Edwin Sutherland and White-Collar Crime

Given the work of the muckrakers and sociologist Ross, the stage was now set for the burgeoning fields of sociology and criminology to study white-collar crime. Unfortunately, that stage remained empty for another 40 years as scholars continued to focus on street crime. In the 1940s, however, Edwin Sutherland wrote some important works about whitecollar crime, a term he coined, and his views remain influential today. Sutherland (1949) studied the 70 largest U.S. manufacturing, mining, and retail corporations and found they had violated antitrust, false advertising, and other laws 980 times, or 14 each on the average. Their crimes, including bribery of public officials, were not just accidental violations but deliberate, repeated, extensive, and harmful. Because Sutherland was forced to rely on the official record, he thought the true extent of corporate lawbreaking was much higher. He added that any common criminal committing even his low estimate of an average 14 offenses would be considered a habitual offender worthy of public and legal condemnation. The widespread corporate lawbreaking Sutherland found caused him to challenge the assumption of “conventional theories that crime is due to poverty or to the personal and social pathologies connected with poverty” (p. 25).

Many of the corporations Sutherland studied had been charged with engaging in crimes during World Wars I and II. These crimes included illegal profiteering, the manufacture of defective military parts and the sale of rancid food to the army, tax evasion, the sale of munitions and other war materials to Germany and other nations with which the United States was at war, and even the revealing of military secrets to these nations. From these crimes Sutherland concluded that “many corporations have used the national emergency as an opportunity for extraordinary enrichment of themselves” (p. 175). This led him to observe that “profits are more important to large corporations than patriotism, even in the midst of an international struggle which endangered Western civilization” (p. 174).

Despite Sutherland's path-breaking work, sociologists and criminologists ignored his call for increased scholarship on white-collar crime for at least another 20 years. We begin our own examination of white-collar crime by looking at Sutherland's definition of the term and later attempts to improve his definition.

Defining White-Collar Crime

In one of criminology's most famous definitions, Sutherland (1949:9) said white-collar crime is “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” Sutherland's definition has two major components. First, the crime must be committed by someone of “respectability and high social status.” Sutherland's definition thus excluded crime by blue-collar workers. Second, the crime must be committed “in the course of” one's occupation. Thus, a wealthy corporate executive who murders a lover would not, according to Sutherland, be committing white-collar crime. Like Ross and the muckrakers, Sutherland stressed that behavior of respectable persons can be quite harmful even if it does not violate any criminal laws.

Over the years, Sutherland' definition of white-collar crime has been criticized and revised. Some early critics argued that behavior that does not violate criminal law should not be considered a crime, no matter how harmful it may be (Tappan 1947). Others noted that his definition rules out lawbreaking behavior by the wealthy, such as tax evasion, that is not committed in the course of their occupation but does involve many elements of other forms of white-collar crime (Edelhertz 1970). Still other critics noted that his definition excluded crimes by blue-collar workers and businesses that, notwithstanding the color of the “collar,” share many features of crimes committed by persons of high social status (Shaprio 1990). One other conceptual problem arose from Sutherland's own application of his definition. Although he defined white-collar crime as crime committed by people of high social status as part of their occupations, his 1949 book, White-Collar Crime, focused almost entirely on crime by corporations, or corporate crime. This inconsistency led to some confusion over whether white-collar crime is something individuals do or something corporations and other businesses do (Geis 1992).

Contemporary Views

Given white-collar crime's complexity, many substitute terms have been proposed over the years and many categories of white-collar crime developed. Some of the substitute terms include elite deviance, respectable crime, and upperworld crime (Simon 2002). Given the popularity of Sutherland's coinage, most scholars continue to favor white-collar crime, although some call for the term to include crime by blue-collar workers in the course of their occupation and crime by blue-collar businesses. Others fear that including these sort of crimes would dilute the message that Sutherland, and, before him, Ross and the muckrakers, sought to send.

Of the many typologies of white-collar crime, one of the most influential was developed by Marshall Clinard and Richard Quinney (1973). They divided white-collar crime into two types, occupational and corporate. Occupational crime is committed by individuals in the course of their occupation for personal gain. Common examples of occupational crime are employee theft, which is committed against one's employer, and corruption by physicians and other professional workers, which is committed against these professionals' clients or the government. As the name implies, corporate crime is committed by corporations. Corporate executives obviously plan and commit the crime but do so for their corporations' financial gain. Although executives may then benefit along with their corporations, their primary intention is to benefit the corporation. While liking Clinard and Quinney's typology, some scholars prefer the name organizational crime over the term corporate crime (Ermann and Lundman 1978). This term emphasizes that crime can be done by and on behalf of organizations, many of them corporations, but some of them small businesses, including blue-collar businesses such as auto repair shops.

The revised typology of occupational and organizational crime is popular and will be used here even though, as health care fraud will illustrate, it is often difficult to know whether to classify a given crime as occupational or organizational. With this typology in mind, sociologist James W. Coleman (1998:7) proposed the following definition of white-collar crime first advanced by the National White Collar Crime Center: “illegal or unethical acts that violate fiduciary responsibility of public trust committed by an individual or organization, usually during the course of legitimate occupational activity, by persons of high or respectable social status for personal or organizational gain.” One advantage of this definition is that it includes harmful but legal corporate behavior. Nancy K. Frank and Michael J. Lynch (1992) referred to such behavior as “corporate crime,” defined as “socially injurious and blameworthy acts, legal or illegal, that cause financial, physical or environmental harm, committed by corporations and businesses against their workers, the general public, the environment, other corporations and businesses, the government, or other countries. The benefactor of such crimes is the corporation.”

With these concepts in mind, we now turn to specific examples of white-collar crime. Using the categories outlined earlier, we start with occupational crime and then turn to corporate and other organizational crime.

Occupational Crime: Lawbreaking for Personal Gain

Organizational Criminality and Corporate Crime

As discussed earlier, much white-collar crime is committed for the sake of corporations and other business enterprises. The primary intent of the persons committing the crime is to benefit the organization for which they work. They know, of course, that if they help their business, the business will “help” them. But their primary goal of helping the business classifies their crime as organizational, not occupational, although this classification becomes somewhat tricky when the owner of a business is involved. That said, we now look at some common forms of organizational crime. Because of its seriousness, we will focus mostly on corporate crime.

