UPI Study › Courses › Criminology › Free lessons › Lesson 14.2 Free with a free account
Organized Crime and Extortion: Definitions, History, and Examples
Criminology · Chapter 14: White-Collar, Organized, and Economic CrimeSection 14.2 · lesson 60 of 91video coming soon
← White Collar and Occupational Crime: Definitions, Statistics, and Legal FrameworksNext lesson: Money Laundering and Green-Collar Crime: Techniques, Examples, and Punishments →
In this lesson
Definitions, history, enforcement tools, and related offenses.
- Define organized crime by structure and explain the contest over it.
- Compare the hierarchy and enterprise models.
- Trace the illicit market concept and the enforcement response.
- State the elements of extortion and related offenses.
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,525 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
What Makes a Group Organized
Movies make organized crime look like a family drama. Criminology asks a plainer question: what structure makes a group organized? Organized crime is one of the most mythologized topics in criminology, so we start by defining it carefully.
Lesson Roadmap
Seven Steps From Structure to Markets
This lesson defines organized crime by its structure, and explains why an older, ethnic definition was rejected. We compare two models of how criminal groups are organized: the hierarchy and the enterprise. We trace the prohibition lesson, which generalizes into the illicit market concept. We look at corruption as an enabling condition, and the legal tools of the enforcement response. We weigh the debate over broad conspiracy and forfeiture powers. Then we define extortion, and distinguish it from robbery and blackmail. Finally, we see what organized crime adds to criminology: the analysis of markets, not individuals.
Definition
Four Structural Features of Organized Crime
Organized crime is defined here by four structural features. The first is continuity. The enterprise persists over time, beyond any single transaction. The second is an internal structure that coordinates multiple participants. The third is an illicit purpose. The fourth is the use of corruption and intimidation, to protect the enterprise from law enforcement and from competitors. Notice what this definition leaves out: any reference to who the participants are. That omission is deliberate. These features can and do appear in groups of any ethnic or national background.
Historical Error
Why Ethnic Definitions Were Rejected
The structural definition replaces an older approach that defined organized crime by a single named ethnic group. That older approach is a documented historical error. It conflated a specific immigrant community with criminal organization in general. It obscured the fact that organized crime has appeared across many ethnic and national groups throughout documented history. And it contributed to discriminatory public perception and policy, directed at the group it named. Contemporary criminology rejects any ethnic definition of organized crime. The correction matters beyond historical accuracy. An ethnic definition sends investigators looking only where one community is present, missing organized crime everywhere else. At the same time, it subjects members of that community to suspicion, regardless of any individual connection to crime. A structural definition avoids both errors at once. It is both more accurate and more defensible.
Two Models
Hierarchy Versus Enterprise Structures
Two models describe how organized criminal groups are structured. The hierarchy model pictures a stable, centralized chain of command with fixed roles. It looks much like a conventional organization chart. The enterprise model pictures a looser network. Participants form and dissolve ties around specific illicit ventures, as opportunity dictates. No fixed hierarchy governs every activity. Research generally finds that many real criminal networks are looser than the popular hierarchical image suggests. They more closely resemble the enterprise model. Some groups do show more hierarchical features than others. And the choice of model is not merely descriptive, because each implies a different enforcement approach.
Visual Contrast
Picturing Chains of Command and Loose Ties
Now picture the two models, one after the other. In the hierarchy model, leadership sits at the top, with a mid-level tier and operational roles below. Every line runs up a fixed chain of command. In the enterprise model, participants are linked by loose ties. Those ties shift as participants organize around particular ventures, and some links are temporary. There is no single top, and no fixed set of tiers. Research generally places many real networks closer to the enterprise picture. Keep this contrast in mind, because it explains why certain legal tools were designed the way they were.
Historical Lesson
Prohibition and the Illicit Market Concept
Organized crime in the United States developed alongside periods of prohibition. Prohibition here means legal restriction of a good or service for which substantial public demand persisted. The lesson reaches well beyond any single historical episode. Prohibiting a good or service with sustained demand tends to create a profitable illicit market to supply it. Organized enterprise tends to develop wherever such a market exists, and legitimate suppliers are excluded from serving it. This generalizes into the illicit market concept. Organized crime exists, structurally, wherever there is demand the legal market is prevented from serving. That is true regardless of which good or service is at issue in a given period.
Enabling Condition
Corruption and Institutional Defenses
Corruption of public officials is a key enabling condition for organized crime. It means using bribery or other improper influence, to secure an official's cooperation or inaction. Why does it matter so much? An enterprise facing effective, uncorrupted law enforcement has much greater difficulty sustaining continuity over time. So institutions build defenses against corruption. Internal oversight bodies watch for improper influence from inside. Rotation of assignments keeps long-term corrupt relationships from forming. Transparency requirements and independent auditing of enforcement and regulatory functions add outside checks. Each defense is designed to reduce the opportunity for sustained improper influence to take hold.
Legal Tools
Conspiracy Law and the RICO Framework
Several legal tools form the enforcement response, described here by their legal function. Conspiracy law criminalizes an agreement between two or more people to commit an offense. That allows prosecution of coordinated planning, even when no underlying offense was completed. The racketeering framework, at the federal level, is chiefly the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. It is codified in Title eighteen of the U.S. Code, sections nineteen sixty-one through nineteen sixty-eight. It allows prosecution based on a pattern of predicate offenses connected to a criminal enterprise. Each offense need not be charged and proven entirely separately.
Legal Tools
Forfeiture, Witness Protection, and Surveillance
Asset forfeiture lets the state seize property connected to criminal activity, through a defined legal process. Witness protection relocates and protects witnesses whose cooperation puts them at risk. And the electronic surveillance framework sets the authorization process, including judicial approval, for electronic surveillance. The pattern approach fits the enterprise model. Where roles keep shifting, proving a fixed hierarchy is hard, but proving a pattern is possible.
