The Informer
The Informer blog provides a platform for academics, policymakers and practitioners to discuss their work and research and to share their opinions on organised crime.
We collaborate with the European Consortium for Political Research's Standing Group on Organised Crime (ECPR-SGOC), one of the standing groups of the ECPR. The editorial board includes representatives from the University of Bath, Oxford University, the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Sao Paulo, Sofia University and Flinders University.
2 March, 2021
To date, female actors within organised crime structures have remained invisible. With the exception of well-known women who have inherited illicit businesses and operations from their jailed or...
22 February, 2021
Police are not police and the law is not the law everywhere, one must be reminded, as I strolled through the hallowed centrepiece of Interpol’s Lyonnais HQ, having transposed myself from Singapore to...
18 December, 2020
Cathy Haenlein
As the UK establishes its post-Brexit independent sanctions regime, the potential to use sanctions against serious and organised crime has attracted growing attention. To add value, any move in this...
17 December, 2020
Martina Bedetti
Following the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, Italy was one of the first countries to implement extreme measures in an attempt to contain the drastic...
16 December, 2020
Dr Philip A. Berry
In recent evidence to a House of Lords committee examining United Kingdom (UK) policy in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Baroness Goldie warned that the Afghan narcotics trade, which accounts for...
1 December, 2020
Fausto Carbajal Glass
Although not new, the creation of illicit economies by organised crime has swiftly become an ever-present phenomenon in the 21st century. Criminal groups have diversified economically into the...
19 November, 2020
Ava Tambala
Written by Ava Tambala, a year 13 Sixth Form student and the 2020 recipient of the Urban Synergy-Refinitiv Bright Horizon Internship Programme - an initiative established in October 2020 to offer...
17 November, 2020
This report was prepared for discussion at Towards a More Safe and Secure World Master Seminar: A Multi-Regional Project (October 27 - December 9, 2020), sponsored by the US Department of State's...
28 September, 2020
Organised crime groups (OCGs) have evolved and adapted techniques designed to facilitate criminal activities, evade detection and enable criminal enterprise to endure. The National Crime Agency’s (...
17 September, 2020
The crime of association for mafia-type offences was introduced into the Italian criminal justice system by law on 13 September 1982. Provision n. 646 (better known as the law "Rognoni-La Torre"...
26 August, 2020
In July, news outlets around the world reported that online hackers unsuccessfully attempted to obtain confidential Covid-19 vaccination research from pharmaceutical companies and research centres in...
23 July, 2020
John M. Sellar OBE
The criminal exploitation of our planet’s species is bringing many of them close to extinction. This is occurring to numerous animals and plants, either as entire species or in geographically-...
28 May, 2020
Anna Sergi, Alexandria Reid, Luca Storti, Marleen Easton
In May 2020, the Secur.Ports workshop brought together 16 pratitioners and 9 researchers with expertise in the field of port policing, port security, organised crime and border control. Funded by the...
12 June, 2020
Alexander Kupatadze
The ongoing debate surrounding the impact of Covid-19 on organised crime is incomplete. Whilst discussions have centred on the workings of mafia-type groups and other non-state actors, these are not...
9 June, 2020
According to a recent article published in The Times titled “Britain is cocaine capital of Europe”, cocaine use in the UK has increased by nearly 300 per cent in less than a decade. Cocaine...
3 June, 2020
Andrea Varsori
Rio de Janeiro’s criminal groups have, from time to time, attracted international attention. The news of their anti-coronavirus measures has made international headlines once more. Drug-dealing...
21 May, 2020
Fabian Zhilla
It is a maxim in the criminology of organised crime that as the state strengthens, organised criminal groups are weakened. Notwithstanding this notion, the present context in the wake of COVID- 19...
11 May, 2020
Tink Palmer MBE
The Marie Collins Foundation (MCF) is a child protection charity which works to ameliorate the impact of online child sexual abuse and related offline abuse. COVID-19 presents many challenges to...
1 May, 2020
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international trade has led to a significant retraction in global commerce. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) estimates that worldwide merchandise trade will...
