1 00:00:01,020 --> 00:00:08,880 In this episode, The Changing Character of War program welcomes Dr. James Cocaine, a professor of the United Nations University in New York. 2 00:00:09,510 --> 00:00:13,500 In his new book, Hidden Power The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime. 3 00:00:13,860 --> 00:00:21,960 Dr. Cocaine investigates the differences and surprising similarities between the visible world of politics and the usually hidden criminal underworld. 4 00:00:25,710 --> 00:00:31,560 Why would we talk about organised crime in a program on the changing character of war? 5 00:00:31,800 --> 00:00:39,120 It's precisely because, as Annette said, we have to ask some fundamental questions about the categories we're dealing with. 6 00:00:39,540 --> 00:00:43,200 What do we mean by war? What do we mean by strategy? 7 00:00:43,860 --> 00:00:51,270 What are the purposes and motivations that armed groups have in using violence? 8 00:00:51,840 --> 00:00:55,080 And to find a way into this topic and into this book? 9 00:00:55,680 --> 00:00:58,140 Hidden Power The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime. 10 00:00:58,500 --> 00:01:09,180 I want to begin with a story that was told by Jim Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, when he appeared on Capitol Hill at a hearing in 1999. 11 00:01:10,080 --> 00:01:15,510 It was a hearing on money laundering and to explain some of the ways that money laundering worked. 12 00:01:16,170 --> 00:01:19,320 He said once he told this little story to the committee. 13 00:01:20,460 --> 00:01:28,650 Imagine, if you will, he said that you are in the restaurant of a luxury hotel on the banks of Lake Geneva, and a gentleman approaches you. 14 00:01:28,650 --> 00:01:33,480 And he says that he is the an executive of a Russian trading company. 15 00:01:33,720 --> 00:01:38,790 And he has a proposition for you about a joint venture that he'd like you to undertake with him. 16 00:01:39,420 --> 00:01:46,260 Then said, Well, see, there are four possibilities. The first possibility is that he is exactly what he said he was. 17 00:01:46,410 --> 00:01:54,060 He's a trader in an import export company. The second possibility is that he's a member of the Russian intelligence services. 18 00:01:55,020 --> 00:02:02,220 The third possibility is that he's a member of Russian organised crime and the fourth possibility, he said, 19 00:02:02,370 --> 00:02:06,749 and by far the most interesting one is that in fact he is all of those things 20 00:02:06,750 --> 00:02:10,530 and all of those organisations are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement. 21 00:02:11,550 --> 00:02:15,720 What we'll see was getting that is that increasingly these categories that 22 00:02:15,720 --> 00:02:20,010 we have developed and that shape the way we see the world are breaking down. 23 00:02:20,490 --> 00:02:26,820 Increasingly there is intersection between business, politics and what we like to call crime. 24 00:02:27,570 --> 00:02:34,080 This book, which I'm going to talk about today, is really an attempt to understand that at two levels first of all, 25 00:02:34,080 --> 00:02:37,530 conceptual or theoretical, and secondly, empirically. 26 00:02:38,070 --> 00:02:44,760 So I want to begin today by talking a little bit about the conceptual or theoretical question of the relationship between these categories. 27 00:02:45,180 --> 00:02:51,030 And then come on to an empirical discussion. So let's begin with the basic question. 28 00:02:51,060 --> 00:02:53,850 Organised crime and politics, are they really so different? 29 00:02:59,270 --> 00:03:09,200 The reason a cartoon like this is amusing is precisely because it gets at a truth that lies behind our traditional or conceptual categories, 30 00:03:09,200 --> 00:03:17,510 our conventional thinking that there seems to be a similarity in the way that these two spheres work that our conventional thinking doesn't capture. 31 00:03:18,500 --> 00:03:23,210 Traditionally, we've had separate departments of political science and criminology. 32 00:03:24,080 --> 00:03:27,830 We've had political scientists, international relations theorists, 33 00:03:28,610 --> 00:03:36,230 students of war focussed on the use of violence for political purposes, the pursuit of political power. 34 00:03:37,400 --> 00:03:46,070 They have excluded organised crime as a unit of analysis because they have said organised crime is not about the pursuit of political power. 35 00:03:47,420 --> 00:03:55,249 Criminologists, on the other hand, have argued that in some cases we do in fact see organised crime groups, 36 00:03:55,250 --> 00:04:01,310 not all organised crime groups, but some governing illicit markets and even communities. 37 00:04:02,030 --> 00:04:09,740 And so that at least gives them governmental power. They may not, and in fact by definition they do not seek formal political authority, 38 00:04:10,340 --> 00:04:14,210 but they do develop governmental power and arguably political influence. 39 00:04:15,230 --> 00:04:20,059 So this book, the premise of this book really is to think about what would it mean if we took 40 00:04:20,060 --> 00:04:25,850 that understanding seriously and brought it into the realm of strategic theory, 41 00:04:26,030 --> 00:04:29,840 of the study of war, the study of international relations? 42 00:04:30,290 --> 00:04:37,460 What would it mean if we took seriously the idea that the power that attracts people to organised crime is not just the power to make money, 43 00:04:38,120 --> 00:04:41,690 but the power to govern others conduct. 44 00:04:42,230 --> 00:04:49,790 And we see hints of this when we look at the way that organised criminals themselves talk about their life inside these groups. 45 00:04:50,960 --> 00:04:52,940 This is Francisco Minaya, 46 00:04:52,940 --> 00:05:01,910 a very important government witness in the 1980s and 1990s who helped the Italian judiciary understand what was going on inside the Mafia. 47 00:05:02,420 --> 00:05:07,010 And at one point when he was asked why he got into a life of crime, he said this. 48 00:05:07,010 --> 00:05:13,850 He said, It's often believed that people work with the Cosa Nostra for the money, but that's only partly true. 49 00:05:14,600 --> 00:05:18,740 Do you know why I became a woman tonight? A man of honour or a mafioso? 50 00:05:19,610 --> 00:05:23,270 Because before I had been a nobody in Palermo. 51 00:05:23,660 --> 00:05:28,460 And then afterwards, wherever I went, heads bowed. 