Policy Debate
Broad Powers Versus Due Process Concerns
Conspiracy law and asset forfeiture both generate a genuine policy debate. Proponents argue that these broad powers are necessary. Organized enterprises are structured to insulate their leadership from direct involvement in any single offense. With narrower tools, leaders could escape liability while lower-level participants are prosecuted. Critics argue that broad conspiracy liability risks capturing people whose connection to the criminal purpose is marginal. They also argue that forfeiture can raise due process concerns. That concern is sharpest where forfeiture proceeds against property, without a criminal conviction of a specific person. This lesson states both positions, and adopts neither.
Definition
Extortion, Robbery, and Blackmail Compared
Extortion is obtaining property through a wrongful threat, typically a threat of future harm rather than immediate force. Compare it with robbery and blackmail. Robbery uses force or the immediate threat of force, and the threat and taking happen at essentially the same time. The property is taken directly from the victim's person or presence. Extortion uses a threat of future harm. The threat comes before the transfer, often by some interval. And the victim hands the property over, under compulsion. Where a jurisdiction recognizes blackmail separately, the threat is typically to reveal damaging or embarrassing information. The property or benefit is handed over to prevent that disclosure. Protection arrangements, where payment is demanded to avoid harm the demander would otherwise cause, fall within extortion's elements.
Quick Check
The Knife and the Next-Day Payment
Quick check. A man shows a clerk a knife, and says he'll come back tomorrow and hurt her unless she pays him then. The next day, she pays. Robbery, extortion, or lawful hard bargaining? Pause, and decide. Extortion. The knife doesn't decide it: the harm threatened is in the future, and she hands the money over later. Robbery would need the taking on the spot, under force or an immediate threat.
Applied Example
Fay Tests for a Racketeering Pattern
Now a prosecutor, Fay, is weighing a racketeering charge. She has to test the predicate-offense requirement. The legal question is whether the conduct is a set of isolated, unconnected incidents. Or is it a genuine pattern of specified offenses, tied to an ongoing enterprise? Only the second qualifies.
Broader Contribution
Analyzing Markets Rather Than Individuals
Transnational organized crime, meaning organized criminal activity across several national jurisdictions, is a distinct category. Chapter seventeen takes up its international frameworks and jurisdictional questions. Finally, organized crime contributes a distinctive approach to criminology: the analysis of markets, rather than individuals. Much of the theory in this course explains why an individual offends. Organized crime scholarship asks how an illicit market forms, sustains itself, and responds to enforcement.
Practice
Sorting Extortion, Robbery, and Hard Bargaining
Let's practice telling extortion, robbery, and lawful bargaining apart. Taking property on the spot with force, or with an immediate threat of physical harm, is robbery. Demanding payment while threatening future harm or future property damage is extortion. Demanding a recurring payment to avoid future harm to a business is extortion too, in the form of a protection arrangement. Threatening to reveal damaging information unless paid is extortion, or blackmail where a jurisdiction separates it. Aggressive negotiation with only lawful competitive pressure is lawful hard bargaining. So is threatening to walk away from a lawful deal unless the terms improve.
Reverse Problem
Why Illicit Markets Persist Despite Enforcement
Now the reverse problem. An illicit market has persisted for decades, despite sustained enforcement. What does the prohibition lesson suggest? Pause, and decide. The prohibition lesson points to the likely cause: sustained demand that the legal market is barred from serving.
Key Takeaways
Structure, Patterns, Demand, and Threats
Let's pull it together. Organized crime is defined by structure, never by ethnicity. Many real networks look like enterprises, so legal tools target patterns. Blocked demand creates illicit markets. And extortion rests on a threat of future harm.
About Criminology at UPI Study
Criminology (Criminology 150) is a self-paced online course of 91 video lessons in 21 chapters, from classical criminology and crime data to theories of crime, victims, policing, courts and corrections. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
Every lesson transcript is free on pages like this one, and the videos are free with a free UPI Study account. Enrolling adds a practice quiz after each lesson, the graded work and final exam that earn the credit, lifetime access, and an official transcript on completion. UPI Study has helped over 130,000 students with college credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
Enroll now → Course details Download the syllabus Every course with PRO →
Why take it here
Why students take Criminology with UPI Study
Where the credit goes
Universities that work with NCCRS
Criminology carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
Thomas Edison State UniversitySigned partner
University of the PeopleSigned partner
Charter Oak State CollegeSigned partner
Strayer UniversitySigned partner
Columbia Southern UniversitySigned partner
Indiana TechSigned partner
Penn StateWorks with NCCRS
Southern New Hampshire UniversityWorks with NCCRS
SUNYWorks with NCCRS
+many more cooperating universitiesFind my college →Find my college → Not listed? Ask Athena in the corner of this page, or book a 15-minute call.
FAQ
Questions students ask us
About Organized Crime and Extortion: Definitions, History, and Examples
How do criminologists define organized crime?
What is the difference between the hierarchy model and the enterprise model of organized crime?
What is the illicit market concept, and how does it connect to prohibition?
What is the difference between extortion and robbery?
About the Criminology course
How many college credits is Criminology?
How much does Criminology cost and what is included?
Which universities accept UPI Study credits?
How long does Criminology take?
How are the exams done?
How do my credits reach my college?
Ready for the full course? Earn 3 credits in Criminology.
91 video lessons, a quiz after each one, and the graded work that earns the credit. Recommended for credit by NCCRS.
3 credits · NCCRSEnroll →