gration. This high level of corruption practically guarantees that corrupt officials and members of Russian crime groups are among the members of many businesses which form partnerships with U.S. businesses. As the number of these ties increase in the global market era, so too does access to the U.S. for Russian criminals. Thus, the nature of life in Russia facilitates illegal activities by Russian emigrants in the U.S. However, the authors make it explicit that Russian émigrés in the U.S. are nothing like the Italian Mafia and, in Russian, government corruption is so pervasive and part of business-as-usual that it, too, is nothing like organized crime in the U.S. “The networks are neither highly centralized nor dominated by a small number of individuals…people from the former Soviet Union who have become involved in crime have been especially opportunistic and, at the same time, lack the trust associated with ethnic identity that is associated with other criminal organizations” (Finckenauer et al. 198-199).
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