Double Crossed - The Failure of Organized Crime Control

Michael Woodiwiss

Summary

In the United States, the popular symbols of organised crime are still Depression-era figures such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky - thought to be heads of giant, hierarchically organised mafias. In Double Crossed, Michael Woodiwiss challenges perpetuated myths to reveal a more disturbing reality of organised crime - one in which government officials and the wider establishment are deeply complicit.

Delving into attempts to implement policies to control organised crime in the US, Italy and the UK, Woodiwiss reveals little-known manifestations of organised crime among the political and corporate establishment. A follow up to his 2005 Gangster Capitalism, Woodiwiss broadens and brings his argument up to the present by examining those who constructed and then benefited from myth making. These include the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, opportunistic American politicians and officials and, more recently, law enforcement bureaucracies, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Organised crime control policies now tend to legitimise repression and cover-up failure. They do little to control organised crime. While the US continues to export its organised crime control template to the rest of the world, opportunities for successful criminal activity proliferate at local, national and global levels, making successful prosecutions irrelevant.

Available since: 06/20/2017.

Other books that might interest you

We're Dead Come On In

Bruce Davis

A true crime account of a mass shooting by gangster brothers which resulted in the deaths of six police officers in Depression-era Missouri.   “In all the annals of preservation of the peace there is no story that runs more gallantly than this.” —Springfield Leader, January 4, 1932 As dusk fell on a bitterly cold night during the Great Depression, a posse of ten local lawmen approached two brothers holed up in an isolated Missouri farmhouse. Minutes later, six officers were dead, three were wounded, and the outlaws had escaped. After a wild car chase through Oklahoma and across Texas, police finally surrounded Harry and Jennings Young in their Houston hideout. The brutal killings attracted the national press (at first Pretty Boy Floyd was rumored to be involved) and the “carnival of carnage” that became known as the Young Brothers Massacre represented the highest number of law enforcement officers killed on a single day until September 11, 2001. Even in the hardscrabble Ozarks, a region historically known for frontier justice and vigilante activity, these crimes caused a sensation, and the Young brothers briefly joined the ranks of infamy with Bonnie and Clyde and other famous outlaws. Author Bruce Davis, a third-generation Methodist minister from Springfield, Missouri, became fascinated with this forgotten case after noticing a memorial to the six fallen police officers in his local police station. He has devoted this account, his first book, to telling the whole story and honoring the brave lawmen who died in their attempts to exact justice.

Show book

The Black Widow

Linda Calvey

If you think you know everything about the East End's toughest gangsters, think again. Meet Linda Calvey, aka the Black Widow.Growing up in the East End of London, Linda falls in with local gangsters including the Krays, Freddie Foreman and Ronnie Cook. When the love of her life, Mickey Calvey, is gunned down on a job gone wrong, Linda resolves to carry on his work. But in 1990, after years of living in fear of her lover Ronnie Cook, Linda finds herself accused of his murder, in a trial that shocks the nation. Still, Linda sticks to her code of honour, refusing to confess. Until now... After 18 years behind bars alongside notorious names including Rose West and Myra Hindley, she is released. This is the final truth about her life and what happened the day Ronnie Cook was murdered.

Show book

Ballad of the Green Beret - The...

Marc Leepson

The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn't The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" or the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"—it was "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, US Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler's clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he wrote a string of popular pulp fiction paperbacks that made "Rambo look like a stroll through Disneyland." He killed a lover's ex-boyfriend in Tennessee. Settling in Central America, Sadler ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, and caroused at his villa. In 1988 he was shot in the head in Guatemala and died a year later. This life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon recounts the sensational details of Sadler's life vividly but soberly, setting his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the big picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.

Show book

Kidnap - Inside the Ransom Business

Anja Shortland

Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap risks, yet kidnaps of foreign workers, local VIPs, and tourists are surprisingly rare and the vast majority of abductions are peacefully resolved—often for remarkably low ransoms. In fact, the market for hostages is so well ordered that the crime is insurable. This is a puzzle: ransoming a hostage is the world's most precarious trade. What would be the "right" price for your loved one—and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? And why would kidnappers release a potential future witness after receiving their money? 
Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies.

Show book

Unsolved Mysteries - Ten Famous...

Albert Jack

From the author of the internationally bestselling Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, What Caesar did for My Salad, Shaggy Dogs, They Laughed at Galileo & Mysterious World.
Introduction
We all love a good mystery don’t we? And by all, I mean each and every one of us are, or will be, captivated at one time or another by a decent, real-life, scary mystery; either one of the world’s most famous or something on a much smaller scale.
But, writing a book on just one of these would have been relatively easy. The challenge came from researching many of them and then condensing them down in a way that I know you, my reader, will enjoy them.
And that is in short, sharp informative sections that can be read on the train, bus, queue or whilst you are waiting to pick the kids up from school. In other words, the challenge was to explain each mystery in a way you can enjoy, and absorb, in about ten minutes flat.
But the missing detail isn’t critical to the basic story; the core details of the mystery in question should all be in there. In some cases, such as chapters on The Bermuda Triangle, UFO’s or USO’s there are literally thousands of examples that I could have used of course, but, in each case I have kept them down to just a handful.
So join me now on a journey through Ten Famous Disappearances...
Including;
Mystery 1 – The Missing Lighthouse-Keepers of Eilean Mor
Mystery 2 – The Mary Celeste Mystery
Mystery 3 – What Happened to Glenn Miller?
Mystery 4 – The Lost King of France
Mystery 5 – The Missing Navy Diver – Buster Crabb
Mystery 6 – John Dillinger – The FBI Did Not Get Their Man
Mystery 7 – Agatha Christie’s Real Life Mystery
Mystery 8 – The Invisible D.B. Cooper
Mystery 9 – Who was the Real Mona Lisa
Mystery 10 – The World’s Strangest Unsolved Crimes

Show book

The Notorious Reno Gang - The...

Rachel Dickinson

The true story of the world's first robbery of a moving train, and the real origins of the Wild West.They were the first outlaws to rob a moving train. But from 1864 to 1868, the Reno brothers and their gang of counterfeiters, robbers, burglars, and safecrackers also held the town of Seymour, Indiana, hostage, making a large hotel near the train station their headquarters. When the gang robbed the Adams Express car of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad on the outskirts of Seymour on October 6, 1866, it shocked the world-and made other burgeoning outlaws like Jesse James sit up and take notice. The extraordinary-and extra-legal-efforts to take them out defined the term "frontier justice." From the first report of the robbery, Allan Pinkerton's operatives were on the scene, followed by kidnappings, lynchings, and an extradition from Canada to Indiana that caused an international incident. In the end, ten members of the Reno Gang were hanged, including three of the Reno brothers. And no one was ever charged with the murders.The Notorious Reno Gang tells the complete story for the first time, revealing how these gangsters, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, and the little city of Seymour ushered in the Wild West.

Show book