52 00:05:29,660 --> 00:05:38,030 You can't value that in money, he said. So it's clear that in some ways organised crime is about power. 53 00:05:38,750 --> 00:05:45,410 But is it the kind of power that political scientists are interested in that strategic theory is interested in? 54 00:05:46,340 --> 00:05:48,860 Is it the kind of power that we fight wars over? 55 00:05:50,240 --> 00:05:56,540 As I said, it's not the case that organised crime seeks political authority or political responsibility. 56 00:05:57,020 --> 00:06:03,210 But there are, there have been hints for some time that some, in some cases they may seek political influence. 57 00:06:03,740 --> 00:06:13,730 And at a conceptual level in the book, what I suggest is that a better way to understand what is going on here is through the lens of governmentality. 58 00:06:14,030 --> 00:06:21,770 The term I borrowed from Michel Foucault for close argument was that Governmentality exists outside the state, 59 00:06:22,280 --> 00:06:28,160 that there can be normative regimes that people internalise to conduct their own conduct. 60 00:06:28,700 --> 00:06:35,660 Normative regimes that shape their perception of what actions are even possible that exist beyond the state. 61 00:06:36,650 --> 00:06:44,630 And we see, again, looking at the firsthand accounts of some people who have been active throughout their lives in organised crime. 62 00:06:44,900 --> 00:06:49,280 But this is the way they perceive their own participation in those groups, 63 00:06:49,670 --> 00:06:53,899 that they provide a normative regime that not only helps them make sense of the world, 64 00:06:53,900 --> 00:06:58,520 gives them an identity, but actually conducts their conduct, governs their conduct, 65 00:06:58,850 --> 00:07:04,370 and that they use as a basis for governmental power to extend influence over others. 66 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:08,990 Again, I think it's useful to turn the word, turn to the words of an individual. 67 00:07:09,800 --> 00:07:19,940 Firsthand account from the Mafia. In 1949, after he returned to Italy from America, where he'd become a mafia leader. 68 00:07:19,940 --> 00:07:26,600 Nikola Gentil, who was born in Sicily, gave a an interview granting an interview to a doctor, a researcher. 69 00:07:27,200 --> 00:07:37,560 And in that interview, which is partly reproduced in the book, he explained the governmental nature of a true mafiosos power. 70 00:07:37,580 --> 00:07:44,930 And again, he told he told a little story, which I find quite revealing due to riddle. 71 00:07:45,260 --> 00:07:54,350 He said, Little Professor, if I come in here unarmed and you pick up a pistol and you pointed at my head and you say, 72 00:07:54,980 --> 00:07:58,340 Nicola, gently get down on your knees. What do I do? 73 00:07:59,570 --> 00:08:03,180 I get down on my knees. That doesn't mean you're a mafioso. 74 00:08:03,200 --> 00:08:09,410 Because you forced me to get down on my knees. It means you're a cretin with a pistol in your hand. 75 00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:20,180 Now, if I, Nicola, gently come in here and I'm unarmed and you're unarmed, too, and I say to you, Don't you? 76 00:08:20,510 --> 00:08:27,890 Look, I'm in a bit of a situation. I have to ask you to get on your knees and you say to me, Why? 77 00:08:28,490 --> 00:08:35,420 And I say to Toretto, Let me explain. And I managed to convince you that you have to get down on your knees. 78 00:08:35,780 --> 00:08:39,440 And then you get down on your knees when you kneel down. 79 00:08:39,980 --> 00:08:47,750 That makes me a mafioso. What he was getting at is that the heart of the persuasive, 80 00:08:47,930 --> 00:08:56,419 the heart of the strategic interaction inside these criminal groups is not based purely on coercion, but on corruption. 81 00:08:56,420 --> 00:09:05,569 And at a strategic level, corruption is a mixture of coercion and pure persuasion, and it's a very strange creature as a strategic instrument, 82 00:09:05,570 --> 00:09:12,590 because what it does is it creates an association between you and the target, the person that you're offering the for all, 83 00:09:12,590 --> 00:09:25,430 led by sort of pseudo voluntarily participating in the interaction, the corrupt exchange the person begins to take on a hidden association with you, 84 00:09:25,760 --> 00:09:32,630 begins to form a hidden clandestine organisation, in a sense society with you. 85 00:09:33,410 --> 00:09:39,320 And it's in this sense that the governmentality within strategic criminal groups works. 86 00:09:39,830 --> 00:09:44,540 It's a hidden power. It's not trying to be a formal governing authority. 87 00:09:44,750 --> 00:09:53,600 It's not seeking formal political authority. In fact, what these strategic criminal groups want is power without formal responsibility. 88 00:09:54,620 --> 00:09:58,160 But it is power nonetheless, and it is governmental. 89 00:09:58,490 --> 00:10:05,240 It structures the way individuals within these regimes think and act and what they think is possible. 90 00:10:06,590 --> 00:10:14,809 So what that leads us to is a pretty fundamentally startling theoretical implication that while we have traditionally 91 00:10:14,810 --> 00:10:21,050 thought that there were two quite distinct worlds an upper world of formal politics and an underworld of crime, 92 00:10:21,410 --> 00:10:32,660 in fact, there may be one single market for government with individuals as potential consumers of a range of different forms of governmentality. 93 00:10:32,660 --> 00:10:39,410 And it may not only be politics and crime, there are, in fact other forms of association and normative regimes. 94 00:10:40,070 --> 00:10:44,480 For example, in some contemporary terrorist groups that operate in a similar way, 95 00:10:44,870 --> 00:10:51,410 we may now be in a common market for government with a range of alternative providers of governmentality. 96 00:10:53,120 --> 00:11:01,879 And what that means is that those groups providing these different forms of governmentality have the option strategically, 97 00:11:01,880 --> 00:11:08,690 not only to compete with each other, to offer their products, their forms of governmentality as entirely distinct, 98 00:11:09,590 --> 00:11:15,890 but sometimes to work together, to collaborate, to find ways to position themselves in that market for government, 99 00:11:16,220 --> 00:11:25,630 that allow each of them to get on with selling their products, their governmentality in a way that is acceptable to each of them and to consumers. 