Organized crime

full International Organized Crimes (Legal Essay) 31 March Introduction Organized crime syndicates have also gone global in tandem with the increased trade in the sale of good, rendition of services, and flow of international financial resources due to the advent of improved information and communications technology. Crime syndicates had been in many ways become much more sophisticated and their operations cross national borders. It is a hallmark of their operations to enlist the support of criminals in other countries to gain the advantages of cooperation and also of increased efficiency, much like any business company. Favorite areas of organized crime syndicates involve illegal drugs, gun running, and modern human slavery or in human trafficking for prostitution, drug mules, and donor organs.
Discussion – (Summary)
The current event news story discussed in this brief paper appeared in the Wall Street Journal written by Sean Gardiner dated last February 11, 2014 entitled “ Arrests in New York and Italy on Gun, Drug Trafficking.” Criminal organizations find it favorable for their own highly-secretive operations to combine the sale and transport of illegal drugs with running for guns because these two contraband items are closely related; shipping illegal drugs across the international borders required a good arsenal to fight off police authorities after them.
In the aforementioned news article, law enforcement authorities finally acted after two years to arrest about two dozen people involved in an international drug-dealing conspiracy. Seven men were arrested in Brooklyn, New York City by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and another seventeen men were also arrested in Calabria, Italy by Italian National Police agents (Gardiner para. 3). The arrested men are reputedly members of a new crime syndicate, the Italian-American Mafia, patterned after the earlier Sicilian Mafia.

Evaluation – criminals engage in illegal activities because of the high profits provided by such type of activities. In the said news article, the arrested men tried to engage in traffic of narcotics combined with money laundering, kidnapping, and extortion. This is an alarming development because organized crime syndicates always try to establish new criminal links to their own group to further their objectives and achieve them much more easily as compared to going it alone. This type of criminal connections present a more difficult task for authorities to monitor because it crosses national boundaries and involve issues of sovereignty. However, a good working relationship with counterparts in other countries can obviate the advantages of criminal syndicates using international means of communications, such as transfers of money. Taking down criminal organizations cost taxpayers their money and perhaps officers lives.
This latest news gives again a bad name to ethnic Italian-Americans majority of whom are essentially law-abiding citizens in America. The entire Italian-American community gets a black eye because it gives other people the impression of Italians always prone to committing various crimes just to get easy money. This news can stereotype the Americans of an Italian heritage or lineage to be viewed and categorized as belonging to the same Mafia-type groups. This is certainly bad for this particular ethnic group which contributed to this country.
Conclusion
The so-called modern organized crime syndicates today use sophisticated means of information and communications to perpetrate their crimes; however, police authorities are in many ways a step ahead as police agents also use modern means of surveillance to detect any criminal intent even before a crime is committed by catching criminals in the planning stages. The success of crime syndicates indicates a failure of police power and ultimately, that of the entire society and even the whole country itself as democracy is threatened by criminals who take advantage of the liberties offered by a modern liberal free-market capitalist economy.
Work Cited
Gardiner, Sean. “ Arrests in New York and Italy on Gun, Drug Trafficking.” The Wall Street Journal. 11 Feb. 2014 Web. 31 Mar. 2014. .