Organized Criminal Activities - Essay Example

win, 2010; Heberle, 2009) and expanding the responsibilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in finding and shutting down criminal enterprises. This paper assesses the extent of organized crime activities in the U.S. Criminal activities for every criminal organization vary, but nowadays, they have involved both illegal and legal businesses. The illegal businesses’ revenues are posted to legal businesses, or in other words, laundered through legal activities to produce the image that they were earned legally (Toner, 2009).

The following criminal activities are some of the major and frequent criminal businesses of criminal enterprises. For the most part of the twentieth century, the traditional organized syndicates in the U.S. consisted of Russian mobsters; Chinese tongs, Japanese Boryokudan, and other Asian crime rings; the Italian Cosa Nostra organizations; Balkan groups with links to Hungary and Romania; Middle Eastern groups with traditional criminal or terrorist links; groups from African countries; and biker gangs.

These criminal organizations performed several illegal activities, and in the 1950s and 1960s, the most profitable of these activities was gambling, and then loan sharking, narcotics trafficking, extortion, prostitution, bootlegging, and fraud (Finklea, 2009, p.12). Numerous people who are non-members of criminal organizations, however, provide goods and services in a forced relationship through violence or threats of violence (Abadinsky, 2010, p.281). Gambling involves bookmaking, casino gambling and associated activities, other kinds of gambling, and Internet gambling.

Bookmaking refers to profiting from betting in races, which is illegal in many states. Bookmakers book events for two kinds of horse races or other types of races, such as dog races and several sports events (Abadinsky, 2010, p.283). Illegal bookmaking has raised accusations that they fix races. These bookmakers mostly operate in major American cities. Casino