100 00:11:25,640 --> 00:11:27,590 And this is particularly the case. 101 00:11:27,830 --> 00:11:34,729 There's a particular complementarity between those providing a political form of governmentality your loyalty to the 102 00:11:34,730 --> 00:11:41,960 state and those providing a hidden form of governmentality your loyalty to a mafia or to an organised criminal group, 103 00:11:42,170 --> 00:11:52,580 because you can, in fact, as an individual it appears quite straightforwardly pay both allegiances at once to those two different groups. 104 00:11:54,050 --> 00:11:57,830 So this brings us to the empirical analysis in the book. 105 00:11:58,070 --> 00:12:02,630 This is a nice theory, but do we find any evidence of this in practice, 106 00:12:03,170 --> 00:12:11,480 and do we in fact see groups cultivating that governmental power not only to form power within their own organisation, 107 00:12:11,750 --> 00:12:17,000 but to extend it to other groups, to extend it to even other states? 108 00:12:17,360 --> 00:12:22,040 And do we see them using violence in the pursuit of that governmental power? 109 00:12:22,130 --> 00:12:31,850 That's the question that I look at empirically in the book. The answer I provide in the book is that we do unsurprisingly, 110 00:12:32,390 --> 00:12:39,890 and that we in fact see six different ideal types of positioning strategy that criminal groups 111 00:12:39,890 --> 00:12:44,690 adopt in this market for government in relation to other providers of governmentality. 112 00:12:45,050 --> 00:12:50,390 And to explain those different strategies, I want to tell you six small stories taken from the book. 113 00:12:50,780 --> 00:12:53,660 There are plenty of others, so please don't feel that you've read the whole book. 114 00:12:53,780 --> 00:13:00,500 At the end of my talk and since I was invited, I will let you know that you can buy it now on your friendly Amazon. 115 00:13:00,860 --> 00:13:08,180 I'm not sure if it's in Blackwell's yet. It just came up. It's also available on Hirst's website, and it's published in North America. 116 00:13:08,610 --> 00:13:12,110 You pay, but I think the cheapest prices are on Amazon right now. 117 00:13:13,520 --> 00:13:24,860 So the first story I want to tell begins in 1941, very end of 1941, just after Pearl Harbour. 118 00:13:25,580 --> 00:13:32,120 This vessel, the Normandy, is the largest cruise liner in the world at the time, and she has just docked in New York. 119 00:13:33,140 --> 00:13:37,160 New York is very nervous. After Pearl Harbour, the United States has just ended the war. 120 00:13:37,580 --> 00:13:43,940 And being a French vessel and the French being an axis power, at that point, the United States government seizes her. 121 00:13:45,230 --> 00:13:49,760 Within three months, she was repurposed as the Lafayette. 122 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:55,970 She was going to become a troop transport, taking more than 10,000 troops at once across the Atlantic to enter the war. 123 00:13:56,600 --> 00:14:02,960 But instead, this happened. This is on the west side, about 43rd and 44th Street. 124 00:14:03,860 --> 00:14:13,310 She was burned to the waterline, capsized. One American army member died and about 140 something were injured. 125 00:14:13,820 --> 00:14:18,080 It was the largest vessel put out of action in the war to date. 126 00:14:18,980 --> 00:14:25,730 So this immediately led to great fear not only in the American public, but in particular in US, in the US Navy. 127 00:14:26,600 --> 00:14:34,820 Then the New York harbour was a vital strategic point, and if she had been burnt to the waterline as a result of sabotage, 128 00:14:35,150 --> 00:14:42,440 there was a risk not only that there were saboteurs in New York Harbour, but potentially that there was a fifth column working. 129 00:14:42,530 --> 00:14:50,899 So I went internal thinking potentially with the Italian-American community and perhaps also the German-American community. 130 00:14:50,900 --> 00:14:58,049 Now the internal debates and we know this from archival research both in America and in into the internal debates, 131 00:14:58,050 --> 00:15:01,160 I didn't think that that necessarily was the case. 132 00:15:01,160 --> 00:15:08,690 But having just entered the war, the government had to the US government had to take a precautionary approach and be sure that they were 133 00:15:08,690 --> 00:15:15,320 protecting against the development by axis powers of governmental influence in on the docks in New York. 134 00:15:15,770 --> 00:15:20,480 So they sent in U.S. naval agents to talk to the local dockworkers about what had gone on. 135 00:15:20,960 --> 00:15:24,500 And the result was that they were met with complete and utter silence. 136 00:15:25,370 --> 00:15:31,820 Why? Because it turned out that it wasn't the US government that had government governmental power on the docks. 137 00:15:32,690 --> 00:15:40,070 It was the mafia. So the U.S. Navy organised an operation which became known as the Underworld Project. 138 00:15:40,580 --> 00:15:46,639 First they reached out to this gentleman, Meyer Lansky, who was a New Yorker from the Lower East Side, 139 00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:49,340 who had a very close relationship with this gentleman, 140 00:15:49,430 --> 00:15:58,130 Lucky Luciano, who was sitting in a jail upstate in New York as the result of having been put put away on sex trafficking charges. 141 00:16:01,000 --> 00:16:07,540 The US Navy developed a collaboration with Luciano and the Mafia that gave them access not only to the docks 142 00:16:07,990 --> 00:16:14,260 but allowed them to place naval agents on fishing vessels up and down the east coast of the United States. 143 00:16:14,800 --> 00:16:19,270 That led to the use of Mafia assets to break into foreign consulates and seize 144 00:16:19,270 --> 00:16:25,540 evidence that led to the arrest of Nazi sympathisers and landed sympathisers. 145 00:16:26,020 --> 00:16:32,050 That led to the illegal suppression of labour action on the docks, to the intimidation of the press. 146 00:16:32,350 --> 00:16:38,830 And even my research turned out at one point led to the Mafia helping the FBI 147 00:16:39,070 --> 00:16:44,950 identify four Nazi saboteurs that had been landed on the east end of Long Island. 148 00:16:45,850 --> 00:16:48,340 They were rather inept saboteurs. It has to be said. 149 00:16:48,580 --> 00:16:57,280 But nonetheless, it was through and through the efforts of the Mafia that they were quickly identified and and taken to trial. 