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