Organized Crime Syndicates - Essay Example

Favorite areas of organized crime syndicates involve illegal drugs, gun running, and modern human slavery or 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 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 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 types 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 group to further their objectives and achieve them much more easily as compared to going it alone. This type of criminal connection presents a more difficult task for authorities to monitor because it crosses national boundaries and involves issues of sovereignty. However, a good working relationship with counterparts in other countries can obviate the advantages of criminal syndicates using international means of communication, such as transfers of money. Taking down criminal organizations cost taxpayers their money and perhaps officers' lives.

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.