In this episode, The Changing Character of War program welcomes Dr. James Cocaine, a professor of the United Nations University in New York.
In his new book, Hidden Power The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime.
Dr. Cocaine investigates the differences and surprising similarities between the visible world of politics and the usually hidden criminal underworld.
Why would we talk about organised crime in a program on the changing character of war?
It's precisely because, as Annette said, we have to ask some fundamental questions about the categories we're dealing with.
What do we mean by war? What do we mean by strategy?
What are the purposes and motivations that armed groups have in using violence?
And to find a way into this topic and into this book?
Hidden Power The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime.
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.
It was a hearing on money laundering and to explain some of the ways that money laundering worked.
He said once he told this little story to the committee.
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.
And he says that he is the an executive of a Russian trading company.
And he has a proposition for you about a joint venture that he'd like you to undertake with him.
Then said, Well, see, there are four possibilities. The first possibility is that he is exactly what he said he was.
He's a trader in an import export company. The second possibility is that he's a member of the Russian intelligence services.
The third possibility is that he's a member of Russian organised crime and the fourth possibility, he said,
and by far the most interesting one is that in fact he is all of those things
and all of those organisations are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement.
What we'll see was getting that is that increasingly these categories that
we have developed and that shape the way we see the world are breaking down.
Increasingly there is intersection between business, politics and what we like to call crime.
This book, which I'm going to talk about today, is really an attempt to understand that at two levels first of all,
conceptual or theoretical, and secondly, empirically.
So I want to begin today by talking a little bit about the conceptual or theoretical question of the relationship between these categories.
And then come on to an empirical discussion. So let's begin with the basic question.
Organised crime and politics, are they really so different?
The reason a cartoon like this is amusing is precisely because it gets at a truth that lies behind our traditional or conceptual categories,
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.
Traditionally, we've had separate departments of political science and criminology.
We've had political scientists, international relations theorists,
students of war focussed on the use of violence for political purposes, the pursuit of political power.
They have excluded organised crime as a unit of analysis because they have said organised crime is not about the pursuit of political power.
Criminologists, on the other hand, have argued that in some cases we do in fact see organised crime groups,
not all organised crime groups, but some governing illicit markets and even communities.
And so that at least gives them governmental power. They may not, and in fact by definition they do not seek formal political authority,
but they do develop governmental power and arguably political influence.
So this book, the premise of this book really is to think about what would it mean if we took
that understanding seriously and brought it into the realm of strategic theory,
of the study of war, the study of international relations?
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,
but the power to govern others conduct.
And we see hints of this when we look at the way that organised criminals themselves talk about their life inside these groups.
This is Francisco Minaya,
a very important government witness in the 1980s and 1990s who helped the Italian judiciary understand what was going on inside the Mafia.
And at one point when he was asked why he got into a life of crime, he said this.
He said, It's often believed that people work with the Cosa Nostra for the money, but that's only partly true.
Do you know why I became a woman tonight? A man of honour or a mafioso?
Because before I had been a nobody in Palermo.
And then afterwards, wherever I went, heads bowed.
You can't value that in money, he said. So it's clear that in some ways organised crime is about power.
But is it the kind of power that political scientists are interested in that strategic theory is interested in?
Is it the kind of power that we fight wars over?
As I said, it's not the case that organised crime seeks political authority or political responsibility.
But there are, there have been hints for some time that some, in some cases they may seek political influence.
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.
The term I borrowed from Michel Foucault for close argument was that Governmentality exists outside the state,
that there can be normative regimes that people internalise to conduct their own conduct.
Normative regimes that shape their perception of what actions are even possible that exist beyond the state.
And we see, again, looking at the firsthand accounts of some people who have been active throughout their lives in organised crime.
But this is the way they perceive their own participation in those groups,
that they provide a normative regime that not only helps them make sense of the world,
gives them an identity, but actually conducts their conduct, governs their conduct,
and that they use as a basis for governmental power to extend influence over others.
Again, I think it's useful to turn the word, turn to the words of an individual.
Firsthand account from the Mafia. In 1949, after he returned to Italy from America, where he'd become a mafia leader.
Nikola Gentil, who was born in Sicily, gave a an interview granting an interview to a doctor, a researcher.
And in that interview, which is partly reproduced in the book, he explained the governmental nature of a true mafiosos power.
