engleski

Crime as a Business, Business as a Crime

In transitional societies the line between business and crime is elusive. The moral norms from predemocratic and egalitarian communities, do not cope with sophisticated crimes. The legal order is formalistic, bureaucracy politically biased and prone to corruption. The police and judiciary do not have enough power and authority, being accompanied with a lack of a political will to fight crime. Three elements of situation will be discussed in the paper. First, the paper will include the law and economic analysis of the state of affairs in Croatia. Secondly, the phenomenology of the crime behaviour will be investigated, offering an analysis how they try to integrate them in society. Thirdly, why state measures fail to fight crime as the business. When we discuss organised crime, we always have in our mind the picture of a really big Weberian type of organization, with hierarchy, with rules, with wages, with promotion and career. Organised crime is not such a type of organization. Mafias are not bureaucratic organizations, they are not even companies. They are groups who are surviving because they are very closely connected. This is the reason why we have a so-called mafia connected by ethnicity, origin or national identification. We are talking about the Russian mafia, about Croatian and Serbian mafia, we are talking about Italian mafia. They are not organizations. The point here is that we cannot fight against organised crime by eliminating just the top of the groups. They are a big group, and very easily are able to replace the top with newcomers, with the new people who are using the opportunity to become the leaders. Eliminating just a few of them will not be the solution. I think one of the good examples from the Serbian case, even if I worry very much about the final result, is that they eliminated not just the top, but the substance of the organization. They are like a hydra ; when you eliminate one head, two heads or organizations arise. But let’s keep in mind that the definitions of what is crime and what is not are changeable. In countries in transition, the line between legal and illegal business activities is very flexible. In many cases legal activity has to be supported by disobedience to the law. The people are investing a lot of efforts in order to avoid some rules, trying to bribe officers, courts or some important politicians. They do perceive as necessary such type of behaviour. This is illegal, but sometimes they are using a behaviour or tools which are completely legal but not acceptable. Not just from the moral point of view but also because of open and honest competition in the market. With some distance of ten years, we can discuss almost all of the economic change in Croatia also from the perspective of organised crime. The days of privatization, denationalization, return of property and transformation of social and legal categories in the new capitalist system can be described as the days of semi-legal activity. Formally, legalistically, that was not against the law, but in reality this produced a lot of risky situations which are actually opportunities for organised crime which has some capital to invest, influence to use, to get some advantages. Organised crime is the answer, actually organised crime has some advantages against the uncertainties we face in transition.

organised crime; transition; abuse of office in business; money laundering; white-collar crime; good governance

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