Organized crime is dominated by employees of multinational companies, politicians and bureaucrats. Gangsters are a problem, but they are minor players when compared with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that selectively enforce drugs prohibition and profit from it. The position of large corporations in the global economy provides the most mouth-watering opportunities for illegal profits.
Woodiwiss shows how respectable businessmen and revered statesmen have seized these opportunities in an orgy of fraud and illegal violence that would leave the most hardened Mafioso speechless with admiration. Score: 2. It is a chronicle that touches upon deep and ongoing themes in the history of the Americas, and more specifically of the United States government, Cuba before and after the revolution, and the criminal networks known as the Mafia.
In return, Cuban authorities allowed the Mafia to operate its establishments without interference. Over the next twenty-five years, a gangster state took root in Cuba as Batista, other corrupt Cuban politicians, and senior Cuban army and police officers got rich. All was going swimmingly until a handful of revolutionaries upended the neat arrangement: and the CIA, Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and the Mafia joined forces to attempt the overthrow of Castro.
Gangsterismo is unique in the literature on Cuba, and establishes for the first time the integral, extensive role of mobsters in the Cuban exile movement. The narrative unfolds against a broader historical backdrop of which it was a part: the confrontation between the United States and the Cuban revolution, which turned Cuba into one of the most perilous battlegrounds of the Cold War. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole.
In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the? The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service.
The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. Score: 5. Based on a process of review and revision, it is both a 'state of the discipline' assessment and a topical reference. The authors were chosen by their specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers. Gangsters and Other Statesmen examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making.
In this timely and provocative book, he demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, Gangsters and Other Statesmen raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.
He found himself tailed by men in cheap leather jackets, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the KGB's notorious prison. The break-in was the beginning of an extraordinary psychological war against the journalist and his family. Vladimir Putin's spies used tactics developed by the KGB and perfected in the s by the Stasi, East Germany's sinister secret police.
This clandestine campaign burst into the open in when the Kremlin expelled Harding from Moscow. Luke Harding's Mafia State gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller. When people are confronted with the genre of crime fiction, they usually associate it with detective fiction or crime thrillers.
These works have shaped our understanding of crime literature profoundly and influenced the emergence of other crime fiction genres and their authors. On these grounds this essay will mainly focus on the emergence of a crime genre that is concerned with the American gangster and the myth of the mafia. To be more precise, I will concentrate on the mafia gangster in the United States and analyze his way to success and power.
To better understand the phenomenon of the mafia gangster, I will give a brief account of American crime fiction followed by a description of the typical ingredients a successful crime novel has to have.
Afterwards, I will present some information on the American gangster in general and explain the circumstances that facilitated his career in organized crime to become such an important part of American culture. Although the yakuza's protective mafia role has existed at least since the end of the Second World War, and arguably longer, their sources of income have not remained constant. The yakuza have undergone considerable change in their business activities over the last half-century.
The two key factors driving this evolution have been the changes in the legal, and law-enforcement environment within which these groups must operate, and the economic opportunities available to them. This first factor demonstrates that the complex and ambiguous relationship between the yakuza and the state has always been more than purely symbiotic.
With the introduction of the boryokudan yakuza countermeasures law in , the relationship between the yakuza and the state has become more unambiguously antagonistic. Assessing the impact of this law is, however, problematic; the contemporaneous bursting of Japan's economic bubble at the beginning of the s also profoundly and adversely influenced yakuza sources of income.
It is impossible to completely disentangle the effects of these two events. By the end of the twentieth century, the outlook for the yakuza was bleak and offered no short-term prospect of amelioration. More profoundly, state-expropriation of protection markets formerly dominated by the yakuza suggests that the longer-term prospects for these groups are bleaker still: no longer, therefore, need the yakuza be seen as an inevitable and necessary evil.
In Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian. This clandestine campaign burst into the open in when the Kremlin expelled Harding from Moscow - the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War. Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia is a brilliant and haunting account of the insidious methods used by a resurgent Kremlin against its so-called "enemies" - human rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists.
It includes unpublished material from confidential US diplomatic cables, released last year by WikiLeaks, which describe Russia as a "virtual mafia state". Harding gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller. Presents a comparative perspective of 'non traditional' organized crime in the United States and Latin America - beyond the Mafia.
