Causes of the Political-Criminal Nexus
Annelise Anderson
Senior Research Fellow
The Hoover Institution
for the
Colloquium on Confronting the Security Challenge
of the
Political-Criminal Nexus
National Strategy Information Center
Washington, D.C.
October 30, 1997
In the early days after the United States entered World War
II, a U.S. government official met with a leading American mafia
figure--who happened to be in prison--and they made a deal. What
the government wanted was protection of the New York harbor from
Nazi sabotage. The New York harbor was indeed protected, and at
the end of the war Lucky Luciano was deported to Italy.
This is an example of the political-criminal nexus, and
there are several points to note.
First, the government--specifically, the Office of Naval
Intelligence--initiated the contact. It wanted something, and it
had something to offer--in this case, amelioration of law
enforcement. Lucky Luciano also got moved from upstate New York
(Danamorra state prison) to a location closer to Manhattan.
Second, we can assume that in securing the New York harbor
against sabotage, the mafia and the longshoremen's unions, which
it controlled, used techniques that the government--the armed
forces and the local government as well--were unwilling to use.
Longshoremen were selected for jobs at the "shape up" in hiring
halls, and perhaps those who looked or sounded German were no
longer hired. Perhaps suspicious characters on the docks ended
up in the water with few questions asked.
Third, the mafia control of the docks already existed when
the government approached Lucky Luciano.
And fourth, the political-criminal nexus was not a
continuing relationship; it ended when the war was over.
* * *
The case studies of the political-criminal nexus that have
been presented at this conference[1] are fascinating in their
detail about the development of these relationships in different
countries and over time.
They define mafias in much the same way as I have defined
them in my own work[2]--as profit-oriented criminal enterprises
that use violence or the threat of violence, try to discourage
their members from cooperating with the police, and corrupt
legitimate government authority--or are approached corruptly by
it. In other words, the political-criminal nexus is central to
the existence of organized crime.
The various causes of the political-criminal nexus are also
recounted in the papers presented at this conference. In my own
work I have used a framework of three contributing causes,
perhaps operating in combination with one another:
1) An abdication of power, or anarchy: There is an
unwillingness or inability on the part of the government to
achieve its ends with means available to it. This is similar to
the "weak government" hypothesis seen as a cause of the
development of mafias in Southern Italy and in Colombia, and I
have used this hypothesis and summarized the literature about it
in my own work on the Sicilian mafia. But I am less convinced by
it than I used to be.
Consider a country where law enforcement is spread very
thin, too thin to respond effectively to hijackings and robberies
and counterfeiting. A country where the economy is expanding
rapidly and the population is moving into new areas; where the
legal structure itself is just getting established, law
enforcement institutions are new and inexperienced, and new laws
need to be passed to deal with new conditions and new kinds of
scams--a situation like the economic frontier of the Internet
today.
I am talking about the 19th century United States. We
have here the difficulty of what sociologists called U.S.
exceptionalism: the United States is often different from other
countries, including those of Western Europe. It doesn't seem to
fit, and it didn't in this case either. The response of the
people was vigilante groups. These groups sometimes performed
well and sometimes did not, but often leading members of the
community were members, and they were committed to law and
order--the rule of law, contracts, property. They generally
disbanded when formal law enforcement became more effective.
There was no mafia.
2) Excessive bureaucratic power. A second cause to
which I attribute mafias and the development of the political-
criminal nexus is excessive bureaucratic power, where it is
necessary to go to the authorities for a wide variety of permits,
allocations, tax deals, and so forth. Excessive bureaucratic
power may produce episodic corruption, which is widespread and
does not necessarily lead to mafias. Such corruption may extend
to the use of violence to exclude competition, and at this point
it is possible to say that a mafia and a political-criminal nexus
has emerged.
3) Illegal markets. Illegal markets--in drugs,
alcohol, gambling, pornography--are a major impetus for the
development of mafias. Certainly the prohibition of alcohol in
the United States during the 1920s was a major cause of the
development of mafias in U.S. cities. In the Soviet Union
private markets in virtually everything except small crafts were
illegal, and corruption was widespread during the Communist era.
Illegal markets are an extreme case of excessive bureaucratic
power, and also an example, in the area where trade is made
illegal by the state, of anarchy: the refusal of the government
to enforce contracts and property rights in a particular area.
I find that the overcontrolled economy is a major reason for
the development of mafias and the political-criminal nexus. But
the overcontrolled economy provides only the setting. It is the
political half of the political-criminal nexus that often takes
action, for personal gain or to achieve political objectives,
allowing the criminal half of the nexus to achieve extraordinary
profits, win contracts unjustly, and defeat its competitors with
the help of the authorities in return for the benefits the
criminals deliver to the political sphere. Often it is not the
criminals who engage in bribery, but the authorities who shake
down the criminals.
The correct response to this sort of activity is outrage and
action on the part of citizens--demands for reform, hearings,
anti-corruption commissions, new legislation, and the opportunity
for politicians to run on a reform platform--the opportunity to
change the government, to throw the rascals out. A free press,
freedom of association, sufficient resources in the private
sector, the inability of the government to control dissent
completely, and genuinely competitive elections are critical to
this process.
The overregulated economy as the major origin of the
political-criminal nexus is the "strong state" hypothesis. To
evaluate this hypothesis, we have to look at and explain heavily
regulated states where mafias do not seem to have developed--for
example, Sweden and other Scandinavian counties.
This brings up the question of what we mean by a strong
state. Were Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union strong
states, or was the United States when Richard Nixon was the head
of the executive branch, and the people said "We're sorry, but
you're going to have to resign" the really strong state--the
state where the people held the ultimate control and were able to
change the government when they decided it was performing
unacceptably?
The ability of people to control their government is (or
should be) the central issue of political science, and is more
unusual than commonly supposed, being found primarily in the
countries whose political systems have been heavily influenced by
Great Britain, in the countries of Scandinavia, and perhaps in
some other countries of Western Europe.
Perhaps I have raised more questions than I have answered
about the course and causes of the political-criminal nexus, but
maybe that is as it should be.
Notes
1. The seven case studies include Lee, Rennsselaer and Francisco
Thoumi, "Colombia;" Lo, T. Wing, "Hong Kong;" Paoli, Letizia,
"Italy;" Pimental, Stanley, and Peter Lupsha, "Mexico;" Ebbe, Obi
N.I., "Nigeria;" Shelley, Louise, "Russia;" and Kelly, Robert,
"United States." They are scheduled to be published by the
National Strategy Information Center; contact nsic@ix.netcom.com
for additional information.
2. See Anderson, Annelise. "Organized Crime, Mafia, and
Governments." In Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Peltzman, eds.
The Economics of Organized Crime. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1994; _____. "The Red Mafia: A Legacy of
Communism." In Edward P. Lazear, ed. Economic Transition in
Eastern Europe and Russia. Stanford, Cal.: Hoover Institution
Press, 1995.