150 00:16:57,280 --> 00:17:01,749 And actually that the case that grew out of that incident, Ex Parte Quirin, 151 00:17:01,750 --> 00:17:06,340 is the legal precedent that forms the basis to this day of the military commissions 152 00:17:06,790 --> 00:17:11,110 that the United States has been using for the last decade in Guantanamo. 153 00:17:12,100 --> 00:17:15,550 Now, how do we know all this? How can I say this with such certainty? 154 00:17:15,850 --> 00:17:18,730 How can I be sure that this isn't simply conspiracy theory? 155 00:17:19,060 --> 00:17:28,660 Well, the answer is that we have a judicial archive in the personal archives of Tom Dewey, who was the prosecutor that put away Luciano. 156 00:17:28,660 --> 00:17:35,890 And then by the time this was all happening, had risen partly on the strength of his efforts as prosecutor to become the governor of New York. 157 00:17:36,370 --> 00:17:41,910 So when the federal authorities approached him at the end of the war and said, remember that guy, Lucky Luciano? 158 00:17:41,920 --> 00:17:45,970 He was actually very helpful during the war. You're going to have to pardon him and release him. 159 00:17:46,450 --> 00:17:50,050 You can imagine having been the prosecutor who put him away in the first place. 160 00:17:50,530 --> 00:17:54,880 The jury wasn't very happy. So he ordered a judicial investigation. 161 00:17:55,270 --> 00:18:03,669 And it's the testimony of 54 witnesses, the majority of whom are mafiosi, but also governmental actors that are sitting unpublished. 162 00:18:03,670 --> 00:18:10,780 In an archive in the University of Rochester, Dewey's personal archive that forms the basis of this analysis in the book. 163 00:18:10,870 --> 00:18:17,620 So it's pretty ironclad. Evidence correlates also with a number of other indicia indicating that this was 164 00:18:17,620 --> 00:18:24,610 the basis of a collaboration between the Mafia and the Navy during the war. 165 00:18:24,640 --> 00:18:32,770 Now, what does this tell us about criminal strategy? Well, my point here is that this is a classic what I call in the book Intermediation Strategy. 166 00:18:33,250 --> 00:18:42,040 The strategy that we typically associate with mafias, where a criminal group intermediates between the state and a space, 167 00:18:42,040 --> 00:18:48,450 a market or a population that the state is having trouble developing governmental power over. 168 00:18:49,330 --> 00:18:51,730 It's a form of jurisdictional sharing. 169 00:18:53,020 --> 00:19:02,260 The state works in the upper world and the criminal group controls and provides access to the riches and resources of the underworld. 170 00:19:02,950 --> 00:19:09,999 But we know from this archive that the organised crime group in this case quite deliberately and strategically 171 00:19:10,000 --> 00:19:17,800 developed its power and this strategy in a way to increase its governmental influence also in the upper world. 172 00:19:18,070 --> 00:19:24,490 And we know also that it used that relationship not only domestically, but also to develop its power elsewhere. 173 00:19:24,730 --> 00:19:29,200 And we know that because the underworld project, as this was called in, 174 00:19:29,200 --> 00:19:35,529 the U.S. Navy grew into not just a domestic operation, but an international operation in particular, 175 00:19:35,530 --> 00:19:42,130 when the same same individuals that were involved in the project were asked to plan the invasion of Sicily, 176 00:19:42,880 --> 00:19:47,530 and that led them to do a number of to basically to collect operational and tactical 177 00:19:47,530 --> 00:19:53,200 intelligence through the Mafia from the Italian-American population of Manhattan. 178 00:19:54,430 --> 00:20:03,400 But it also led to a number of curious incidents, such as them asking Lucky Luciano whether they should carry out an amphibious assault in Sicily. 179 00:20:03,670 --> 00:20:09,610 And his answer was this small town on the wet northwestern coast of Sicily. 180 00:20:09,640 --> 00:20:15,610 Not easy to see there, but as you can probably tell, it's not the most obvious place to carry out an amphibious invasion. 181 00:20:16,300 --> 00:20:23,410 And one one reason for thinking he may have nominated that is that this was the hometown of the rival faction within Israel. 182 00:20:26,050 --> 00:20:31,120 Now, this leads us to the second strategy that I cover in the book Autonomy. 183 00:20:31,570 --> 00:20:41,320 And what I argue here is that some criminal groups don't seek to mediate between the state and a hard to reach population, market or community. 184 00:20:41,320 --> 00:20:44,170 They instead seek relative autonomy from the state. 185 00:20:44,200 --> 00:20:52,980 They don't want to secede and become formal states, but they use their military prowess to carve out a space within which they can govern. 186 00:20:52,990 --> 00:20:59,290 And typically we think of these actors as warlords in rural contexts, but increasingly we also see some. 187 00:20:59,370 --> 00:21:00,840 Gangs in urban context. 188 00:21:01,200 --> 00:21:11,310 Adopting this approach and what we see from the National Archives in Q is that the Allied military government, when it invaded Sicily, 189 00:21:11,610 --> 00:21:19,410 I was quite aware that as they removed the fascist powers, the only alternative provider of governmental power was the Mafia. 190 00:21:19,830 --> 00:21:23,489 There's a wonderful series of memoranda written by an American captain, 191 00:21:23,490 --> 00:21:28,950 Captain Scott in who had been the consul in Poland, consul general in Palermo before the war, 192 00:21:29,190 --> 00:21:40,020 who describes in incredibly accurate detail how the Mafia developed and how it exercised power in the in in both the cities and in the interior, 193 00:21:40,320 --> 00:21:44,790 and how this would confront the strategy of the allies. 194 00:21:45,090 --> 00:21:53,760 And he laid out for the allies three options. You can either confront them, you can negotiate a deal, or you can withdraw and leave space to them. 195 00:21:53,910 --> 00:22:01,590 And we know from the annotations on these memoranda that they went quite high up in the in the allied command structure, 196 00:22:02,130 --> 00:22:08,280 even to Harold Macmillan, who was at the time Churchill's representative for the whole Mediterranean Theatre. 197 00:22:08,550 --> 00:22:14,520 But ultimately, the decision presented with those three strategic options was no decision. 198 00:22:15,810 --> 00:22:23,070 And as a result, that meant that the allied agents in the interior in particular had to have to stumble through, 199 00:22:23,100 --> 00:22:29,010 have a muddle along, had to figure out themselves how to deal with the local mafiosi. 