And again, he told he told a little story, which I find quite revealing due to riddle.
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,
Nicola, gently get down on your knees. What do I do?
I get down on my knees. That doesn't mean you're a mafioso.
Because you forced me to get down on my knees. It means you're a cretin with a pistol in your hand.
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?
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?
And I say to Toretto, Let me explain. And I managed to convince you that you have to get down on your knees.
And then you get down on your knees when you kneel down.
That makes me a mafioso. What he was getting at is that the heart of the persuasive,
the heart of the strategic interaction inside these criminal groups is not based purely on coercion, but on corruption.
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,
because what it does is it creates an association between you and the target, the person that you're offering the for all,
led by sort of pseudo voluntarily participating in the interaction, the corrupt exchange the person begins to take on a hidden association with you,
begins to form a hidden clandestine organisation, in a sense society with you.
And it's in this sense that the governmentality within strategic criminal groups works.
It's a hidden power. It's not trying to be a formal governing authority.
It's not seeking formal political authority. In fact, what these strategic criminal groups want is power without formal responsibility.
But it is power nonetheless, and it is governmental.
It structures the way individuals within these regimes think and act and what they think is possible.
So what that leads us to is a pretty fundamentally startling theoretical implication that while we have traditionally
thought that there were two quite distinct worlds an upper world of formal politics and an underworld of crime,
in fact, there may be one single market for government with individuals as potential consumers of a range of different forms of governmentality.
And it may not only be politics and crime, there are, in fact other forms of association and normative regimes.
For example, in some contemporary terrorist groups that operate in a similar way,
we may now be in a common market for government with a range of alternative providers of governmentality.
And what that means is that those groups providing these different forms of governmentality have the option strategically,
not only to compete with each other, to offer their products, their forms of governmentality as entirely distinct,
but sometimes to work together, to collaborate, to find ways to position themselves in that market for government,
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.
And this is particularly the case.
There's a particular complementarity between those providing a political form of governmentality your loyalty to the
state and those providing a hidden form of governmentality your loyalty to a mafia or to an organised criminal group,
because you can, in fact, as an individual it appears quite straightforwardly pay both allegiances at once to those two different groups.
So this brings us to the empirical analysis in the book.
This is a nice theory, but do we find any evidence of this in practice,
and do we in fact see groups cultivating that governmental power not only to form power within their own organisation,
but to extend it to other groups, to extend it to even other states?
And do we see them using violence in the pursuit of that governmental power?
That's the question that I look at empirically in the book. The answer I provide in the book is that we do unsurprisingly,
and that we in fact see six different ideal types of positioning strategy that criminal groups
adopt in this market for government in relation to other providers of governmentality.
And to explain those different strategies, I want to tell you six small stories taken from the book.
There are plenty of others, so please don't feel that you've read the whole book.
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.
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.
You pay, but I think the cheapest prices are on Amazon right now.
So the first story I want to tell begins in 1941, very end of 1941, just after Pearl Harbour.
This vessel, the Normandy, is the largest cruise liner in the world at the time, and she has just docked in New York.
New York is very nervous. After Pearl Harbour, the United States has just ended the war.
And being a French vessel and the French being an axis power, at that point, the United States government seizes her.
Within three months, she was repurposed as the Lafayette.
She was going to become a troop transport, taking more than 10,000 troops at once across the Atlantic to enter the war.
But instead, this happened. This is on the west side, about 43rd and 44th Street.
She was burned to the waterline, capsized. One American army member died and about 140 something were injured.
It was the largest vessel put out of action in the war to date.
So this immediately led to great fear not only in the American public, but in particular in US, in the US Navy.
Then the New York harbour was a vital strategic point, and if she had been burnt to the waterline as a result of sabotage,
there was a risk not only that there were saboteurs in New York Harbour, but potentially that there was a fifth column working.
So I went internal thinking potentially with the Italian-American community and perhaps also the German-American community.
Now the internal debates and we know this from archival research both in America and in into the internal debates,
I didn't think that that necessarily was the case.
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
protecting against the development by axis powers of governmental influence in on the docks in New York.
So they sent in U.S. naval agents to talk to the local dockworkers about what had gone on.
And the result was that they were met with complete and utter silence.
Why? Because it turned out that it wasn't the US government that had government governmental power on the docks.