21 April, 2020
We sometimes forget that organised crime is actually ‘us’, and not some vague, mythical, ethnic or national threat from somewhere else. ‘Us’ refers to the general, ‘law-abiding’ public, which is rife...
18 April, 2020
Territorial control is a crucial activity for many criminal organisations. Italian mafias, in particular, consider the territory they originate from as a crucial resource. It is the place they wield...
6 April, 2020
There is no shortage of evidence that ‘organised crime’ has rapidly adapted to Covid-19 conditions. While some journalists have looked at how illicit trades are affected by the pandemic, think thanks...
3 April, 2020
COVID-19 is already having an unprecedented impact on the UK illicit drug market, its dependent customers and County Lines in particular. Just as international drug traffickers rely on hiding in...
27 March, 2020
County Lines is undeniably the most significant trend in over a decade in the market for illicit drugs in Britain. It is a criminal business model unlike any other across Europe, thriving on the...
25 March, 2020
Stefano Betti
Across the world, organised crime groups have wasted no time in capitalising on new opportunities presented by COVID-19. The intersections between organised crime and the virus are plentiful: while...
26 September, 2019
Bonnie Mitchell
As the US and China escalate their trade war, increasingly imposing new tariffs on each other’s goods, there is another factor in the US-China economic relationship that receives little attention,...
16 August, 2019
Fausto Carbajal Glass
South Africa and Mexico face similar security challenges, particularly when it comes to criminal violence. Both governments have responded in a similar fashion for years, by employing joint police-...
12 August, 2019
On the 8th of July 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 20 tons of cocaine on a cargo ship stopped in the Port of Philadelphia. Port seizures just like this, especially of cocaine,...
9 August, 2019
Alexandria Reid
The plan to introduce 10 freeports across the UK after Brexit has drawn attention in recent weeks. Introducing these provenly risky ‘special economic zones’ sits uneasily alongside the UK’s wider...
25 April, 2019
Mike Salinas
The traditional ‘pub’ as a site of leisure (and crime)
In bygone eras, the public house (i.e. the ‘local pub’) was a staple of the British social landscape. It was a transitional space for leisure:...
11 April, 2019
Attila Nagy
This article is not meant to fully cover trade in post-conflict societies, but rather, the aim of this article is to introduce the kind of issues that enable illicit trade to flourish in post-...
5 April, 2019
Anne-Marie Barry (St Mary's University) and Evangelina Moisi
On 25 March 2019, RUSI’s Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research (SHOC) – in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Modern Slavery at St Mary’s University, Twickenham and the Catholic...
SHOC Workshop Summary: The Role of Academic–Law Enforcement Partnerships in Tackling Organised Crime
26 March, 2019
Evangelina Moisi
On 11 March 2019, RUSI’s Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research (SHOC) convened a workshop exploring the role of academic-law enforcement partnerships in tackling organised crime (OC). Although...
19 March, 2019
Anton Moiseienko
This post draws on research completed as part of RUSI’s Financial Crime 2.0 research programme.
In early March 2019, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) announced that it was seeking to freeze and...
13 March, 2019
Fausto Carbajal Glass
Amid high expectations, and on a popular mandate to curb violence across the country, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) won the Mexican presidential election in early July 2018....
6 March, 2019
Chris Allen
Organised criminals are smart. Their primary motivation is profit and they will adapt pretty much anything, including their modus operandi and the commodity they trade in, to ensure a constant cash...
26 February, 2019
Zoha Waseem
Since the 1980s, ‘police encounters’ have been a notorious phenomenon in South Asia, especially in India and Pakistan. Jyoti Belur, who has researched encounters in Mumbai, defines an ‘encounter’ as...
20 February, 2019
Jay Albanese
Organised crime (OC) is often described as criminal conduct that is “organised”. Of course, this is a tautology, saying the same thing twice only with different words. As a US Supreme Justice once...
11 February, 2019
Anton Moiseienko and Tom Keatinge
While the UK’s vulnerability to money laundering is well-known, an accurate estimate of the scale of money laundering in the UK is not available. As a recent workshop held by the Strategic Hub for...
6 February, 2019
Cyrille Fijnaut
Anyone familiar with the history of European police and judicial cooperation knows that the arrangements that existed in this area up to the Maastricht Treaty 1992 were a jumble of overlapping,...