200 00:22:29,520 --> 00:22:33,390 So one of them ingeniously in a small town whose name you may recognise, 201 00:22:34,980 --> 00:22:39,780 decided that what he would do would be to work around the local mafioso who got his 202 00:22:39,780 --> 00:22:44,430 power from controlling the local wheat market and just buy direct from the producer. 203 00:22:45,210 --> 00:22:49,290 But again, a bit like what happened in New York when he got to the farm gate, 204 00:22:50,130 --> 00:22:57,510 nobody would sell because the Mafioso was using his control of violence to exercise and 205 00:22:57,510 --> 00:23:04,920 develop governmental power and using that to exercise political authority in the region. 206 00:23:05,520 --> 00:23:10,589 Now, what that leads to, we trace this in the book through a mixture of American, 207 00:23:10,590 --> 00:23:20,610 Italian and British archival sources is a deliberate attempt by the Mafia to build their power back into the political settlement in Sicily. 208 00:23:21,240 --> 00:23:24,900 And they did this. And this is what brings me back to the autonomy strategy. 209 00:23:25,500 --> 00:23:31,800 They did this by fomenting and funding and organising a secessionist insurgency, 210 00:23:31,980 --> 00:23:36,780 a secessionist political movement at first, but then an actual armed insurgency. 211 00:23:37,560 --> 00:23:46,410 And they used the military pressure of that insurgency to to threaten Sicilian secession and to create leverage, 212 00:23:46,590 --> 00:23:54,360 which then became the basis for their insertion into negotiations over the constitutional settlement of the Italian state, 213 00:23:54,360 --> 00:23:57,360 post-war and the place of Sicily within it. 214 00:23:57,900 --> 00:24:04,080 And we know from the archival trail that they didn't immediately go to the Christian Democrats, their ultimate partners. 215 00:24:04,320 --> 00:24:07,320 First, they shopped around. They tried the monarchists. 216 00:24:07,650 --> 00:24:11,400 They didn't get the price they wanted there. So then they tried the Communists. 217 00:24:11,880 --> 00:24:13,380 They didn't get the price they wanted there. 218 00:24:13,380 --> 00:24:23,820 So ultimately they settled into a relationship with the Christian Democrats, and that became the basis for the Italian state in Rome, 219 00:24:23,820 --> 00:24:28,470 agreeing to Sicilian regional autonomy within the constitutional settlement. 220 00:24:28,830 --> 00:24:33,620 So through a deliberate political strategy, the Mafia and quite a radical one, 221 00:24:33,630 --> 00:24:39,220 actually, the Mafia was able to protect to adopt a conservative economic strategy. 222 00:24:39,240 --> 00:24:47,790 They protected their economic power within the Sicilian political economy through a deliberate political strategy, 223 00:24:47,790 --> 00:24:54,720 using force to mount an insurgency that gave them the governmental power and the leverage they needed. 224 00:24:55,200 --> 00:24:57,059 They weren't the only ones who tried this. 225 00:24:57,060 --> 00:25:03,360 There were also others, such as the Bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who even at one point wrote directly to Churchill, 226 00:25:03,360 --> 00:25:09,570 wrote directly to Truman, seeking political patronage, trying to insert himself in the political, political discussion. 227 00:25:10,020 --> 00:25:16,800 But he was much less successful. There were others, however, in the post-war period, who were more successful. 228 00:25:17,190 --> 00:25:25,590 And that leads us to the third strategy I cover in the book Mergers or Joint Ventures. 229 00:25:27,060 --> 00:25:35,190 In some context, an organised criminal group and a political organisation will decide that instead of operating at arm's length, 230 00:25:35,220 --> 00:25:41,070 arm's length, they may be better off vertically integrating their organisational structures. 231 00:25:41,070 --> 00:25:45,870 And what I mean by that is that political assets, even state capabilities, 232 00:25:46,170 --> 00:25:56,040 could be useful in the development of criminal rents and that criminal personnel and capabilities might be useful for governing. 233 00:25:56,550 --> 00:26:06,550 And we see a classic example of this in Palermo. In the 1950s and sixties where another Salvatore Salvatore Lima, the the mayor of Palermo, 234 00:26:07,600 --> 00:26:14,229 essentially integrated the Christian Democratic Party with the Mafia structures so that the mafia structures were essential 235 00:26:14,230 --> 00:26:23,740 to his hold on political power within the party and the parties delivering of electoral support to the government in Rome. 236 00:26:24,040 --> 00:26:30,370 And in return the assets of the state from the power to procure to the power to finance, 237 00:26:30,550 --> 00:26:36,190 were used to develop infrastructure projects that rewarded mafia assets. 238 00:26:36,610 --> 00:26:43,870 So we see here an integration of these of the two organisations in a way that is redolent of, for example, 239 00:26:43,870 --> 00:26:50,620 more recently what we see in Guinea-Bissau with the use of naval assets in drug trafficking and 240 00:26:50,620 --> 00:26:55,780 the determination of political outcomes on the basis of what's going on in the criminal market. 241 00:26:56,620 --> 00:27:01,929 And it's not only in the in the book, it's not only in Palermo that we see this. 242 00:27:01,930 --> 00:27:07,570 We also see the North American Mafia adopting a very similar approach half a world away, 243 00:27:07,810 --> 00:27:17,530 around the same time with Fulgencio Batista, the strongman of Cuba at the time, Batista and his cohorts. 244 00:27:17,530 --> 00:27:20,410 What worked with the same individuals we saw earlier, 245 00:27:20,740 --> 00:27:30,280 Lansky and again Luciano here he is in Havana at the famous 1946 Christmas summit that Frank Sinatra was the lead entertainer, 246 00:27:30,280 --> 00:27:38,350 that they work together these two organisations, to develop Cuba's political economy in ways that serve them both. 247 00:27:38,890 --> 00:27:43,690 In particular, Batista set up a new development bank bonds, 248 00:27:44,260 --> 00:27:51,160 which underwrote giant infrastructure projects and the development of hotels that were 249 00:27:51,280 --> 00:28:00,430 owned and operated by both Havana political elites and mafiosi from North America. 