It was the mafia. So the U.S. Navy organised an operation which became known as the Underworld Project.
First they reached out to this gentleman, Meyer Lansky, who was a New Yorker from the Lower East Side,
who had a very close relationship with this gentleman,
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.
The US Navy developed a collaboration with Luciano and the Mafia that gave them access not only to the docks
but allowed them to place naval agents on fishing vessels up and down the east coast of the United States.
That led to the use of Mafia assets to break into foreign consulates and seize
evidence that led to the arrest of Nazi sympathisers and landed sympathisers.
That led to the illegal suppression of labour action on the docks, to the intimidation of the press.
And even my research turned out at one point led to the Mafia helping the FBI
identify four Nazi saboteurs that had been landed on the east end of Long Island.
They were rather inept saboteurs. It has to be said.
But nonetheless, it was through and through the efforts of the Mafia that they were quickly identified and and taken to trial.
And actually that the case that grew out of that incident, Ex Parte Quirin,
is the legal precedent that forms the basis to this day of the military commissions
that the United States has been using for the last decade in Guantanamo.
Now, how do we know all this? How can I say this with such certainty?
How can I be sure that this isn't simply conspiracy theory?
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.
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.
So when the federal authorities approached him at the end of the war and said, remember that guy, Lucky Luciano?
He was actually very helpful during the war. You're going to have to pardon him and release him.
You can imagine having been the prosecutor who put him away in the first place.
The jury wasn't very happy. So he ordered a judicial investigation.
And it's the testimony of 54 witnesses, the majority of whom are mafiosi, but also governmental actors that are sitting unpublished.
In an archive in the University of Rochester, Dewey's personal archive that forms the basis of this analysis in the book.
So it's pretty ironclad. Evidence correlates also with a number of other indicia indicating that this was
the basis of a collaboration between the Mafia and the Navy during the war.
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.
The strategy that we typically associate with mafias, where a criminal group intermediates between the state and a space,
a market or a population that the state is having trouble developing governmental power over.
It's a form of jurisdictional sharing.
The state works in the upper world and the criminal group controls and provides access to the riches and resources of the underworld.
But we know from this archive that the organised crime group in this case quite deliberately and strategically
developed its power and this strategy in a way to increase its governmental influence also in the upper world.
And we know also that it used that relationship not only domestically, but also to develop its power elsewhere.
And we know that because the underworld project, as this was called in,
the U.S. Navy grew into not just a domestic operation, but an international operation in particular,
when the same same individuals that were involved in the project were asked to plan the invasion of Sicily,
and that led them to do a number of to basically to collect operational and tactical
intelligence through the Mafia from the Italian-American population of Manhattan.
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.
And his answer was this small town on the wet northwestern coast of Sicily.
Not easy to see there, but as you can probably tell, it's not the most obvious place to carry out an amphibious invasion.
And one one reason for thinking he may have nominated that is that this was the hometown of the rival faction within Israel.
Now, this leads us to the second strategy that I cover in the book Autonomy.
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.
They instead seek relative autonomy from the state.
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.
And typically we think of these actors as warlords in rural contexts, but increasingly we also see some.
Gangs in urban context.
Adopting this approach and what we see from the National Archives in Q is that the Allied military government, when it invaded Sicily,
I was quite aware that as they removed the fascist powers, the only alternative provider of governmental power was the Mafia.
There's a wonderful series of memoranda written by an American captain,
Captain Scott in who had been the consul in Poland, consul general in Palermo before the war,
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,
and how this would confront the strategy of the allies.
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.
And we know from the annotations on these memoranda that they went quite high up in the in the allied command structure,
even to Harold Macmillan, who was at the time Churchill's representative for the whole Mediterranean Theatre.
But ultimately, the decision presented with those three strategic options was no decision.
And as a result, that meant that the allied agents in the interior in particular had to have to stumble through,
have a muddle along, had to figure out themselves how to deal with the local mafiosi.
So one of them ingeniously in a small town whose name you may recognise,
decided that what he would do would be to work around the local mafioso who got his
power from controlling the local wheat market and just buy direct from the producer.
But again, a bit like what happened in New York when he got to the farm gate,
nobody would sell because the Mafioso was using his control of violence to exercise and
develop governmental power and using that to exercise political authority in the region.