23 January, 2019
Shahrzad Fouladvand
In 2014, fourteen years after the UN Human Trafficking Protocol was adopted by the UN, a more modest document was opened for signature by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Entering into...
18 January, 2019
Tony Saggers
Much has been discussed, in recent months, regarding the implications of Brexit for UK law enforcement and how we will continue to conduct the international aspects of intelligence and operations...
9 January, 2019
Stefano Betti
Critical infrastructures (CIs) are the backbone of our global society. These infrastructures keep the global economy moving, ensuring the day-to-day delivery of social goods and services. They are...
12 December, 2018
Benedetta Di Matteo
Modern slavery and trafficking in human beings are global phenomena that affect a growing number of victims. While it is difficult to provide an exact figure, the International Labour Organization (...
6 December, 2018
Angus Nurse
In recent years, greater attention has been given internationally to the role of organised crime networks in environmental crime, including the illegal trade in wildlife. There is evidence of...
28 November, 2018
Tanya Wyatt
Wildlife trafficking, like other illicit markets, is one way that organised crime groups (OCGs) make money. The involvement of organised crime in the illegal wildlife trade has in recent years gained...
23 November, 2018
Andrew Wallis
How many slaves work for you? You probably think the answer is none. But if you own a smartphone, an item of cotton clothing, or consume food you did not grow yourself, you may have in the region of...
14 November, 2018
Julian Fernandez
When Colombia’s ex-president Juan Manuel Santos left office in June 2018, his country boasted of over 209,000 hectares of coca leaf - the most it has ever had. Santos’s political opponents blame him...
5 November, 2018
JUEST Network
JUEST, the UK-EU Security and Criminal Justice Cooperation Network, was launched on the 22nd of October 2018, as an important step towards encouraging multidisciplinary research and engagement to...
1 November, 2018
Yuliya Zabyelina
Extortion is conventionally understood as an attempt or act of obtaining money, property, or services from an individual or organization through some form of coercion. Extortion is one of the most...
23 October, 2018
Katja Samuel
As terrorist groups become more global in their reach, creative in their methods and increasingly connected to organised criminal groups (OCGs), new and complex counter-terrorism responses are...
11 October, 2018
Valentina Butera
In January 2018, Operation Stige led to the arrest of 169 individuals across Italy and Germany on charges including participation in a mafia-type association, money laundering, extortion, unfair...
3 October, 2018
Adrian Leiva
Unlike more conventional forms of crime, the success of organised criminal groups depends largely on their ability to identify and recruit co-offenders. Due to the everchanging nature of illicit...
24 September, 2018
Guido Palazzo
On the 4th of February 1991, Mario Tamburrino was unloading barrels from his truck when a life-changing accident occurred: the truck driver was transporting 571 industrial barrels with toxic waste...
14 September, 2018
Daniel White
It is argued the world has been fundamentally changed by forces of globalisation that are driven by neoliberal, ‘Washington consensus’ free-market capitalism. This shift is so profound, it is said,...
9 September, 2018
Fabio Armao
The spread of youth gangs has accompanied the origin and development of large industrialised cities, starting in countries like the US. In recent decades, however, the phenomenon has undergone...
29 August, 2018
María Teresa Martínez
Graphic crime scenes accompanied by figures depicting unprecedented homicides rates continue to dominate the Mexican media landscape. In Mexico, violence and its causes have dominated almost all...
22 August, 2018
RUSI is hiring!
We are looking to recruit for two positions with the Cocaine Route Monitoring and Support (CORMS) programme: a Key Expert (KE2) Project Manager and a full-time intern, both based in...
20 August, 2018
Deborah Alimi
This year’s World Drug Report is yet another piece of evidence that the international community faces a daunting task. Despite century long efforts by global law enforcement, the illicit market...
16 August, 2018
Nicholas Lord, Liz Campbell and Karin van Wingerde
In July 2018, a joint report from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Egmont Group provided an overview of the range of techniques and mechanisms that criminals use to obscure their...
10 August, 2018
James Windle
There are many ways to research organised crime and illicit enterprise. One of the most useful – yet underused – is historical research. This article argues that historical research should be used...