This focus should not obscure the fact that many “blue-collar” or small businesses cheat their customers and otherwise commit fraud. Auto repair shops are notorious in this regard. Auto repair fraud (overcharging and unnecessary or faulty repairs) costs more than an estimated $20 billion annually and accounts for 30 to 40 percent of all auto repair expenses (Best Wire 2003; Fleck 2002). Most auto repair goes undetected because car owners do not realize they are being defrauded. In a recent example involving a small shop, a mechanic in central Massachusetts was sentenced to eight months in jail in July 2004 for charging two customers almost $5,000 for work he never did (Bruun 2004). In 1992 a much larger scandal involved Sears department stores in California. Sears was accused by California officials of overcharging its customers by telling them unnecessary repairs were needed on their cars. Because Sears auto repair personnel were paid a commission for the repairs they did, they recommended repairs that were clearly not needed. Sears agreed to pay almost $50 million to compensate some 900,000 customers $50 each and to pay California legal expenses (Fisher 1992).

Sometimes investigators use field experiments to uncover auto repair fraud. In one investigation, cars with supposedly dead batteries were brought to 313 auto repair shops. The batteries were actually still working. Over one-tenth of the shops said the batteries could not be recharged and that a new battery would be needed (Jesilow, Geis, and O'Brien 1985). A smaller experiment conducted by a Chicago TV station involved cars in fine condition taken to 13 repair shops, six of which said the cars needed repairs up to $600 (Molla 1994).

Auto repair fraud is conducted by legitimate businesses that defraud the public as part of their business practice. Other organizational criminality involves illegitimate businesses that are fraudulent from the outset and have the sole purpose of defrauding the public. Examples include phony home improvement businesses, contests, and charities; land frauds; and various financial, medical, and other enterprises. Some of the health care and savings and loan fraud discussed earlier was committed by illegitimate enterprises formed to specifically defraud the public and/or the government.

We now come to crime by corporations, which, because of their size, scope, and influence, are perhaps the worst offenders of all (Reiman 2004). Recall that Edwin Sutherland documented repeated lawbreaking by the largest U.S. corporations. That pattern has continued decades after Sutherland's revelation. During the mid-1970s, the federal government accused almost two-thirds of the 500 corporations with violating the law, and almost one-fourth of these were convicted of (or did not contest) at least one criminal or civil offense (Clinard and Yeager 1980; U.S. News & World Report 1982). Some 2,300 corporations overall were convicted in the 1970s of federal offenses.

During the 1990s, more than 100 top corporations were criminally fined after pleading guilty or no contest to criminal charges. Their ranks included pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche, fined $500 million for vitamin price-fixing worldwide; Exxon, fined $125 million for environmental law violations that led to the massive 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Alaskan coast; Archer Daniels Midland, fined $100 million for fixing prices of feed and flavor additives; and pharmaceutical company Genetech, fined $30 million for marketing a drug to doctors even though the drug had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (Mokhiber and Weissman 1999). Major financial scandals broke in 2001 and 2002 involving Enron and many other corporations (discussed later). In the following two years, major pharmaceutical companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle accusations that they overcharged Medicaid by illegally failing to offer it their lowest prices. Bayer paid $257 million, Glaxo Smith-Kline paid $86.7 million, and Schering-Plough paid $345.5 million. Schering-Plough, which settled its case in July 2004, had offered lower prices for its allergy drug Claritin to two health insurance companies and paid one of them more than $10 million in kickbacks to have its patients use the drug (Abelson 2004). In May 2004 another pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $430 million after charges that it marketed an epilepsy drug for uses that the FDA had not approved (Farrell 2004). These examples indicate that not much has changed since Sutherland's pioneering work on corporate crime was published in 1949.

Corporate crime takes two general forms: financial and violent. The major distinction between the two is whether people are injured or killed by corporate misconduct. We will first examine financial crime by corporations and then discuss the violence they commit.

Corporate Violence: Threats to Health and Safety

If you heard that corporations kill many more people each year than all the murders combined, would you believe it? Even if corporations are corrupt, you may be thinking, they do not murder. Yet their actions do, in fact, kill more people each year than all the murders combined. It is difficult for any of us to believe that corporations maim and kill. We equate violence with interpersonal violence, which dominates public discussion, fills us with fear, and even controls our lives. Corporate violence, in contrast, is less visible and has been called “quiet violence” (Frank and Lynch 1992). The term corporate violence refers to actions by corporations that cause injury, illness, and even death. These lives are lost in the name of profit, as corporations pursue profits with reckless disregard for the health, safety, and lives of their workers, consumers, and the general public (Mokhiber 1988). Let's look at each of these three groups of victims in turn and discuss some of the more grievous examples of corporate violence that victimize each group.

In bait-and-switch advertising, a store advertises an attractive item that is not actually available, or is available only in small quantities. The item is gone when customers come to buy it, and the sales clerk switches them to a more expensive product in the same line.

WORKERS AND UNSAFE WORKPLACES. Each year many workers die or become injured or ill because of hazardous occupational conditions; others suffer long-lasting psychological effects (Rosoff, Pontell, and Tillman 2004). Some hazardous workplace conditions violate federal and state laws, whereas others are technically not illegal but still pose dangers to workers. Most hazardous conditions involve worker exposure to toxic substances such as vinyl chloride, cotton and coal dust, asbestos, and many other chemicals and materials that cause several types of cancer and respiratory illness such as asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. One study, for example, found that workers exposed to vinyl chloride had abnormally high levels of liver, lung, and brain cancer (Wu et al. 1989). Another found one-fourth of all bladder cancer to be work related (Raloff 1989). Working with dangerous equipment and in dangerous circumstances causes injury and death.

The sad thing is that it does not have to be this way. Although some jobs and workplaces are inevitably hazardous, the prime reason for the nation's high rate of occupational injury, illness, and death is that corporations disregard their workers' health and safety in the name of profit. To compound the problem, the government has lax rules on workplace health and safety and does relatively little to enforce the ones that do exist. Lest any of this sound too critical, consider the experience of Japan, which has far fewer occupational health and safety problems because of its safer workplaces. Japanese management places greater emphasis on worker safety than does its U.S. counterpart and, in fact, considers worker safety a greater priority than production quantity. For U.S. management, the priorities are reversed (Engelman 1993).