250 00:28:01,090 --> 00:28:08,020 So it was, in a sense, a merger or a joint venture, the whole strategy in Cuba after World War Two. 251 00:28:08,440 --> 00:28:13,660 But it also led to an erosion of Batista's legitimacy. 252 00:28:14,440 --> 00:28:22,600 And this is what we typically see over the medium to long term, where we see mergers or joint ventures between organised crime and political actors, 253 00:28:23,230 --> 00:28:30,070 that the local population begins increasingly to doubt the legitimacy of the system of governance, 254 00:28:30,070 --> 00:28:32,200 of governance, of the formal governmentality, 255 00:28:32,440 --> 00:28:40,270 as they recognise increasingly that the criminal governance mentality is becoming dominant over the formal governmentality offered by the state. 256 00:28:41,410 --> 00:28:50,980 And as a result in Cuba it led to gaps in the market for government that other individuals such as Castro, were able to step into and exploit. 257 00:28:51,010 --> 00:28:57,010 Now, Castro is interesting in part because the first time he appears in the American national archival 258 00:28:57,010 --> 00:29:04,550 record is in a passage describing a period of rule under Batista that the Cubans know as gangsterism. 259 00:29:05,380 --> 00:29:11,680 The political elite in Havana was working with local street gangs, many with connections to the university, 260 00:29:12,010 --> 00:29:17,920 to develop power, governmental power at the street level, and roll that into political power. 261 00:29:18,190 --> 00:29:26,110 And one of the key organisers of one of those university based gangs was none other than out Fidel Castro. 262 00:29:26,590 --> 00:29:31,540 But he his own personal strategic development took him in quite a different direction, obviously. 263 00:29:31,990 --> 00:29:39,700 And so by the time he's holed up in the mountains in the east of Cuba, what he is confronted by is not a legitimate, 264 00:29:40,030 --> 00:29:45,640 highly effective state, but one that is riddled with corruption and no longer legitimate in the eyes of the population. 265 00:29:45,910 --> 00:29:57,130 And not only that, but one where the the military has become organised on the basis of criminal logic, not on the basis of a military logic. 266 00:29:57,550 --> 00:30:06,700 So command appointments in the east of Cuba were being sold to the highest bidder based on the access they provided to criminal revenues, 267 00:30:06,700 --> 00:30:12,100 in particular prostitution, local gambling and drug trafficking revenues. 268 00:30:12,610 --> 00:30:22,420 And increasingly, what that meant was that Castro, when he marched towards Havana, did not have to fight a series of pitched engagements, 269 00:30:22,750 --> 00:30:28,370 but was simply able to march as forward as the Cuban military faded away in front of him. 270 00:30:28,390 --> 00:30:31,180 And again, there are very interesting contemporary parallels. 271 00:30:31,900 --> 00:30:38,410 We think, for example, about how the Tuaregs swept down from the north towards Bamako a few years ago in Mali. 272 00:30:38,650 --> 00:30:43,990 And it's a similar story. The met them, the Malian army, we now know, 273 00:30:44,170 --> 00:30:49,989 had become riddled with corruption and its military effectiveness had been undermined as command appointments had 274 00:30:49,990 --> 00:30:57,880 become increasingly based on access to local drug trafficking and other smuggling markets in the north of Mali. 275 00:31:00,450 --> 00:31:04,710 So what this leads to is the mafia being kicked out of Cuba. 276 00:31:05,340 --> 00:31:12,570 But their first response was, in fact, to turn away from collaboration and towards a strategy of confrontation. 277 00:31:12,810 --> 00:31:18,270 What I describe in the book is the fourth ideal type, a strategy, in fact, of terrorism. 278 00:31:19,140 --> 00:31:25,050 Now, why do I call it terrorism? Isn't it rather strange to be thinking of organised crime group using a terrorist strategy? 279 00:31:27,690 --> 00:31:33,870 Well, what we find in the historical record is that the North American Mafia working with Exiled Batista, 280 00:31:33,870 --> 00:31:39,570 Johnny Battista on US organised armed attacks from the Yucatan Peninsula, 281 00:31:40,020 --> 00:31:52,080 bombing civilian and commercial premises quite deliberately in Cuba in an effort to turn the Cuban population against Castro and to sow disorder, 282 00:31:52,410 --> 00:31:56,130 creating a governmental space that they could then sweep back into. 283 00:31:56,940 --> 00:32:02,429 That seems to me to be a fairly straightforward example of terrorism military attacks on a 284 00:32:02,430 --> 00:32:06,660 civilian population designed to create public pressure leading to a change of public policy. 285 00:32:08,700 --> 00:32:16,950 This has been a little written out of the record, though, because what grew out of it was not just a strategy of terrorism, but a strategic alliance. 286 00:32:16,950 --> 00:32:27,000 The fifth ideal type of criminal positioning strategy, again, with the United States government after they were exiled from Cuba, 287 00:32:27,300 --> 00:32:33,270 many of the Diokno set and the mafia formed joint ventures in hotels in Miami. 288 00:32:33,660 --> 00:32:35,880 One of them was this hotel, the Fontainebleau. 289 00:32:36,720 --> 00:32:45,270 And we know from the National Archives in Maryland that it was there that members of the CIA met with two men, Sam Gold, 290 00:32:45,900 --> 00:32:55,170 and a guy simply described as Joe, to pass them botulinum pills that these people were going to take back to Cuba to try and kill Castro. 291 00:32:55,920 --> 00:33:00,660 But we also know that Sam Gold was, in fact, Sam Giancana, 292 00:33:01,080 --> 00:33:07,110 who at the time was the number four on the FBI's most wanted list because he was the head of the Chicago mafia. 293 00:33:08,130 --> 00:33:13,709 So even as you have one arm of government seeking to prosecute organised crime, 294 00:33:13,710 --> 00:33:18,900 you have another government forming an alliance with organised crime to extend the 295 00:33:18,900 --> 00:33:24,930 Government's power in the situation of growing confrontation with a foreign government. 296 00:33:26,040 --> 00:33:39,030 At least that's what we thought the situation was. But my archival research reveals that it was not the CIA that approached the Mafia. 297 00:33:39,420 --> 00:33:45,930 It was not the CIA that cooked up the scheme and brought it wholesale to the Mafia and engaged them as their agents. 