2 August, 2018
Dwight Smith
This is the second of two Informer blogs by Dwight Smith examining how we think about organised crime. The first part was published on Monday 30 July.
Initially, organised crime...
30 July, 2018
Dwight Smith
This is the first of two Informer blogs by Dwight Smith examining how we think about organised crime. The second part will be published on Thursday 2 August.
In October 1965, I was...
24 July, 2018
Andrea Varsori
Being a criminal in Rio de Janeiro has never been a safe business, but this year it’s more dangerous than ever. On February 16 2018, Brazil’s federal government took over the administration of...
18 July, 2018
Daniela Irrera
Terrorist attacks have always historically shaped public attitudes and behaviours across Europe. The sense that terrorism is a danger to the lives of ordinary people and the perception that...
10 July, 2018
Derek Johnson, Justine Wilkinson
The year 2013 brought us the now infamous ‘Horsemeat Scandal’, providing the public with a previously unthinkable indication of the scale of crime in the UK’s food supply chain. Recognising the...
2 July, 2018
Simon Avery
“Serious organised crime” can be a confusing thing. It is a concept which lumps together such diverse issues as drugs, cybercrime, money laundering and modern slavery; it incorporates everything from...
26 June, 2018
Roberta Damiani
Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, published in the early 1990s, is one of the most influential books in comparative politics. The book sought to investigate...
21 June, 2018
Jane Schneider
The locution “criminal organisations” works better than “organised crime” for drawing attention to variation along the following lines. Different categories of organisation have distinctive revenue...
13 June, 2018
Baris Cayli
“Anyone who is deaf, blind and dumb will live a hundred years in peace.” So reads the proverb in the book penned by the Sicilian ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè. Conjuring the fundamental principle of...
8 June, 2018
Alexandria Reid
The Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research (SHOC) at RUSI is thrilled to announce the establishment of a new multidisciplinary research and engagement network. The UK-EU Security and Criminal...
6 June, 2018
David Pérez-Esparza and David Hemenway
In 2017, 29,168 people were murdered in Mexico, the most since records began. Excluding countries at war, there were more homicides in Mexico last year than in any country in the world, apart from...
30 May, 2018
Alexandra V Orlova
Corruption is discussed and debated in a variety of contexts, but no definitive definition of what corruption looks or feels like exists. In addition to difficulties of definition, as well as the...
23 May, 2018
Chris Bowkett
In 2009, a few scrap pieces of paper were found in a cupboard during an arrest of a camorrista – a member of the Neapolitan Camorra – in the town of Ercolano, close to Naples. This scrap paper listed...
15 May, 2018
Caitlin Hughes, Jenny Chalmers and David Bright
Fuelled by high demand, profits and the global nature of the illicit drug market(s), drug trafficking remains one of the most maligned forms of serious and organised crime. The last decade has seen...
9 May, 2018
Adam Edwards
The ‘smart city’ is invariably promoted as an unqualified good thing, particularly given pressures for more efficient, economic and effective governance in rapidly expanding cities. However, in the...
2 May, 2018
Aubrey Jones
Money is power. People will assume that this statement is so obvious it no longer needs repeating. Yet many law enforcement agencies do not seem to have got the message. Money is the crucial element...
24 April, 2018
Cristina Sáenz Pérez
In the upcoming months, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will have to rule on a case that could decide the future of the European arrest warrant (EAW) in the UK. The Irish Supreme...
9 April, 2018
SHOC
On 14 March 2018, RUSI’s Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research (SHOC) convened a workshop to explore future scenarios of EU-UK police cooperation after Brexit. Organised in partnership with the...
5 April, 2018
Patricio Estévez-Soto
Extortion against businesses is one of the main security challenges facing the Mexican government today. Statistics from crimes reported to the police show that extortion has increased dramatically...
29 March, 2018
Michael Woodiwiss
The journey to the writing of my most recent book, Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control, began in 1983 when I was in Washington, DC. I was able to interview an assistant counsel for...
22 March, 2018
Cindy Berman
Modern slavery is often linked to organised crime. We assume the problem is driven by criminal gangs that make huge profits from trafficking and exploiting vulnerable children, women and men into...
