Your search for: organized AND crime

Typically, other reference works on organized crime in the United States focus primarily on the Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, and neglect the many new ethnic and racial criminal organizations that permeate American society today. This reference fills those gaps while providing systematic detailed ...

Typically, other reference works on organized crime in the United States focus primarily on the Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, and neglect the many new ethnic and racial criminal organizations that permeate American society today. This reference fills those gaps while providing systematic detailed coverage of traditional crime families, individuals, significant events, and terms. More than 250 entries provide in-depth information on major underworld figures, from Al Capone to John Gotti and Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, and key criminal events and milestones. In addition, Kelly, an expert on organized crime, provides in-depth coverage of African American organized crime, Chinese Triads and Tongs, the Colombian drug cartels' infiltration of the U.S., Dominican drug trafficking, ecocrime, Russian organized crime, Latin gangs and criminal groups, and Vietnamese American organized crime.

Internationally known authorities in criminal justice provide one of the most comprehensive assessments today of the diverse ethnic and racial groups in the criminal underworld and their grave threats to the very fabric of American society. This coherent overview describes Mafia, Chinese, African ...

Internationally known authorities in criminal justice provide one of the most comprehensive assessments today of the diverse ethnic and racial groups in the criminal underworld and their grave threats to the very fabric of American society. This coherent overview describes Mafia, Chinese, African American, Russian, and other criminal activities in different cities currently with historical background, showing the pernicious effects that their illicit operations have had on the economic, social, political, and moral life of the nation. This one-volume reference also assesses law enforcement and crime control programs during the 20th century. This sobering overview should be required reading for specialist and general audiences alike and for broad library use given the serious threats of organized crime to all Americans in the 1990s.

The term Cold War has long been associated with the "red menace" of communism at home and abroad. Yet as Lee Bernstein shows in this illuminating study, during the 1950s the threat posed by organized crime preoccupied Americans at least as much as the fear of communist subversion. At the beginning ...

The term Cold War has long been associated with the "red menace" of communism at home and abroad. Yet as Lee Bernstein shows in this illuminating study, during the 1950s the threat posed by organized crime preoccupied Americans at least as much as the fear of communist subversion. At the beginning of the decade, the televised hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver's crime committee, focusing on colorful mob figures such as Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, attracted far more attention than the spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the years that followed, public concern about gangsters and racketeering continued unabated, even after the anticommunist fever of McCarthyism had begun to subside.

Drawing on a broad range of evidence, from government records to films, television shows, and pulp novels, Bernstein explains how the campaign against organized crime, like the crusade against communism, reflected deep social and political anxieties. Just as the inquisitions of Senator McCarthy fed on popular fears,of international conspiracy and alien infiltration, the anticrime investigations of the 1950s raised the specter of a foreign-based criminal cartel -- the Sicilian Mafia -- preying on a vulnerable American public. In both cases, the association of the foreign-born with criminal or un-American activity led to the creation of state and local citizens committees and to calls for new restrictions on immigration. Labor unions also came under attack, particularly after the McClellan Committee and its chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, claimed to have found a link between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, and the Mafia.

As Bernstein points out, despitesignificant changes in the way organized crime actually operated, and despite repeated protests from Italian Americans, the popular image of the sinister gangster persisted, because it served a more profound need. In an era marked

Before Enron, before Arthur Anderson, and before Worldcom, there was the Bank of New York money laundering scandal, which hit headlines in 1999. Promising to be one of the most important books on international organized crime, money laundering, and the complicity between legitimate and illegitimate ...

Before Enron, before Arthur Anderson, and before Worldcom, there was the Bank of New York money laundering scandal, which hit headlines in 1999. Promising to be one of the most important books on international organized crime, money laundering, and the complicity between legitimate and illegitimate businesses in both the United States and the former Soviet Union, among other places, during the last decade of the 20th century, All Is Clouded by Desire examines the criminal dealings that led to the revelation that the Bank of New York's Eastern European Division laundered $6 billion for Russian organized criminals and other shady organizations and individuals. In a series of intrigues that involved crooked Geneva banker Bruce Rappaport and high-level members of the Bank of New York, criminal Russian organizations were able to thrive and prosper during a time when the rest of the former Soviet Union crumbled amidst growing corruption and a declining economy. Tracing the financial shenanigans back many years, Block and Weaver illustrate how the underworld of high finance, money laundering, mafia groups, CIA operatives, and legitimate banking institutions can clean dirty money and operate criminal enterprises that span the globe.