Estimates of the Problem. Exact data on workplace illness, injury, and death are difficult to determine for several reasons (Reiman 2004). First, it is often difficult to establish that illness and death are work related. Second, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a major source of workplace data, gathers data only from workplaces with at least 11 employees. Its annual count of the number of workplace injuries is thought to miss from 33 percent to 69 percent of the actual number of injuries (Leigh, Marcin, and Miller 2004). Third, corporations and smaller businesses often hide injuries and illnesses their workers suffer.

Not surprisingly, then, estimates of workplace illness, injury, and death vary widely (Reiman 2004; Simon 2002). Government data indicate that about 5,500 workers die each year from workplace injuries, that 4.4 million experience nonfatal injury, and that 300,000 incur workplace-induced illness. About half of these illnesses are considered serious, and almost all the illness would be preventable if companies obeyed the law and if the law were more stringent. These health problems can take several years to prove fatal, and it is estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 people die each year from them (AFL-CIO 2004).

Of the 5,500 workers who die each year, the number of preventable deaths because of workplace safety violations is difficult to estimate. Some workplaces and industries, such as construction, are inevitably dangerous, and accidents will happen no matter how careful workers and their employers are. But other injuries and eventual deaths occur because of illegal, unsafe working conditions, with the employers either barely punished or not punished at all (Barstow 2003). The number of such deaths is at least 100 per year, but some estimates say that about half of all deaths (and also of all injuries) result from unsafe conditions.

Adding up all of these admittedly rough figures yields the following estimates of the annual human toll from workplace safety violations: (1) between 50,100 and 62,750 deaths from illness or injury, (2) 150,000 serious illnesses, and (3) as many as 2 million or more injuries. Because of underreporting and other measurement problems, the true toll of work-related death, illness, and injury may well be much higher.

Examples of the Problem. Sometimes the harm done to workers is immediate and visible. In 2001 a crew was working near a tank filled with sulfuric acid at a refinery in Delaware; the refinery had a history of safety violations. The crew was told to work there even though employees had warned that the tank was corroded. An explosion that occurred when a wielding torch ignited vapors leaking from the tank hurled one of the workers into the acid. The only remains that were found were some steel parts of his boots (Barstow 2003).

Some industries are particularly dangerous for workers. In the agricultural industry, hundreds of farm workers are exposed to dangerous pesticides each year (see the “Crime and Controversy” box). In the mining industry, accidents killed 30 people in 2003 and injured many more (Drew and Oppel 2004). Mining companies' failure to observe safety codes has accounted for most of these accidents over the years. In one example, a 1981 explosion in a Colorado mine killed 15 miners. The mine had been cited more than 1,000 times in the preceding three years for safety violations. In another example, a 1984 underground fire in Utah killed 27 miners. The mine had previously been cited for 34 safety violations, 9 of which led to the fire (Simon 2002). Weak safety codes also kill miners. In 2003 two workers died because the driver of a coal-carrying truck, so large that its wheels are 11 feet tall, had a blind spot and did not see them. The mine union had urged that such trucks be equipped with video and radar systems to eliminate blind spots, but the industry opposed the systems and the new head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration agreed with the industry (Drew and Oppel 2004).

Fatal accidents also occur in other industries. A particularly tragic example was a September 1991 fire that killed 25 workers and injured 56 more at a poultry plant in Hamlet, North Carolina (Aulette and Michalowski 1993). At the time of the fire, the plant's doors were locked and it had no fire alarms or sprinklers. Because smoke inhalation killed all but one of the 25 people who died, they likely would have survived had the doors not been locked. Compounding the problem, federal and state authorities had not inspected the plant in 11 years. It is no exaggeration to say that the plant's owners and managers were at least partly responsible for the 25 deaths even if they did not set the fire.

Usually, however, the harm done to workers takes much more time to kill them. The coal mining industry is a prime example. Long-term breathing of coal dust leads to several respiratory problems, including black lung disease, which has killed some 100,000 coal miners over the last century and still kills about 1,500 annually. According to a recent investigation, many coal mining companies “cheat on air-quality tests to conceal lethal dust levels. And while the federal government has known of the widespread cheating for more than 20 years, it has done little to stop it because of other priorities and a reluctance to confront coal operators” (Harris 1998: A1). Many miners help to falsify the tests, partly because they are told to but mostly because they are afraid their mines will shut down if their true air quality became known. As one former miner with black lung disease put it, “You either do it or the mine shuts down. And if the mine shuts down, you ain't got no job. And if you ain't got no job, you got no food on the table” (Harris 1998: A1). Despite the dangers of coal dust, the industry in recent years has lobbied to raise allowable coal-dust levels, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration has eased health and safety regulations in other areas (Drew and Oppel 2004).

The asbestos industry has also killed many workers. Beginning in the late 1960s, medical researchers began to discover that asbestos, long used as a fire retardant in schools, homes, and other buildings and as an insulator in high-temperature equipment, can cause asbestosis, a virulent lung disease. Because this disease takes a long time to develop, it is estimated that more than 200,000 people, mostly asbestos workers but also consumers, will eventually die from asbestos-related cancer and lung disease within the next few decades (Brodeur 1985).

The asbestos industry hid the dangers of asbestos for several decades.

Where's the crime? you might be asking. What if no one happened to know that asbestos was dangerous? If this were the case, then asbestos deaths would be a tragic problem but one for which the industry perhaps should not be blamed. Unfortunately there is plenty of blame, and even murderous criminal neglect, to go around. It turns out that the asbestos industry began to suspect at least as early as the 1930s that asbestos was dangerous, as it saw its workers coming down with serious lung disease. Responsible corporations would have reported their suspicions to the appropriate federal and state authorities and taken every safety measure possible to limit or prevent their workers' exposure to asbestos fibers.

But the asbestos companies did none of this. Instead, they deliberately suppressed evidence of lung disease in their workers and settled workers' claims out of court to avoid publicity (Lilienfeld 1991). For more than 30 years they continued to manufacture a product they knew was dangerous. During that time, more than 21 million U.S. residents who worked with asbestos, were still alive by the early 1980s, and asbestos was put into many schools and other structures that were built. It is no exaggeration to say that their concern for profit was and will be responsible for more than 200,000 deaths and that the asbestos industry was guilty of “corporate malfeasance and inhumanity … that is unparalleled in the annals of the private-enterprise system” (Brodeur 1985:7).