15 March, 2018
Camila Nunes Dias
In July 2016, Brazil’s prison population numbered more than 700,000 inmates. Of those, about one third – more than 240,000 inmates – were housed in prisons in the state of São Paulo. With 45 million...
8 March, 2018
Connie Agius
It’s an ordinary summer day in Australia, with families gathering for barbeques, kids playing in the streets and couples frolicking in the surf. It is 1967, and a man drives to a house in a suburban...
8 November, 2017
Dr Adam D M Svendsen
Late in 2013 the UK underwent a third major organisational overhaul to further re-invigorate its countering of serious and organised crime. Most far-ranging concerns boil down to the targeting of...
5 September, 2017
Joss Meakins
Nuclear terrorism is a severe and credible threat. In July, the Washington Post reported that Daesh (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) had almost ‘stumbled on the ingredients...
9 January, 2017
Our partners at the ECPR Standing Group on Organised Crime have announced that their 2nd General Conference will be held at the University of Bath from 7 to 8 July 2017: ‘Organised Crime Today –...
23 August, 2017
Sophie Henderson
As money laundering (ML) methods evolve to make use of new technologies, this workshop aimed to explore the potential impact of virtual currencies (VCs) on the future of money laundering techniques....
SHOC Workshop Summary – Serious and Organised Crime: The Threat to the UK and Our Strategic Response
23 August, 2017
Sophie Henderson and Adam Edwards
As the government undertakes a review of its Serious and Organised Crime Strategy, SHOC organised a workshop to allow policymakers and practitioners to draw on research conducted by academics since...
22 August, 2017
Sophie Henderson
Transnational smuggling routes throughout Central Asia are not a new problem: the region has served for centuries as a vast transit hub for both legal and illicit trade to Europe and the Middle East...
22 August, 2017
Cathy Haenlein and Alexander Babuta
The US Congress Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the so-called ‘Helsinki Commission’ has worked in Washington since 1976 to monitor compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and...
4 July, 2017
Alexander Babuta
Bolivia has increased the national limit for legal coca cultivation from 12,000 to 22,000 hectares. But will increased cultivation fuel the illegal cocaine trade?
In March, Bolivian President Evo...
9 December, 2016
Sasha Jesperson
Modern slavery is a serious and organised crime. Across many areas of criminality, organised crime groups (OCGs) are shifting away from large and risky shipments of illicit commodities like cocaine,...
28 October, 2016
Clare Ellis and Calum Jeffray
With growing evidence pointing to convergence in criminal activities, and the emergence of fluid criminal networks with transient membership, it is time to consider whether the UK’s approach to...
22 September, 2016
Diorella Islas
The conference is focused on ‘Crime and Crime Control: Structures, Developments and Actors’, aiming to bring together criminology experts in order to exchange knowledge and perspectives.
Participants...
30 August, 2016
Diorella Islas
In July 2016, the UNODC and the governments of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia published three separate national reports on the cultivation of coca leaves. For the first two countries the reports show a...
2 August, 2016
Lynne Owens
I am delighted to have been invited to launch the Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research website.
Serious and organised crime includes child sexual exploitation and abuse, cybercrime, economic...
19 July, 2016
Sasha Jesperson
Irregular migration, a concept that encompasses a wide range of activities, including people smuggling and human trafficking, has become big business for organised crime networks. The UN estimates...
20 June, 2016
Diorella Islas
The 22nd meeting of the Anti-Drug Trafficking Task Force was held at the SELEC Headquarters in Bucharest, during 14-15 of June 2016. In the constant effort to strengthen the regional cooperation, the...
9 July, 2017
Cathy Haenlein
Organised crime, rather than terrorism, is the greatest threat to elephants and other species in East Africa. Our primary focus should be on the organised crime groups and corrupt actors known to...
19 August, 2017
Inês Sofia de Oliveira
International anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism finance (AML/CTF) standards are largely governed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). FATF’s strength rests on its ability to...
15 July, 2017
Clare Ellis
The National Strategic Assessment of Serious and Organised crime highlights the growing significance of technology in driving criminal innovation; however, as many police forces struggle to adapt to...