This book, The State of the American Mind: Stupor and Pathetic Docility Volume One begins to unravel some of the most obvious, perplexing, embarrassing and enduring problems and contradictions of American history and sociology, viz.
Further, how could men of such great wisdom and intellect like George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others who were Enlightenment scholars and clearly knew that slavery was despicable and evil, because they had variously experienced white servitude and slavery themselves, collude to establish and institutionalize the horrible system of Negro chattel slavery in America; and also disenfranchised over 90 percent of people of their own race actions that racism could not explain.
Thus, this book starts with serious critical discussions of race in America and reveals what no textbook has ever done, viz. Further, the book also shows the year Black slavery started something almost, all textbooks got wrong. It also shows who, was the fi rst Black slave in America something no textbook ever mentions. It also shows when and how racism started in America and many other very sensitive and embarrassing but necessary issues that America avoids but must be frankly discussed for America to move forward.
This book therefore shatters the two dominant themes of Americas history and sociology that Blacks were brought into America in chains as slaves while whites came to America in search of freedom, as Harvard educated President Obama famously told us in his race speech. Thus, the crowning lesson of this book, in addition to discussing some critical policy issues like education, health care, etc.
Nothing is more universal, more common and more shared in American history and sociology than the fact that most of our ancestors, black and white, were servants, bond-indentures and slaves who were dominated and super-exploited by few overlords. Colonial America was the preferred dumping ground for British, outcasts, rejects, criminals, masterless class, vagabonds, bond-indentures, slaves, etc.
Thus, that America was a nation founded by British rejects and losers is inherently more rational than the prevailing orthodoxy or the Obama theory of Americas founders that they were great honorable men who journeyed across the ocean for freedom because of the obvious reason that good, powerful achieving citizens do not normally emigrate to new uncharted lands. He was an unusual and gifted star child who was beyond his mother's understanding.
His gang activities kept him out of the regular sequential leap from grade to grade. He earned his high school diploma by challenging the GED at his mother's behest, after reading books on math, language arts, classics, and Aesop's Fables, which he loved the most, in local libraries day and night, well before his eighteenth birthday, and earned the title "the richest man in the world" by working and fighting in the underground.
In his youth, he consolidated the dangerous Black Disciples and Vice Lord gangs of Chicago and all their subdivisions to complete his dream in building another Black Wall Street on the West Side. After he met Madi, Derek Jenkins, and the Stepfather, he moved closer to his dreams. When the Shadow of Knights confiscated sixty tons of drugs and guns off the Chicago streets and placed them on the FBI's doorstep, the ghetto ninjas were a marked group.
Surveys American geographers' current research in their speciality areas and tracks trends and innovations in the subfields of geography. Based on a process of review and revision, it is both a 'state of the discipline' assessment and a topical reference.
The authors were chosen by their specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers. Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Pt. Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?
In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive. Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists.
Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity and thus identity on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films.
Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity. Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.
The twenty-five essays accompany, illustrate and underpin the conceptual framework elaborated in Post-Communist Mafia State, published in conjunction with this volume.
Leading specialists analyze the manifestations of the current political regime in Hungary from twenty-five angles. Topics discussed include the ideology, constitutional issues, social policy, the judiciary, foreign relations, nationalism, media, memory politics, corruption, civil society, education, culture and so on. Beyond the basic features of the economy the domains of taxation, banking system, energy policies and the agriculture are treated in dedicated studies.
The essays are based on detailed empirical investigation about conditions in today's Hungary. They nevertheless contribute to the exploration of the characteristic features of post-communist authoritarian regimes, shared by an increasing number of countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Skip to content. Gangster States. Author : K. Gangster States Book Review:. Mafia State. Mafia State Book Review:. Gangster State. Gangster State Book Review:. Gangsters and Other Statesmen. Gangsters and Other Statesmen Book Review:.
Gangsterismo Book Review:. Post Communist Mafia State. Gangster Capitalism. Gangster Capitalism Book Review:.
Gangsters Democracy and the State in Southeast Asia. Author : Cornell University. Gangster Warlords. Gangster Warlords Book Review:. The Japanese Mafia. Author : Peter B. The Japanese Mafia Book Review:. Beyond the Mafia.
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