CONSUMERS AND UNSAFE PRODUCTS. Even if you work in a safe workplace, you are not necessarily safe from corporate violence. Every year corporations market dangerous products that injure us, make us sick, and even kill us. In 2003 government agencies issued 5,000 recalls for 60 million products considered dangerous or unhealthy (Alterio 2004). Because many people do not hear about the recalls, many hazardous products, including one-third of recalled vehicles and one-half of recalled appliances, are still in use. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (2003) estimated that unsafe products are associated with about 4,600 deaths each year and about 15 million injuries. It is not known how many of these deaths and injuries are from products that were unsafe as manufactured versus those that were unsafe because they had aged past safe use (e.g., an old toaster with a frayed electric cord). On the other hand, not all deaths and injuries from unsafe products come to the commission's attention. Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that each year about 5,000 people die and 350,000 are hospitalized from eating contaminated food (Petersen and Drew 2003), almost all of it because of processing violations; again, not all such deaths come to the CDC's attention. Combining the two agencies' death estimates, about 9,600 people each year die from unsafe products, including food.

Children seem to be at special risk from unsafe products, thanks in part to the reluctance of companies to reveal potential dangers in the products they market for children. A report in 2000 indicated that 17 companies “kept quiet about products that were seriously injuring children until the government stepped in” (O'Donnell 2000:1A). These products included cribs and infant carriers, and the injuries included amputated fingers. Some of the companies had received thousands of complaints from parents and had investigated their products' safety, but they hid the evidence of their products' dangers from the government. One of these companies allegedly was Hasbro, which the government said had remained silent about defective handles on infant carriers that had caused seven skull fractures. Hasbro paid a civil fine but denied any wrongdoing. Another company allegedly kept quiet about defective strollers that caused more than 200 injuries, including broken bones.

Three industries posing a great danger to consumers are the automobile, pharmaceutical, and food industries.

The Automobile Industry. We all know that cars often have many defects, some of them safety hazards. Given cars' complexity, some defects are inevitable and perhaps not that blameworthy. But there have been many tragic cases in which automobile manufacturers knew of safety defects that killed and injured many people, but decided not to do anything in order to save money.

The most infamous case is probably that of the Ford Pinto, first put on the market in 1971, even though Ford already knew that the Pinto had a defective gas tank that could easily burst into flames and explode in rear-end collisions. Ford did a cost–benefit analysis to determine whether it would cost more money to fix each Pinto, at $11 per car, or to pay settlements in lawsuits after people died or burned in Pinto accidents. Specifically, Ford calculated that it would cost $49.5 million to settle lawsuits from the 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, and 2,100 burned cars it anticipated would occur, versus $137 million to fix the 12.5 million Pintos and other Fords with the problem. Because not fixing the problem would save Ford about $87 million, Ford executives decided to do nothing, even though they knew people would die and be seriously burned. About 500 people eventually did die (although one estimate puts the number at “only” some two dozen) when Pintos were hit from behind, often by cars traveling at relatively low speeds. The Pinto was finally recalled in 1978 to make the gas tank safe (Cullen, Maakestad, and Cavender 1987; Dowie 1977).

Ford was responsible for more deaths and injuries beginning in 1966 because of faulty automatic transmission in many of its vehicles that slipped from “park” into “reverse.” This defect has received much less attention than the Pinto's but was almost as deadly (ConsumerReports 1985; Kahn 1986). Drivers would put their car in park while they got out to get groceries from the trunk, open up their garage door, or get the mail from a streetside mailbox. The transmission would shift unexpectedly into reverse, causing the car to roll backward, and knocking or running over the driver. By 1971 Ford was receiving six letters per month of this problem but chose to do nothing. In fact, for years it denied its vehicles had any reversal problem at all. Ford's inaction led to at least 207 deaths and 4,597 injuries by 1985 from Ford vehicles rolling backward onto people.

The Ford Pinto had a defective gas tank that could easily burst into flames and explode in rear-end collisions. The company knew about this problem before the car went on the market but decided not to fix it in order to save money.

The federal government did little to prevent these deaths and injuries. Instead of ordering a recall, the Department of Transportation allowed Ford in 1980 to send warning stickers to owners of all Ford vehicles manufactured between 1966 and 1979. Because many original owners had sold their cars, about 2.7 million owners of used Fords never received the stickers. At least 80 people died in Ford reversal accidents from 1980, when the stickers were mailed, to 1985.

Ford claimed its vehicles were no worse than any other manufacturer's and blamed the problem on drivers' failure to actually put their cars in park initially. Unfortunately for Ford, although the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recorded the 80 deaths from Ford cars between 1980 and 1985, it recorded only 31 similar fatalities for General Motors, Chrysler, and American Motors combined. Unless we are to assume that Ford drivers were somehow more inept than others at putting their vehicles into park, the Ford transmission had to be at fault. Ford eventually corrected the problem beginning in its 1980 models.

At about the same time, thousands of Ford owners during the 1980s and 1990s reported that their cars were stalling on highways and when making left turns. Although Ford told the government that this problem was not due to any defect, its officials and engineers knew that the cars did, in fact, have a significant defect: an ignition system that would become too hot and then shut off the engine. Determining that it would cost almost half a billion dollars to fix the problem in millions of cars, Ford kept quiet about the defect for nine years even as it led to serious car accidents, some of them fatal. Ford finally fixed the problem by 1996 (Labaton and Bergman 2000).

Unsafe tires have also killed. In the early 1970s, Firestone knew that its new Firestone 500 tires could separate and blow out, posing a serious danger to drivers. Instead of fixing the tire and recalling the ones already sold, as requested by the government, Firestone continued to tout the tire's prowess and eventually sold almost 24 million. When NHTSA publicized the tire's dangers, Firestone sold its remaining Firestone 500 tires at steep discounts to get rid of them. At least 34 people are known to have died after their Firestone 500 tires blew out, and several thousand more were involved in accidents, with many being injured. In 1980 Firestone paid a $50,000 fine for selling its unsafe tire (Mokhiber 1988). Like Ford and other companies, then, Firestone knew full well that its unsafe product would cost lives and cause much injury but decided that profits were more important than people. Although Firestone's decision was responsible for 34 deaths and many injuries, no one in the company was criminally prosecuted.

