Organised Crime Seminar PDF

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02/02/18 Week 4

SEMINAR 13 ORGANISED CRIME QUESTION 1 - Organised crime. Open up the following Home Office document on organised crime, produced by Theresa May when Home Secretary, ‘Local to the Global’: Reducing the risk from Organised Crime’. The document is still of relevance today. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97823/organisedcrime-strategy.pdf a) Read only the ‘Foreword’ by Theresa May for this task. Consider you had to write an essay on some aspect of organised crime. Write a small paragraph explaining the Government’s strategy to combat organised crime. Start the paragraph with; ‘The Government from a strategic perspective… b) Bearing in mind the government strategy, now read paragraphs 23 to 31 inclusive from the same document. That suggests organised crime would appear to be a thriving successful business. Those paragraphs describe some of the more prevalent characteristics of organised crime, and reinforce some of the points I made in the PowerPoint. Pick five words. -

of the characteristics that you find interesting and explain them in your own Fraud Drug dealing Money laundering Card cloning Trafficking Mugging by addicts Theft and Burglary Phishing Young women into prostitution Car-jacking

Characteristics of organised crime: Corruption (people in many levels of authority) – law enforcement. Corruption involved in planning, corruption of morals, corruption of people to victimise them. Complexity – using codes Technical and often specialist. Technology is always evolving, they flexible, can change, reinvent, and spot opportunities in the market. Global – ability to affiliate themselves with other organisations around the world i.e. human trafficking. Know how to regroup if they need to i.e. terrorism. Adapt quickly Intelligence (criminal intelligence, sophisticated in terms of crime and how they cover their tracks and keeping their activities away from the spotlight. More strategic in the use of violence) Reputation (element of coercion) They are multifaceted- they are often involved in more than one type of crime. a) We will discuss them. Explore them further in the context of how to combat them. Come up with some ideas. More security Banking regulations Structured idea of crime

02/02/18 Week 4 b) Which characteristic ‘stands’ out for you? Why? Explain. There is more than one definition to organised criminality. Typology Corruption Coercion Raid pace of adapting to change Hate crime – Barbara Perry – looking at the power dynamic. QUESTION 2 Find the Campbell digital chapter in the Organised Crime section 6 of the Resource List. It is the first item. Skim read pages 13-20 inclusive until you find the answers to the following, [Although I have only digitalised one chapter this is an excellent recent book on organised crime] a) How does Campbell distinguish ‘traditional organised’ crime from crime committed by ‘gangs’? What are the key distinguishing features? Gangs are usually teenagers and young adults whereas organised organisations are generally older people. The organised crime members aim to be undetected by the police, and other enforcement services whereas the police know gang members for their criminality. Violence (peer group, street, family) Corruption Strategic – protecting criminality in organised crime Overly simplified/overused – gangs but there are sometimes commonalities between the different groups b) What does Campbell suggest is the key distinguishing features between ‘white collar crime’ and ‘organised crime’? How does she go on to qualify that distinction? -

Organised Crime – can be linked with white-collar through corruption White-collar crime  occupational (generally the middle/upper class people committing these crimes i.e. embezzlement on tax) committing crime within the occupation they are in.     

Investment brokers Fraud Tax evasion Money laundering Ponzi- schemes

c) Why does Campbell suggest organised crime is in fact ‘disorganised’ crime? What problems do that bring? How would you incorporate this into an essay about organised crime and policing? It is not very constant Smaller legal activities Volatile Global patterns Not that’s it’s disorganised but it is fractured. There are different branches, which can evolve and change Always moving, cannot keep trace on it

02/02/18 Week 4 ‘UK agents joined drugs cartel to net ‘Mr Big’ by Tom Harper, Carl Fellstrom, and Michael Gilliard. The Sunday Times