Now, what that leads to, we trace this in the book through a mixture of American,
Italian and British archival sources is a deliberate attempt by the Mafia to build their power back into the political settlement in Sicily.
And they did this. And this is what brings me back to the autonomy strategy.
They did this by fomenting and funding and organising a secessionist insurgency,
a secessionist political movement at first, but then an actual armed insurgency.
And they used the military pressure of that insurgency to to threaten Sicilian secession and to create leverage,
which then became the basis for their insertion into negotiations over the constitutional settlement of the Italian state,
post-war and the place of Sicily within it.
And we know from the archival trail that they didn't immediately go to the Christian Democrats, their ultimate partners.
First, they shopped around. They tried the monarchists.
They didn't get the price they wanted there. So then they tried the Communists.
They didn't get the price they wanted there.
So ultimately they settled into a relationship with the Christian Democrats, and that became the basis for the Italian state in Rome,
agreeing to Sicilian regional autonomy within the constitutional settlement.
So through a deliberate political strategy, the Mafia and quite a radical one,
actually, the Mafia was able to protect to adopt a conservative economic strategy.
They protected their economic power within the Sicilian political economy through a deliberate political strategy,
using force to mount an insurgency that gave them the governmental power and the leverage they needed.
They weren't the only ones who tried this.
There were also others, such as the Bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who even at one point wrote directly to Churchill,
wrote directly to Truman, seeking political patronage, trying to insert himself in the political, political discussion.
But he was much less successful. There were others, however, in the post-war period, who were more successful.
And that leads us to the third strategy I cover in the book Mergers or Joint Ventures.
In some context, an organised criminal group and a political organisation will decide that instead of operating at arm's length,
arm's length, they may be better off vertically integrating their organisational structures.
And what I mean by that is that political assets, even state capabilities,
could be useful in the development of criminal rents and that criminal personnel and capabilities might be useful for governing.
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,
essentially integrated the Christian Democratic Party with the Mafia structures so that the mafia structures were essential
to his hold on political power within the party and the parties delivering of electoral support to the government in Rome.
And in return the assets of the state from the power to procure to the power to finance,
were used to develop infrastructure projects that rewarded mafia assets.
So we see here an integration of these of the two organisations in a way that is redolent of, for example,
more recently what we see in Guinea-Bissau with the use of naval assets in drug trafficking and
the determination of political outcomes on the basis of what's going on in the criminal market.
And it's not only in the in the book, it's not only in Palermo that we see this.
We also see the North American Mafia adopting a very similar approach half a world away,
around the same time with Fulgencio Batista, the strongman of Cuba at the time, Batista and his cohorts.
What worked with the same individuals we saw earlier,
Lansky and again Luciano here he is in Havana at the famous 1946 Christmas summit that Frank Sinatra was the lead entertainer,
that they work together these two organisations, to develop Cuba's political economy in ways that serve them both.
In particular, Batista set up a new development bank bonds,
which underwrote giant infrastructure projects and the development of hotels that were
owned and operated by both Havana political elites and mafiosi from North America.
So it was, in a sense, a merger or a joint venture, the whole strategy in Cuba after World War Two.
But it also led to an erosion of Batista's legitimacy.
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,
that the local population begins increasingly to doubt the legitimacy of the system of governance,
of governance, of the formal governmentality,
as they recognise increasingly that the criminal governance mentality is becoming dominant over the formal governmentality offered by the state.
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.
Now, Castro is interesting in part because the first time he appears in the American national archival
record is in a passage describing a period of rule under Batista that the Cubans know as gangsterism.
The political elite in Havana was working with local street gangs, many with connections to the university,
to develop power, governmental power at the street level, and roll that into political power.
And one of the key organisers of one of those university based gangs was none other than out Fidel Castro.
But he his own personal strategic development took him in quite a different direction, obviously.
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,
highly effective state, but one that is riddled with corruption and no longer legitimate in the eyes of the population.
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.
So command appointments in the east of Cuba were being sold to the highest bidder based on the access they provided to criminal revenues,
in particular prostitution, local gambling and drug trafficking revenues.
And increasingly, what that meant was that Castro, when he marched towards Havana, did not have to fight a series of pitched engagements,
but was simply able to march as forward as the Cuban military faded away in front of him.
And again, there are very interesting contemporary parallels.