History repeated itself three decades later when more Firestone tires were also reported to be separating and blowing out. Most of the reports involved the Ford Explorer, the most popular SUV, which used the tires as standard equipment. The reports said that the tires tended to fall apart at high speeds, causing many accidents. The tires were eventually linked to 271 deaths and more than 700 injuries, but those were widely thought to be underestimates. Firestone finally recalled millions of the tires in 2000, but left millions of others on the road that were said to suffer from the same tread separation problems. Documents indicated that both Ford and Firestone knew about the blowout problems for several years before the recall was announced (Kumar 2001; Labaton and Bergman 2000; Mayne and Plungis 2004)

The Pharmaceutical Industry. The pharmaceutical industry has also put profits above people by knowingly marketing dangerous drugs. As one scholar wrote, “Time after time, respected pharmaceutical firms have shown a cavalier disregard for the lives and safety of the people who use their products” (Coleman 1998:74).

One example of pharmaceutical misconduct involved Eli Lilly and Company, which in the 1980s put a new arthritis drug, Oraflex, on the market overseas. Shortly after taking the drug, at least 26 people died. These patients' doctors reported the deaths to Lilly. Because the patients were usually elderly, any individual physician could not assume that Oraflex was the cause of death. After getting several reports of such deaths, however, a responsible company would have told the government, conducted more tests, and perhaps taken the drug off the market. Lilly did none of these things and kept the deaths a secret. As a result, the Food and Drug Administration allowed Lilly to market the drug in the United States in April 1982. More deaths took place, and Lilly pleaded guilty in August 1985 to deceiving the government. By this time, Oraflex had killed at least 62 people and made almost 1,000 more seriously ill. Lilly's legal punishment was a $25,000 fine for the company and a $15,000 fine for one of its executives (Coleman 1998).

A similar case involved the Richardson-Merrell Company, which developed a cholesterol drug in the 1950s called MER/29. When the company tested MER/29 on rats, many of the rats died or came down with serious eye problems. In response, Richardson-Merrell falsified its test data to pretend the drug was safe. Before the drug was finally removed from the market, some 400,000 people had taken it, and at least 5,000 developed serious skin and eye problems and suffered hair loss. The company made $7 million in gross income from MER/29 but was eventually fined only $80,000, meaning that the drug made it a tidy profit (Mokhiber 1988).

A more publicized example of pharmaceutical corporate violence involved the A. H. Robins Company and its Dalkon Shield IUD, or intrauterine device (Hicks 1994). Robins, the maker of Robitussin, Chap Stick, and other products you've probably used, distributed over 4 million Dalkon Shield IUDs between 1971 and 1975 in 80 nations, including 2.2 million in the United States, after falsifying safety tests. The IUD turned out to be a time bomb ticking inside women because its “tail string” carried bacteria from the vagina into the uterus where it caused pelvic inflammatory disease for thousands of women, leading to sterility, miscarriage, or, for at least 18 U.S. women, death.

Five percent, or 110,000, of the U.S. women became pregnant despite using the IUD, even though Robins had falsely claimed only a 1 percent pregnancy rate. Sixty percent of these women miscarried. Hundreds of those who did not miscarry gave birth to babies with severe defects including blindness, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation, and others had stillborn babies. The Shield IUD probably killed hundreds or thousands of women outside the United States. In 1974 the FDA asked Robins to stop selling the Shield in the United States. Robins recalled the IUD, and then continued to sell it in other nations for up to nine months. Several thousand women eventually filed lawsuits against A. H. Robins, which eventually paid more than $400 million to settle the suits. Like other corporations, said Morton Mintz (1985:247), a former investigative reporter for The Washington Post, A. H. Robins “put corporate greed before welfare, suppressed scientific studies that would ascertain safety and effectiveness, [and] concealed hazards from consumers.” He added that “almost every other major drug company” has done similar things, often repeatedly.

In the late 1990s another drug company was accused of marketing a dangerous product. Wyeth withdrew two diet drugs from the market after many reports of heart valve damage associated with using the drugs and allegations that the company had hid evidence of the problem. Wyeth eventually paid more than $1 billion to settle class-action lawsuits (Feeley and McCarty 2004; L. Johnson 2004).

Another problem with the pharmaceutical industry is its “dumping” of potentially unsafe drugs overseas. Sometimes the FDA rejects a new drug as potentially too dangerous. In the meantime, the pharmaceutical company has spent much money to develop it. As a result, companies often decide to market unsafe drugs overseas, especially in poor nations, where safety standards are much weaker and there is a ready market of millions of people. One study found that 19 of the 20 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies were accused during the 1970s and 1980s of bribing public officials in other nations to allow unsafe drugs to be dumped there. The officials included customs officers, health inspectors, hospital administrators, physicians, and police. Several of the companies falsified test results of their drugs' safety to gain their approval overseas. When some companies tested their drugs on rats and monkeys and saw the animals developing tumors, blindness, and other problems, they replaced them with other animals and did not report the problems (Braithwaite 1995a).

The Food Industry. A third industry that has put profit over people is the food industry, cited even decades ago as a menace to public health (Kallet 1933). The more than 1,500 chemical additives in our food may cause cancer, gallbladder symptoms, allergies, and other health problems. Historically, one of the worse food offenders is the meatpacking industry, which has supplied spoiled meat to U.S. soldiers in more than one war. Upton Sinclair, in his muckraking novel The Jungle, mentioned earlier, wrote that rats routinely would get into meat in meatpacking plants. Workers used poisoned bread to try to kill the rats. The meat sold to the public thus included dead rats, rat feces, and poisoned bread. Sinclair's novel led to the Federal Meat Inspection Act in 1906 (Frank and Lynch 1992).

Despite this act and other regulations, some meatpacking companies still endanger our health, thanks in large part to lax federal monitoring of the meat industry. In July 2004 four companies in Los Angeles were charged with violating federal food safety laws for, among other actions, selling rat-contaminated meat. Federal inspectors had seized more than six tons of meat that allegedly contained rat feces. Another company was charged with shipping cheese containing potentially deadly bacteria (Rosenzweig 2004). A year earlier, a news report revealed that a Georgia meat company that supplies schools, supermarkets, and restaurants across the nation had been cited for safety violations hundreds of times during the previous three years (Petersen and Drew 2003). Earlier examples of bad meat abound. In 1984 the government accused a Colorado meatpacking company of hiding evidence of disease in slaughtered animals, putting rancid meat into its hamburgers, and placing false dates on old meat. The company was the largest ground meat provider for school lunch programs and an important supplier to supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and the military (Simon 2002).