BRITISH agents infiltrated a South American cartel to gather intelligence that led to the capture of a man accused of running Europe’s largest drug trafficking ring. Informants in Venezuela alerted the National Crime Agency (NCA) to 1.3 tons of cocaine that Robert Dawes, a suspected British crime lord, is alleged to have arranged to be flown from Latin America to Paris. At great personal risk, the agents penetrated the Cartel de los Soles, a notorious international drug smuggling syndicate alleged to be run by senior military officials in the Venezuelan government. The intelligence eventually led to the arrest of Dawes in Spain last November after he was bugged allegedly boasting about his role masterminding the Paris cocaine shipment during a meeting with two Colombian drug traffickers at a hotel in Madrid. The operation is the biggest success for the NCA since it was created by Theresa May, the home secretary, in 2013, and is particularly sensitive as it is believed to be the first time the agency has infiltrated such a group abroad. NCA investigators went to extreme lengths to maintain security; forcing undercover agents to undergo a polygraph test every six months to ensure they had not been discovered by the cartel and “turned” to become double agents. The first details of the eightyear investigation into Dawes, obtained by The Sunday Times, revealed the 43-year-old from Nottinghamshire had evaded capture for years by communicating via BlackBerry phones with special encrypted Sim cards worth £1,500 each. Police in Spain claim they struggled to gather evidence on Dawes, who moved to the Costa del Sol in 2001, as his associates were too frightened to use his real name in the calls that detectives did manage to intercept. In Spain business partners knew him simply as “The One”. Police said Dawes told contacts he would do business with their cartel bosses only if they used the encrypted BlackBerry devices. The Guardia Civil in Spain, which tracked Dawes using specialist officers usually reserved for the fight against terrorist groups, believe his empire stretches from cocaine cartels in Venezuela to the Naples mafia in Italy and the Satudarah, a motorcycle gang that began in Holland. In 2011 The Sunday Times revealed that Dawes was linked to the family of Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan. A nephew of the Afghan leader was reportedly seen meeting a man described as the Briton’s right-hand man. Dawes’s capture was a big breakthrough for an international operation that included the NCA, the Guardia Civil and police in France, Holland, Portugal, Belgium and Germany. He was arrested in a dawn raid by dozens of armed police at his luxury estate in Benalmadena on the Costa del Sol. They also raided a huge estate owned by Dawes in nearby Coin, which boasted a purpose-built lake containing fish worth up to £400 each. He is in custody in France, accused of heading the “largest organisation in Europe devoted to drug trafficking, money laundering and murder”. The shipment Dawes allegedly organised from Caracas to Paris in 2013 contained 32 cases stuffed with cocaine, which were listed in the names of “ghost” passengers. More than 25 people connected to airport security and the military were arrested in Venezuela. The operation also successfully targeted another suspected Dawes associate. Roy Livings, 64, was arrested in July 2014 after 167kg of pure cocaine was seized from a Gibraltar-registered boat, Gloria of Grenada, moored in Sines, Portugal. Investigators had tracked the cocaine after following one of Dawes’s suspected associates, Lee Krokoszynski, 34, from Nottinghamshire. They were both jailed for a total of 17 years by the Portuguese courts late last year. Livings is the director of a number of businesses registered in the UK that sell encrypted Sim cards for mobile phones in Belgium, Holland and Spain. A previous director of one of the companies was Najeb Bouhbouh, 34, who was assassinated in October 2012 as he left a hotel in Antwerp, Belgium. The NCA declined to comment.