298 00:33:46,410 --> 00:33:52,380 Rather, it was the Mafia that had already begun these attacks, that had already begun laying the groundwork, 299 00:33:52,830 --> 00:34:04,470 that had even set up exile governments in exile with individuals like Tony Verona and brought these schemes to the United States government. 300 00:34:05,460 --> 00:34:08,630 Now, why is that important? Well, because of the theoretical level. 301 00:34:08,640 --> 00:34:16,860 What that tells us is that the Mafia had agency, not just at the domestic level, but at the international level. 302 00:34:17,190 --> 00:34:25,350 What you see here is a North American mafia cooking up a scheme for regime change in a foreign government, in a foreign country, 303 00:34:25,740 --> 00:34:32,250 and then taking strategically the steps necessarily necessary to attempt unsuccessfully ultimately, 304 00:34:32,520 --> 00:34:38,670 but to attempt to execute that strategy through working with a political authority. 305 00:34:41,160 --> 00:34:48,300 It's also very interesting to look at how that played out because it has all sorts of unexpected implications and consequences. 306 00:34:49,230 --> 00:35:03,240 We learn that Bobby Kennedy, as he set up the covert assassinations capabilities of the CIA, was probably drawing heavily on his very, 307 00:35:03,240 --> 00:35:12,900 very close study of the Mafia as the counsel to the relevant Senate inquiry just a few years before into labour and organised crime. 308 00:35:14,460 --> 00:35:25,740 We learned that after his brother was killed and Johnson found out about this relationship between the CIA and the Mafia, he said, 309 00:35:25,740 --> 00:35:31,470 using a phrase that was used to describe the hit squad that the Mafia set up in New York in the twenties and thirties, 310 00:35:31,740 --> 00:35:36,810 that the US government had been running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean. 311 00:35:37,440 --> 00:35:40,140 What he was getting at was that there was an increased, 312 00:35:40,440 --> 00:35:49,470 increasing convergence between the strategy of the criminal group and the strategy of clandestine operators of the US government. 313 00:35:50,400 --> 00:35:53,160 We come back to Walsh's comments at the beginning of the talk. 314 00:35:53,640 --> 00:35:59,030 This was not apparently just Russian organised crime and the Russian government and business that were willing. 315 00:35:59,110 --> 00:36:08,130 To work together. But 30 or 40 years before that, we see that it was the United States government that was willing to undertake such collaborations. 316 00:36:08,140 --> 00:36:18,490 And we also learn, and I cover in the book in some detail that there were several very close near misses as a result of this strategic alliance. 317 00:36:19,180 --> 00:36:23,290 In particular, during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 318 00:36:23,620 --> 00:36:31,120 there were a couple of moments in which the Mafia's involvement threatened to blow up the whole affair. 319 00:36:31,150 --> 00:36:36,970 In fact, in the Bay of Pigs case, it may be the Mafia's failure to execute Castro. 320 00:36:37,150 --> 00:36:45,700 That led to the absence of a political shock in Cuba that the invasion was designed to follow in the missile crisis. 321 00:36:46,030 --> 00:36:48,700 Even during the famous three days in October, 322 00:36:48,700 --> 00:36:54,700 when the Kennedys had a backchannel open to the Soviets and were negotiating an offramp for both of them, 323 00:36:55,030 --> 00:37:04,630 the Mafia undertook, without explicit authorisation, another attempt to militarily penetrate Cuba and to attack Castro. 324 00:37:04,660 --> 00:37:09,760 If that had succeeded, one can only imagine what the consequences might have been. 325 00:37:11,890 --> 00:37:15,910 They did not succeed. They did not force their way back into Cuba. 326 00:37:15,910 --> 00:37:19,960 And so finally we come to the sixth strategy that an organised crime group can adopt. 327 00:37:19,990 --> 00:37:25,180 What do you do when your collaboration strategies fail and you confrontation strategies fail? 328 00:37:25,660 --> 00:37:29,440 Well, as Captain Scott and told us in Sicily, there's only one option left. 329 00:37:29,830 --> 00:37:33,250 Withdrawal. And here, actually, it's the marketing. 330 00:37:33,730 --> 00:37:40,510 It's the business management literature that's extremely informative. There is a theory in business management called Blue Ocean Strategy. 331 00:37:43,050 --> 00:37:52,790 What it's describing is that when a market, an ocean is so crowded that it's running red with blood from the fierce rivalries and competitions, 332 00:37:52,800 --> 00:37:58,080 the only really viable strategy left is to look after the horizon, see a nice, 333 00:37:58,080 --> 00:38:04,230 empty, clear blue ocean, and sail off there and create your own market out there. 334 00:38:04,860 --> 00:38:10,320 So that's what the Mafia did. They forgot about Cuba and they sailed off into the blue Caribbean. 335 00:38:11,160 --> 00:38:17,160 First, they mounted an armed invasion of Haiti, not very successfully, but they did. 336 00:38:17,790 --> 00:38:24,449 Again, an example of them having agency. And then they decided that they needed to learn from these failures. 337 00:38:24,450 --> 00:38:30,179 And they took a fundamentally different strategy and they carried out a communications 338 00:38:30,180 --> 00:38:34,980 campaign that they actually with a certain irony called Operation Indoctrination, 339 00:38:35,790 --> 00:38:42,570 which was designed to woo the political elite that ruled in the Bahamas. 340 00:38:43,320 --> 00:38:47,490 And as a result, they developed in the Bahamas on Grand Bahama, in particular, 341 00:38:47,910 --> 00:38:57,750 a mode of casino economy that came of that formed the basis for what has subsequently subsequently been called casino capitalism. 342 00:38:57,780 --> 00:39:05,790 The Bahamas became not only a site for offshore money laundering by American businessmen and political and judicial actors, 343 00:39:06,150 --> 00:39:10,800 but also a site for innovation in global finance. 344 00:39:11,880 --> 00:39:18,930 And as a result of that, again, we see the same thing happening that the local political elite began to lose their legitimacy. 345 00:39:19,740 --> 00:39:23,129 But here we see the Mafia learning strategically. 346 00:39:23,130 --> 00:39:27,030 And this is another key point that at the theoretical level, 347 00:39:27,030 --> 00:39:33,120 we began with an argument that organised crime isn't even a strategic actor, and now we see that they're not only strategic actors, 348 00:39:33,120 --> 00:39:38,550 but they can actually learn over time because instead of repeating the mistakes of Cuba, 349 00:39:38,850 --> 00:39:48,810 what they decided to do here was not was to see the writing on the wall and to form an alliance with the opposition in the Bahamas. 