Organized crime featured high on the headlines this September (not least because of the launch of the Global Initiative), and in a very diverse ways:  high-profile indictments of art thieves, match fixers and the Dread Pirate Roberts brought home the extent to which organized crime creeps insidiously into all aspects of our personal and professional lives.

This month’s “Analyzing Organized Crime” brief explores this theme in greater detail: featuring a report of the panel discussion on cybercrime at the Global Initiative launch, which brought home the extent to which both the internet, and the criminality it enables, are now so vast a response is impossible.  So we have to think strategically about how resources are employed for a response, and the responsibility for that response sits in new corners: emerging economies, the private sector and with every internet enabled individual.

We look at the four match-fixing scandals that came to a head this month: in El Salvador, Singapore, Australia, and Italy… reminding us that it is indeed can be funny old game, but one that is also exploited by criminal economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

September saw the Thomas Crown Affair made real – in an art heist from the Amsterdam Kunsthal Museum worth up to €200 million, which ended less glamorously with fine art burnt in a backyard in Romania.  So we dived a little deeper into how the criminal art market functions, and how art and antiquities are bought and sold on the black market.

Finally, we took a RUSI Journal article as inspiration to dive a little deeper into the Chinese tiger that is changing the global criminal economy in a multitude of ways.  We look specifically at changing drug demand patterns and the involvement of Chinese criminal gangs in human trafficking, following a raid by the Chinese police that took down 301 suspects in early September.

We hope you find our briefs interesting and useful.  You can download the Analyzing Organized Crime Briefs for June 2013, July 2013 and August 2013 here.  We are grateful for any feedback on how to make future editions more so, and welcome those wishing to alert us to their TOC related publications and events so that we can feature them in future editions.  Please do email the Secretariat (secretariat@globalinitiative.net) with your comments and suggestions.

If you want more regular updates on TOC issues, please also check out the Global Initiative on Facebook where we post stories and items of interest regularly, as well as on Twitter where we are actively sharing events and resources as they happen.

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