Effects of Organized Crime on American Culture

Americans at times seem to be consumed by crime, showing at one and the same time a fear of crime and a fascination with it. Crime is a topic in the daily newspaper, often crowding other news off the front pages. Crime and fear of crime are important subjects in political campaigns. Crime is a staple on entertainment programs on television and in books and movies which detail both real and fictional crimes from a wide variety of points of view. Organized crime is only one aspect of the crime problem in America. In the past, organized crime was a more potent and feared force, especially in the cities of the Northeast, but then and now organized crime has an effect on society in terms of added costs to goods and services, increased costs for law enforcement, and an effect on the administration of justice and on the degree to which Americans place their trust in their law enforcement and judicial systems. Organized crime has also served as a sort of reverse royalty in American society and has been immortalized in books and films through most of this century. Each of the immigrant groups that came to America brought with them a negative element in the from of criminal gangs that would prey on other immigrants and then on American society as a whole. The Italian segment of organized crime, variously known as the Mafia or La Cosa Nostra, prevailed for decades but has fallen on hard times because of a changed environment and improved law enforcement. Other org

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of recent arrivals are from the former Soviet Union, and there is now a Russian Mafia operating in the United States, with links to its parent organization in Russia. In Russia, the gangster organization is called organizatsiya, and it consists of more than 100 criminal syndicates involved in nearly every commercial activity in Russia today. There are eight primary groups in Moscow, though they are not as neatly divided as were the five families in the New York Italian Mafia. The Chechens are the most powerful group and specialize in bank fraud and extortion. In the United States, Russian crime groups have become a primary target for the FBI, and the FBI has assigned one agent to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow full time to help the Russians combat this scourge. The Russians have noted that there is one major difference in the way their criminal organizations operate when compared to those in countries like the United States--in the U.S. these groups control only criminal activities, while in Moscow they control everything, costing business millions. The Russian mafia also backs up its edicts with violence on a grand scale (Duffy, Trimble, and Imse, 1994, 41-46). The Russian Mafia has gained a foothold in the northeastern corrid

Category: Government - E