Sometimes companies sell meat so contaminated that it makes us ill and even kills us. In 1993 three children died and almost 500 adults and children became seriously ill after eating hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants in Washington State. Improper handling by a California meat plant had allowed the beef in the hamburgers to become contaminated with deadly bacteria. The tragedy led to widespread criticism of federal meat inspection laws and procedures and prompted calls for tougher laws and enforcement (Kushner 1993). A few months after the tragedy, the USDA shut down 30 slaughterhouses after surprise inspections. Still, more than a year later seven other people became ill after eating contaminated meat in New Jersey. The Secretary of Agriculture then called contaminated meat a serious problem that demanded increased federal attention. Not surprisingly, meatpacking companies criticized the calls for tougher meat inspection (Skrzycki 1994).

THE PUBLIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION. No doubt some pollution of our air, land, and water is inevitable in an industrial society. If people become ill or die from it, that is unfortunate, but unavoidable. But much of our pollution is preventable. Federal environmental laws are weak or nonexistent; corporations often violate the laws that do exist; federal monitoring and enforcement of these laws are lax; and the penalties for environmental violations are minimal (Rosoff, Pontell, and Tillman 2004). According to one report, this fact creates “a system where major polluters can operate with little fear of being caught or punished.” As a result, an estimated 20 percent of U.S. landfills and incinerators, 25 percent of drinking water systems, and 50 percent of wastewater treatment facilities violate health regulations (Armstrong 1999: A1).

The consequences of these problems are illness, disease, and death. We are only beginning to understand the health effects of environmental pollution. For many reasons, it is very difficult to determine how many people die or become ill each year from pollution, or whether pollution even harms health at all. That said, a growing body of epidemiological and other research strongly suggests that pollution does hurt our health, and an increasing number of medical journal articles alerts physicians to watch for pollution-related health problems in their patients (Migliaretti and Cavallo 2004). A study by the American Cancer Society that followed 500,000 people for 16 years found that air pollution contributes to both heart disease and lung cancer and is as dangerous as secondhand smoke or being overweight or a former smoker (Pope et al. 2004). Scientists estimate that air pollution kills between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans each year from the heart disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases it causes (Dockery and Pope 1994).

Although pollution kills many people, the key question, and one almost impossible to answer, is how many of these deaths could be prevented if corporations acted responsibly and put people above profit. A conservative estimate of annual pollution deaths due to corporate crime and neglect would be 35,000.

In this regard, a recent report deplored several major corporations, including General Motors, Standard Oil, and Du Pont, for engaging in a “sad and sordid commercial venture” by conspiring from the beginning of the automobile age to manufacture and market gasoline containing lead, a deadly poison, even though the companies knew there were safe alternatives. Along the way they suppressed evidence of the health dangers of lead. More than 60 years after it was first used, lead was finally banned as a gasoline additive in 1986. A 1985 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that some 5,000 Americans had been dying each year from lead-related heart disease. The author of the report noted that most of the 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline during the last century still remains in our land, air, and water, and that leaded gasoline is still used overseas, especially in poor nations (Kitman 2000).

One form of pollution attracting recent attention is the dumping of toxic waste. The United States produces close to 300 million tons of toxic waste each year, and as much as 90 percent of this is disposed of improperly into some 600,000 contaminated sites across the nation (Simon 2002). Perhaps the most infamous toxic waste dumping crime occurred in an area known as Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York. For years a chemical company had dumped toxic wastes at Love Canal and then donated the land to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953. The school board sold the land to a developer, and houses were eventually built on top of the toxic waste. Eventually the waste leaked into the surrounding land and water, causing birth defects, miscarriages, and other health problems. By the 1980s more than 500 families had to leave their homes, which were later destroyed. The company had also dumped toxic wastes in several other communities (Levine 1982).

In an example of corporate misconduct with immediate consequences, a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India, leaked deadly gas in December 1984, killing at least 3,500 and leaving tens of thousands ill and injured. The leak occurred after Union Carbide had ignored several warnings by U.S. and Indian engineers of such a possibility. No Union Carbide official was ever prosecuted for homicide or manslaughter (Friedrichs 2004).

U.S. corporations also sell and use some 75,000 tons of pesticides overseas, typically in the Third World, which are banned in this country. For example, the notorious pesticide DDT was sold in Central and South America after being banned in the United States. These pesticides are estimated to poison about 400,000 people each year and kill at least 10,000 (Mokhiber 1988).

The Economic and Human Costs of White-Collar Crime

Many criminologists believe that white-collar crime costs us more in lives and money than street crime (Friedrichs 2004; Rosoff, Pontell, and Tillman 2004). Before moving on, let us collect the various figures that have been presented on the costs of both types of crime to see why they feel this way.

We will start with the value of property and money stolen annually from the public, government, and/or private sector by street crime and white-collar crime. Our figure for street crime is $17.1 billion, the FBI's estimate of the economic loss from all property crime and robbery. For white-collar crime, we will add several estimates presented earlier in this and previous chapters, taking the midpoint of estimates for which a range was given: (1) $389 billion (the U.S. News & World Report estimate in today's dollars) for the cost of all corporate crime, including price-fixing, false advertising, tax evasion, and various types of fraud; (2) $100 billion in health care fraud; (3) and $33 billion in employee theft. These figures add up to $522 billion annually. Add to that the IRS's estimate of $194 billion annually in noncorporate tax evasion (see Chapter 11), and the total cost of white-collar crime, broadly defined, reaches $716 billion. As you can see in Figure 12.1, this figure towers over the annual loss from street crime.

Now we will do a similar calculation for the number of people killed each year by street crime (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter) and white-collar crime and misconduct. The UCR's estimate for 2003 homicides was 16,503. For white-collar crime (and misconduct), we again use the estimates presented earlier in this chapter and previous chapters, taking the midpoint of estimates for which a range was given: (1) 56,425 workplace-related deaths from illness or injury; (2) 9,600 deaths from unsafe products; (3) 35,000 deaths from environmental pollution; and (4) and 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgery. Adding these figures together, about 113,025 people a year die from corporate and professional crime and misconduct. As Figure 12.2 illustrates, this number far exceeds the number of people murdered each year.