02/02/18 Week 4 [However in late 2017 a year after his arrest The Times also reported.] A suspected British crime lord facing trial for an audacious plot to flood Europe with cocaine could walk free because the former head of France’s elite crime-busting agency has been arrested. The international operation to bring down Robert Dawes has exposed a network of corrupt officials and security weak spots across European borders, with serious implications for the fight against international terrorism. The operation, led by France’s anti-trafficking agency, the OCRTIS, revealed that the Nottinghamborn Dawes and British associates had organised the cocaine deal using encrypted phones supplied by a front company registered in the UK. Bugs placed in a Spanish hotel also caught Dawes boasting to a representative of the Colombian Medellin cartel that he could organise drug shipments through most ports and airports in Europe using a network of corrupt officials in return for a 30% commission. His network is said to include representatives of the Camorra, the feared Naples-based mafia clan, and the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles. However, lawyers for Dawes, who is being held in a prison outside Paris, are now seeking his release, after the recent arrest of François Thierry, the former head of the OCRTIS. Thierry, who led the operation against Dawes, is suspected of complicity in drug smuggling over his relationship with an informant used to target drug gangs. He dismissed the allegations as “unfair and hypocritical”. Dawes’s lawyers believe the informant was involved in the operation against their client and intend to call him as a witness. They are also seeking to exclude Dawes’s bugged conversations, claiming that the damning material was obtained illegally. The release of Dawes on a legal technicality would be a huge blow to the five international drug enforcement agencies that targeted his organised crime group for 15 years. An associate of Dawes overseeing a cocaine shipment that went missing was shot dead in Antwerp. The killing led to a “Wild West” tit-for-tat shooting spree in Holland and Spain, which claimed 15 lives. Some of the victims were innocents mistaken for gang members, others the girlfriends and relatives of targets. Surveillance on Dawes and his associates led investigators to bug a meeting he attended with the Medellin cartel at the five-star Villa Magna hotel in Madrid on September 23, 2014. During the discussions, Dawes claimed that the only airport his corrupt network could not penetrate was in Madrid. The crime boss went on to boast that he was behind the recent 1.3-ton cocaine importation through Charles de Gaulle airport. Dawes is due to stand trial next year. [2018] He declined to comment. QUESTION 3 a) That case study above concerns a local Nottingham man who was brought up on an estate not too far from this University. All his family live close by. Consider you had to write an essay concerning the characteristics of organised crime what factual evidence would you take from the above article [case study] to corroborate your points? Be as thorough and also as specific as you can. Finding it difficult to infiltrate b) What characteristic of his criminality and/or organisation stands out for you? Amount of connections in different places Nothing was directly in the UK Usually crime bosses are more discrete about their dealings He was able to pull off such large shipments of drugs without being caught Not much evidence QUESTION 4 In Lexis Library go to Journals. And in the ‘search terms’ box put the phrase policing W/10 organised crime. Do not use parenthesis. That should bring up all the articles with the expressionorganised crime within ten words of policing. Scroll down the material and note the quality. Find on that page the article in the Police Journal only ‘Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown: The policing of Chinese organized crime in the UK’. Read only the Introduction and the chapter on Enforcement. a) In what two ways has the threat from Chinese Organised to the UK changed? Border control – relaxed border control through the EU

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Internet – new ways to reach out to audiences Changes to goods/materials that are being pedalled Often this illegal work is being done to fund other forms of criminality i.e. terrorism Look at multi-agency approaches – teamwork

b) What three tensions obscure the policing of organised crime? - Intelligence involved is problematic and to try and get this is difficult because they constantly evolving

c)

Finally use that article to further your research. Find footnote 7 and open up the legislation referred to. This legislative area of serious and organised crime changes regularly. Note some of the important topics in that whole piece of legislation, not just the organised crime section. Pick one section that refers to the fight against serious criminality crime and which you find interesting. Come prepared to briefly explain that's sections relevance to combating serious crime to the others.

ESSENTIAL FURTHER READING Revisit the power point and read the notes to the slides. There is a wealth of information there. Home Office, ‘Local to the Global’ (2011) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/248645/Serious_a nd_Organised_Crime_Strategy.pdf Home Office (2014) http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/807-national-strategic-assessment-ofserious-and-organised-crime-2017/file National Crime Agency Threat Assessment (2017) Campbell, L. ‘Organised Crime and the Law’ (2013) Hart Publishing. All the academic books have features on this subject. The Newburn 3nd ed. Chapter on Organised Crime is good. Remember this is an e-book So too is the Oxford Handbook on Criminology 5th ed. Chapter 20, and although Levi concentrates perhaps more on the global picture it is an extremely academic and informative chapter. Levi is a leading author not only on Organised Crime but Corporate Crime and White Collar Crime. He writes in the 6th ed on the latter two topics. Police Journal PJ 89 1 (70) 1 March 2016. ‘Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown: The policing of Chinese organized crime in the UK’ Daniel Silverstone. London Metropolitan University...