We think, for example, about how the Tuaregs swept down from the north towards Bamako a few years ago in Mali.
And it's a similar story. The met them, the Malian army, we now know,
had become riddled with corruption and its military effectiveness had been undermined as command appointments had
become increasingly based on access to local drug trafficking and other smuggling markets in the north of Mali.
So what this leads to is the mafia being kicked out of Cuba.
But their first response was, in fact, to turn away from collaboration and towards a strategy of confrontation.
What I describe in the book is the fourth ideal type, a strategy, in fact, of terrorism.
Now, why do I call it terrorism? Isn't it rather strange to be thinking of organised crime group using a terrorist strategy?
Well, what we find in the historical record is that the North American Mafia working with Exiled Batista,
Johnny Battista on US organised armed attacks from the Yucatan Peninsula,
bombing civilian and commercial premises quite deliberately in Cuba in an effort to turn the Cuban population against Castro and to sow disorder,
creating a governmental space that they could then sweep back into.
That seems to me to be a fairly straightforward example of terrorism military attacks on a
civilian population designed to create public pressure leading to a change of public policy.
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.
The fifth ideal type of criminal positioning strategy, again, with the United States government after they were exiled from Cuba,
many of the Diokno set and the mafia formed joint ventures in hotels in Miami.
One of them was this hotel, the Fontainebleau.
And we know from the National Archives in Maryland that it was there that members of the CIA met with two men, Sam Gold,
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.
But we also know that Sam Gold was, in fact, Sam Giancana,
who at the time was the number four on the FBI's most wanted list because he was the head of the Chicago mafia.
So even as you have one arm of government seeking to prosecute organised crime,
you have another government forming an alliance with organised crime to extend the
Government's power in the situation of growing confrontation with a foreign government.
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.
It was not the CIA that cooked up the scheme and brought it wholesale to the Mafia and engaged them as their agents.
Rather, it was the Mafia that had already begun these attacks, that had already begun laying the groundwork,
that had even set up exile governments in exile with individuals like Tony Verona and brought these schemes to the United States government.
Now, why is that important? Well, because of the theoretical level.
What that tells us is that the Mafia had agency, not just at the domestic level, but at the international level.
What you see here is a North American mafia cooking up a scheme for regime change in a foreign government, in a foreign country,
and then taking strategically the steps necessarily necessary to attempt unsuccessfully ultimately,
but to attempt to execute that strategy through working with a political authority.
It's also very interesting to look at how that played out because it has all sorts of unexpected implications and consequences.
We learn that Bobby Kennedy, as he set up the covert assassinations capabilities of the CIA, was probably drawing heavily on his very,
very close study of the Mafia as the counsel to the relevant Senate inquiry just a few years before into labour and organised crime.
We learned that after his brother was killed and Johnson found out about this relationship between the CIA and the Mafia, he said,
using a phrase that was used to describe the hit squad that the Mafia set up in New York in the twenties and thirties,
that the US government had been running a Murder Inc in the Caribbean.
What he was getting at was that there was an increased,
increasing convergence between the strategy of the criminal group and the strategy of clandestine operators of the US government.
We come back to Walsh's comments at the beginning of the talk.
This was not apparently just Russian organised crime and the Russian government and business that were willing.
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.
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.
In particular, during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis,
there were a couple of moments in which the Mafia's involvement threatened to blow up the whole affair.
In fact, in the Bay of Pigs case, it may be the Mafia's failure to execute Castro.
That led to the absence of a political shock in Cuba that the invasion was designed to follow in the missile crisis.
Even during the famous three days in October,
when the Kennedys had a backchannel open to the Soviets and were negotiating an offramp for both of them,
the Mafia undertook, without explicit authorisation, another attempt to militarily penetrate Cuba and to attack Castro.
If that had succeeded, one can only imagine what the consequences might have been.
They did not succeed. They did not force their way back into Cuba.
And so finally we come to the sixth strategy that an organised crime group can adopt.
What do you do when your collaboration strategies fail and you confrontation strategies fail?
Well, as Captain Scott and told us in Sicily, there's only one option left.
Withdrawal. And here, actually, it's the marketing.
It's the business management literature that's extremely informative. There is a theory in business management called Blue Ocean Strategy.
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,
the only really viable strategy left is to look after the horizon, see a nice,
empty, clear blue ocean, and sail off there and create your own market out there.