Explaining White-Collar Crime

In many ways, white-collar criminals are not that different from street criminals. Both groups steal and commit violence, even if their methods differ in ways already discussed. In addition, certain explanations of street crime also apply to white-collar crime. At the same time, there are obvious differences between the two types of crime and their respective offenders. To help understand why white-collar crime occurs, it is useful to examine its similarities with and differences from street crime. Because so many types of white-collar crime exist, our discussion will focus on the most serious type, corporate crime.

Reducing White-Collar Crime

To reduce corporate and other white-collar crime, several measures are necessary. To list but a few, federal and state regulatory agencies must be provided much larger budgets so they will become at least somewhat stronger Davids against corporate Goliaths. The media would have to focus as much or more attention on corporate and other white-collar crime as they now do on street crime. More severe punishment might also work. Because the major corporations can easily afford to pay even millions of dollars in fines, these would have to be increased substantially to have a noticeable deterrent effect. Because so few corporate executives and other high-status offenders are threatened with imprisonment, many scholars think the increased use of even short prison terms may induce these offenders to obey the law (Cullen, Maakestad, and Cavender 1987). Agreeing with this view, a writer for Fortune magazine observed that “the problem will not go away until white-collar thieves face a consequence they're actually scared of: time in jail” (Leaf 2002:62).

Other observers say that stiffer fines and greater use of imprisonment will not work and will lead only to further problems, including overburdening a legal system already stretched beyond its means. These observers think that self-regulation and compliance strategies emphasizing informal sanctions such as negative publicity campaigns would ultimately reduce corporate crime more effectively (Braithwaite 1995b). However, Pontell and Calavita (1993) think this approach would not have prevented the 1980s savings and loan fraud, partly because savings and loan executives looted their own institutions and would thus not have cared about their institutions' reputations.

History of Organized Crime

If by organized crime we mean coordinated efforts to acquire illegal profits, then organized crime has existed for centuries. The earliest example of organized crime is piracy, in which pirates roamed the high seas and plundered ships. Piracy was common among ancient Phoenicians on the Mediterranean Sea and, many centuries later, among Vikings in what is now Western Europe. In the 1600s, buccaneers—Dutch, English, and French pirates—began plundering ships carrying goods to and from the Spanish colonies in the New World and then branched out to colonies farther north. By the end of the 1600s, pirates openly traded their plunder with merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other port cities in what is called the “golden age of piracy.” The merchants bought the pirated booty at low cost and sold the pirates food and other provisions. Royal governors and other public officials took bribes to look the other way, with corruption especially rampant in the New York colony.

Piracy eventually faded by the late 1720s after honest officials exposed their brethren's corruption and several pirate leaders were killed. But perhaps the major reason piracy ended was that merchants began to realize they could get greater profits by trading with England than with pirates. “At that point,” wrote criminologists Dennis J. Kenney and James O. Finckenauer (1995:70), “the markets for pirate goods dried up, and the public demand for their services and support for their existence disappeared.” The merchants who once traded with pirates now called them a public menace. One lesson of the golden age of piracy is that “colonial piracy flourished only because the colonists wanted it to” (Kenney and Finckenauer 1995: 70). Piracy's success depended on the willingness of merchants to trade with pirates, the public's willingness to buy the pirates' plunder from the merchants, and the readiness of political officials to take bribes. The situation today with organized crime is not much different.

Organized crime began anew in New York City in the early 1800s, where almost 1 million people—most of them poor, half of them immigrants, and many of them unemployed— lived crammed into two square miles. Amid such conditions, stealing and other crime were inevitable. Young women were forced to turn to prostitution, and young men formed gangs, enabling them to commit crime more effectively and protecting them from the police. These gangs were the forerunners of today's organized crime groups and, like the pirates before them, had a cozy relationship with public officials. Crooked city politicians used them at polling places to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate voters (Kenney and Finckenauer 1995).

By the end of the century, the gangs had developed in New York and elsewhere into extensive operations, many of them involving vice crime such as prostitution and gambling. The ethnic makeup of these organized crime groups reflected the great waves of immigration into the United States during the nineteenth century. Most immigrants settled in the nation's major cities and faced abject poverty and horrible living conditions. As cities grew and the vice trade developed, it was inevitable that many immigrants would turn to organized crime to make ends meet. Irish Americans were the first to take up organized crime, and eventually became very dominant in many cities. Later in the century Italians and Jews immigrated into the country in enormous numbers and soon got their share of the vice trade, working closely, as the Irish had before them, with politicians, police, and various legitimate businesses. In this century, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics have become more involved in organized crime. Although many scholars question whether the United States has been, as popularly thought, one big “melting pot” of various ethnic and racial groups, organized crime ironically is one area in which diverse groups have pursued economic opportunity and the American dream (O'Kane 1992).

If New York and other city gangs were the forerunners of organized crime, the nineteenth-century robber barons were the role models (Abadinsky 2003). To extend our earlier discussion, railroad baron Leland Stanford bribed members of Congress and other officials to gain land grants and federal loans for his Central Pacific Railroad. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company forced competitors out of business with price wars and occasionally dynamite. The Du Pont family, which made its fortune on gunpowder, cornered its market after the Civil War with bribery and explosions of competing firms. These and other examples are evidence of the corruption and violence characterizing much of America's business history. Organized crime since the nineteenth century is merely its latest manifestation.

The robber baron analogy indicates that organized crime and corporate crime might be more similar than we think. Taking up this theme, many scholars see little difference between the two (Abadinsky 2003; Calavita and Pontell 1990). Both kinds of crime involve careful planning and coordinated effort to acquire illegal profits. Both rely on active or passive collusion of public officials and on public willingness to buy the goods and services they provide. Although organized crime is more willing to use interpersonal violence to acquire its profits, corporate crime, as we saw earlier, can also be very violent.

Organized crime's power and wealth increased enormously during Prohibition (Fox 1989). Before this time, organized crime was primarily a local phenomenon with little coordination across cities. Bootlegging demanded much more coordination, because it involved the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcohol. Organized crime groups in different cities now had to coordinate their activities, and organized crime became more organized to maximize bootlegging's enormous profits. At the same time, rival gangs fought each other to control bootlegging turf. Politicians and federal and local law enforcement officials were all too willing to take bribes. For these reasons, Prohibition fueled the rise and power of organized crime. Bribery of politicians and police was common in cities such as Chicago, where organized crime acquired enormous influence.