350 00:39:49,410 --> 00:39:56,250 So they all helped organise and financed the political campaign of the opposition in 351 00:39:56,610 --> 00:40:02,880 the Bahamas and helped bring to power the first black government in the Bahamas, 352 00:40:03,390 --> 00:40:11,970 led by Linda Findley. You probably know what happened to the Bahamas in the two or three decades that followed. 353 00:40:12,540 --> 00:40:17,099 It became the site of a major site for cocaine trafficking into North America and 354 00:40:17,100 --> 00:40:21,600 a key strategic asset in the development of cocaine markets in North America. 355 00:40:22,200 --> 00:40:28,350 So it turns out that it was probably quite a fortuitous, strategic decision that the Mafia made. 356 00:40:29,580 --> 00:40:34,620 So what can we learn from all of this? With just a few minutes left to wrap up, 357 00:40:34,620 --> 00:40:41,640 let me just identify some of the key theoretical insights that I think come from this empirical investigation. 358 00:40:44,530 --> 00:40:49,239 First we see that some criminal groups do, in fact, 359 00:40:49,240 --> 00:40:55,420 deliberately seek and exploit governmental power and that they use that governmental 360 00:40:55,420 --> 00:41:00,970 power to develop influence over formal politics and to achieve political outcomes. 361 00:41:02,590 --> 00:41:08,500 We also see that they use force as part of that strategy to achieve political outcomes, 362 00:41:09,220 --> 00:41:13,900 not something that political science has traditionally accepted or recognised. 363 00:41:15,640 --> 00:41:22,540 Secondly, we see that those strategies take a variety of forms and we can see at least six ideal types 364 00:41:22,900 --> 00:41:28,570 that depend on how they position themselves relative to other providers of governmentality. 365 00:41:29,710 --> 00:41:38,140 Thirdly, we see that legitimacy is crucial to their success in this strategic space. 366 00:41:38,770 --> 00:41:44,079 Legitimacy is to use a term of art, the centre of gravity, 367 00:41:44,080 --> 00:41:49,600 and I think that has major potential policy implications for how we fight organised crime in places today, 368 00:41:49,600 --> 00:41:55,090 ranging from El Salvador to to the Balkans, for example. 369 00:41:56,170 --> 00:42:05,110 Our focus on treating organised crime as a law enforcement problem leaves aside the whole question of that legitimacy within the local population. 370 00:42:06,340 --> 00:42:12,340 This analysis suggests that we need to pay much more attention to efforts to undermine that legitimacy if 371 00:42:12,340 --> 00:42:18,280 we want to prevent them becoming dominant providers of governmentality within the market for government. 372 00:42:22,080 --> 00:42:23,190 In the last part of the book. 373 00:42:23,190 --> 00:42:30,900 I also look at how this may be playing out in contemporary circumstances, including with a couple a couple of small case studies in Mali and Mexico. 374 00:42:31,230 --> 00:42:39,629 And one of the key conclusions there is that globalisation may actually be making it easier for small armed groups to enter this market 375 00:42:39,630 --> 00:42:47,220 for government because it gives it lower than lower cost access to global illicit markets and to the rents that flow from that. 376 00:42:47,970 --> 00:42:52,530 And this leads to two conclusions about organised crime strategies. 377 00:42:53,070 --> 00:43:02,550 The first is that we're increasingly seeing hybrid strategies that draw on multiple forms of legitimacy as the basis for their governmental systems. 378 00:43:02,910 --> 00:43:12,440 This is a picture of a shrine in the Territory controlled by Kobayashi Temple areas, the Knights Templar in Mexico. 379 00:43:12,450 --> 00:43:21,150 And you can see it combines religious iconography with military iconography in the same way that the Knights Templar of yore did. 380 00:43:21,570 --> 00:43:28,050 And that is the basis for governmental strategy and power for the Knights Templar in that area. 381 00:43:28,680 --> 00:43:36,180 But we also see that it's open to armed groups not to blend or hybridise, but to switch between strategies. 382 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:42,480 We increasingly see actors like Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was previously known as Mr. Marlboro, 383 00:43:42,690 --> 00:43:52,860 switching from a criminal strategy to a pure terrorist strategy or even in some cases acquired a Ghali becoming governmental agents for a time. 384 00:43:53,580 --> 00:43:58,110 I think there's a new report about to come out by Peter Neumann at King's College London, 385 00:43:58,380 --> 00:44:03,540 looking at how increasing numbers of jihadists in Europe actually have criminal backgrounds. 386 00:44:04,200 --> 00:44:09,239 And this is a pointer to the fact that we see armed groups increasingly able to switch between 387 00:44:09,240 --> 00:44:14,760 these strategies because the barriers to entry in the market for government are increasingly low. 388 00:44:16,560 --> 00:44:23,129 And finally, I think the final implication and for me in some ways the most disturbing is back to the point we started with. 389 00:44:23,130 --> 00:44:30,330 Jim will see that increasingly we see the strategies of states and organised crime blurring, 390 00:44:31,260 --> 00:44:38,160 particularly at the military level as we move away from kinetic spheres of confrontation 391 00:44:38,550 --> 00:44:44,640 to subversion and to information operations and other non-kinetic realms. 392 00:44:45,390 --> 00:44:49,200 And also at the financial and organisational level, in particular, 393 00:44:49,200 --> 00:44:59,579 the development of offshore financial systems has allowed criminals, whether they are Lucky Luciano or a kleptocratic ruling, 394 00:44:59,580 --> 00:45:07,470 a state to plunder their local community, extract criminal rents and then move that safely offshore, 395 00:45:07,980 --> 00:45:15,660 giving those rulers, political rulers an incentive to adopt a criminal strategy in the way that governance. 396 00:45:15,660 --> 00:45:25,320 And I think that is fundamentally troubling because at its root, this strategy is about developing power without political responsibility. 397 00:45:26,520 --> 00:45:28,110 I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.