Deconstructing Organized Crime

What is organized crime? This question has generated many responses over the decades from scholars, governments, the media, pop culture, and organized criminals themselves. Layered one on top of the other, these answers cumulatively created a ""Mafia Mystique"" that dominated discourse until after the end of the Cold War, when transnational organized crime emerged as a pronounced, if nebulous, threat to global security and stability. The authors untangle this discourse by providing an interdisciplinary analysis of the subject. By focusing on the American experience that dominated organized crime scholarship during the second half of the 20th century as well as more recent global manifestations of transnational organized crime, they illustrate through a series of case studies that organized crime is best understood not as a series of famous gangsters and events but as a method, a structure, of everyday life formed by numerous evolving political, social, economic, and anthropological variables.