After Prohibition ended, organized crime's primary source of income for several decades was gambling. Starting in the 1960s, it moved more into the illegal drug trade, which now provides an important source of organized crime's annual income, estimated between $50 billion and $150 billion in the United States, with gambling a fairly distant second. Due in large part to drug trafficking, organized crime in recent years has taken on an international focus, with cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia and elsewhere (McGee 1995). There is evidence of CIA involvement with international drug smuggling during the Iran-Contra scandal and since (Cockburn and St. Clair 1998).

The Alien Conspiracy Model and Myth

One of the most controversial scholarly issues in U.S. organized crime today is whether it is controlled by a highly organized, hierarchical group of some 24 Italian “families.” This view, often called the alien conspiracy model or the “Mafia mystique,” was popularized in important congressional hearings beginning in the 1950s (Albanese 2000). It was later featured in the various Godfather films and other movies and books, was the central theme of sociologist Donald Cressey's (1969) classic book, Theft of the Nation, and lives today in the TV series The Sopranos. In addition to specifying a hierarchical, Italian-dominated structure of organized crime, the model argues that organized crime was largely unknown before Italians immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s. It also assumes that organized crime exists because immigrants, first Italians and later Asians and others, corrupt righteous U.S. citizens and prey on their weaknesses.

As with many other criminological topics, the alien conspiracy model is best regarded as a myth (Kappeler, Blumberg, and Potter 2000). In emphasizing Italian domination, this particular myth ignores the long history of organized crime before Italian immigration and overlooks the involvement of many other ethnic and racial groups. It also diverts attention from organized crime's roots in poverty, in the readiness of citizens to pay for the goods and services it provides, and in the willingness of politicians, law enforcement agents, and legitimate businesses to take bribes and otherwise cooperate with organized crime.

As the history of organized crime indicates, the public, politicians, and other officials are not very righteous after all. That is still true today. As criminologist Gary W. Potter (1994:147) observed, “It is a fallacy that organized crime produces the desire for vice. Organized crime doesn't force people to gamble, snort cocaine, or read pornography. It merely fills an already existing social gap. The law has made organized crime inevitable because it denies people legal sources for those desired goods and services.”

Nor does organized crime seduce honest politicians, police, and other officials and owners of legitimate businesses. Instead, these keepers of the public trust are often very willing to take bribes and otherwise cooperate with organized crime. In a Seattle study, William Chambliss (1988) found organized crime, business leaders, politicians, and police working hand-in-hand. In a more recent study of organized crime in “Morrisburg,” a pseudonym for an East Coast city of 98,000, Potter (1994:101–102) concluded, “It is quite clear to anyone walking the streets of ‘Morrisburg’ that the political fix is in and extends from the cop on the beat to the most senior political officials.” Such corruption, he noted, “is critical to the survival of organized crime. In fact, organized crime could not operate at all without the direct complicity and connivance of the political machinery in its area of operation” (p. 149).

Like Chambliss and other organized crime researchers, Potter also found legitimate businesses cooperating with organized crime in Morrisburg and noted, “The close interrelationships between legitimate and illicit businesses have been documented time and again in every local study of organized crime groups” (p. 135).

Chambliss, Potter, and other scholars also argue that the alien conspiracy model exaggerates the hierarchical nature of organized crime and the degree to which it is Italian-dominated. Instead, they say, organized crime today is best seen as a loose confederation of local groups consisting of people from many different ethnic backgrounds. Organized crime's decentralized, fluid structure permits it to adapt quickly to the ebb and flow of the vice trade and government's efforts to control it.

Controlling Organized Crime

Organized crime has been around for so long because it provides goods and services that the public desires. For this reason, it will not go away soon. Here the debate over the alien conspiracy model has important implications for how we should try to control organized crime, and for whether any effort will even succeed. If the alien conspiracy model is correct, arrests and prosecutions of selected organized crime “bosses” should eliminate its leadership and thus weaken its ability to entice the public to use its goods and services and various officials to take bribes. The government has used this strategy at least since the days of Al Capone.

If, however, organized crime has a more fluid, decentralized structure whose success depends on public and official readiness to cooperate with its illegal activities, this strategy will not work. As long as public demand for illicit goods and services remains, the financial incentives for organized crime will also remain. And as long as politicians, police, and the business community are eager to cooperate, organized crime will be able to operate with impunity. Organized crime, in short, is too much a part of our economic, political, and social systems for the law enforcement strategy to work well (Albanese 2000).

To reduce organized crime's influence, then, we first must reduce public demand for its illicit goods and services. For better or worse, that is probably a futile goal. If so, a more effective way to fight organized crime might be to admit defeat and to legalize drugs, gambling, and prostitution, because the laws against these crimes have ironically generated opportunities for organized crime to realize huge financial gains (Kappeler, Blumberg, and Potter 2000). Legalizing these crimes would be a very controversial step (see Chapter 14) but would at least lessen organized crime's influence. Legalization might weaken organized crime in an additional way, because current enforcement of the laws in fact strengthens organized crime. The reason is that organized crime figures who get arrested tend to be the smallest, weakest, and most inefficient operators. Their removal from the world of organized crime allows the stronger and more efficient organized crime figures to gain even more control over illicit goods and services. They can also charge more for the goods and services they provide, increasing their profits even further (Kappeler, Blumberg, and Potter 2000).

Of course, legalization of drugs and other illicit products and activities is not about to happen soon. Given that fact, another way to fight organized crime would be to concentrate on the cooperation given it by politicians, police, and legitimate businesses. Unfortunately, this would entail a law enforcement focus that has not really been tried before. It is unlikely the government would want to take this approach, given that in some ways it would be investigating itself.

One final way to weaken organized crime would be to provide alternative economic opportunities for the young people who become involved in it each year. That means that if we could effectively reduce poverty and provide decent-paying, meaningful jobs, we could reduce the attraction of organized crime to the new recruits it needs to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, there are no signs that our nation is eager to launch a new “war on poverty” with the same fervor that has guided our war against drugs and other illicit goods and services that now make so much money for organized crime.