So that's what the Mafia did. They forgot about Cuba and they sailed off into the blue Caribbean.
First, they mounted an armed invasion of Haiti, not very successfully, but they did.
Again, an example of them having agency. And then they decided that they needed to learn from these failures.
And they took a fundamentally different strategy and they carried out a communications
campaign that they actually with a certain irony called Operation Indoctrination,
which was designed to woo the political elite that ruled in the Bahamas.
And as a result, they developed in the Bahamas on Grand Bahama, in particular,
a mode of casino economy that came of that formed the basis for what has subsequently subsequently been called casino capitalism.
The Bahamas became not only a site for offshore money laundering by American businessmen and political and judicial actors,
but also a site for innovation in global finance.
And as a result of that, again, we see the same thing happening that the local political elite began to lose their legitimacy.
But here we see the Mafia learning strategically.
And this is another key point that at the theoretical level,
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,
but they can actually learn over time because instead of repeating the mistakes of Cuba,
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.
So they all helped organise and financed the political campaign of the opposition in
the Bahamas and helped bring to power the first black government in the Bahamas,
led by Linda Findley. You probably know what happened to the Bahamas in the two or three decades that followed.
It became the site of a major site for cocaine trafficking into North America and
a key strategic asset in the development of cocaine markets in North America.
So it turns out that it was probably quite a fortuitous, strategic decision that the Mafia made.
So what can we learn from all of this? With just a few minutes left to wrap up,
let me just identify some of the key theoretical insights that I think come from this empirical investigation.
First we see that some criminal groups do, in fact,
deliberately seek and exploit governmental power and that they use that governmental
power to develop influence over formal politics and to achieve political outcomes.
We also see that they use force as part of that strategy to achieve political outcomes,
not something that political science has traditionally accepted or recognised.
Secondly, we see that those strategies take a variety of forms and we can see at least six ideal types
that depend on how they position themselves relative to other providers of governmentality.
Thirdly, we see that legitimacy is crucial to their success in this strategic space.
Legitimacy is to use a term of art, the centre of gravity,
and I think that has major potential policy implications for how we fight organised crime in places today,
ranging from El Salvador to to the Balkans, for example.
Our focus on treating organised crime as a law enforcement problem leaves aside the whole question of that legitimacy within the local population.
This analysis suggests that we need to pay much more attention to efforts to undermine that legitimacy if
we want to prevent them becoming dominant providers of governmentality within the market for government.
In the last part of the book.
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.
And one of the key conclusions there is that globalisation may actually be making it easier for small armed groups to enter this market
for government because it gives it lower than lower cost access to global illicit markets and to the rents that flow from that.
And this leads to two conclusions about organised crime strategies.
The first is that we're increasingly seeing hybrid strategies that draw on multiple forms of legitimacy as the basis for their governmental systems.
This is a picture of a shrine in the Territory controlled by Kobayashi Temple areas, the Knights Templar in Mexico.
And you can see it combines religious iconography with military iconography in the same way that the Knights Templar of yore did.
And that is the basis for governmental strategy and power for the Knights Templar in that area.
But we also see that it's open to armed groups not to blend or hybridise, but to switch between strategies.
We increasingly see actors like Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was previously known as Mr. Marlboro,
switching from a criminal strategy to a pure terrorist strategy or even in some cases acquired a Ghali becoming governmental agents for a time.
I think there's a new report about to come out by Peter Neumann at King's College London,
looking at how increasing numbers of jihadists in Europe actually have criminal backgrounds.
And this is a pointer to the fact that we see armed groups increasingly able to switch between
these strategies because the barriers to entry in the market for government are increasingly low.
And finally, I think the final implication and for me in some ways the most disturbing is back to the point we started with.
Jim will see that increasingly we see the strategies of states and organised crime blurring,
particularly at the military level as we move away from kinetic spheres of confrontation
to subversion and to information operations and other non-kinetic realms.
And also at the financial and organisational level, in particular,
the development of offshore financial systems has allowed criminals, whether they are Lucky Luciano or a kleptocratic ruling,
a state to plunder their local community, extract criminal rents and then move that safely offshore,
giving those rulers, political rulers an incentive to adopt a criminal strategy in the way that governance.
And I think that is fundamentally troubling because at its root, this strategy is about developing power without political responsibility.
I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.