11.1 Organized Crime

Definition: the continuing criminal enterprise — the group structured for profit through illegal markets, operating through violence-or-corruption, with continuity beyond the individual members. The Palermo Convention's faces: the structured group of three-or-more, the material benefit's purpose, the serious offences' commission; the crime-as-enterprise analogy (the illegal firm's economics). The characteristics (the catalogue): the hierarchy-or-network structure; the continuity (the enterprise outlives the members); the violence-or-corruption duality (market discipline by force; the state's protection purchased); the illegal market's specialization; the profit's laundering need; the transnational reach; the ethnic-and-kinship bonding's sociology against the stereotype's critique. The major groups: the Mafia families, the Yakuza, the Triads, the Cartels, the 'Ndrangheta, the post-Soviet networks; the South Asian corridor: the drug routes (the golden-crescent and golden-triangle flows), the trafficking corridors, the hawala systems' underworld uses; the Nepal faces: the transit-and-destination position (the drugs' transit, the trafficking's origin), the counterfeit-and-smuggling economies, the local protection-and-extortion rackets. The machinery: internationally — the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo, 2000) with its protocol trio (trafficking in persons, migrant smuggling, firearms); the UN Convention against Corruption (Merida, 2003); the drug conventions (1961-1971-1988); UNODC, INTERPOL, FATF; the SAARC instruments. Nationally — the Code's conspiracy-and-gang provisions; the specific Acts (the Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act, 2064; the Asset (Money) Laundering Prevention Act, 2064; the Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act, 2033; the Electronic Transactions…