The business world assist organized crime and in turn organized crime assist the business world. There is a need for corruption by both parties in order to gain power and money. This need or want feeds off of each other in a mutual relationship which provides exactly what they other wanted.
Organized crime is a category of transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals who intend to engage in illegal activity, most commonly for profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist groups, are politically motivated. Gangs may become disciplined enough to be considered organized. A criminal organization or gang can also be referred to as a mafia, mob, ring, or syndicate; the network, subculture and community of criminals may be referred to as the underworld.
Other organizations—including states, churches, militaries, police forces, and corporations—may sometimes use organized-crime methods to conduct their activities, but their powers derive from their status as formal social institutions. There is a tendency to distinguish organized crime from other forms of crime, such as white-collar crime, financial crimes, political crimes, war crime, state crimes, and treason. This distinction is not always apparent and academics continue to debate the matter. For example, in most states organized crime, governance and war sometimes complement each other. The lobbyists has been used to describe democratic countries whose political, social and economic institutions come under the control of a few families and business oligarchs. There has been a relationship between organized crime and the political and corporate world since organized crime began. These relationship has served a purpose for all and in a sense is looked upon as a normal way of “doing business”. Organized crime is not likely to go away in the political and corporate world. This is a relationship that feeds off of each other for the rights to the one thing the world is searching for: money and power.
In the political world it is no different. Organized crime practices and the scandalous and corrupt practices in the political world is a blurred one which is hard to separate. Political corruption is critical to he survival of organized crime.
The relationship between politics and organized crime is a symbiotic one. Politicians give organized crime “official favors” and in returns they get campaign money, private graft, investment opportunities, and direct assistance in bargaining and negotiations. (ARTICLE11 and ARTICLE13 European Parliament)
Morrisburg was a comprehensive study of corruption that found organized crime syndicates making above-the-board contributions to candidates and under-the-table cash contributions to political parties which goes back to the street to encourage votes (as cited in Lyman & Potter, 2004).
(Lyman & Potter, 2004) Chambliss said when commenting on organized crime in Seattle that:
“Money is the oil of our present-day machinery, and elected public officials are the pistons that keep the machine operating. Those who come up with the oil, whatever its source, are in a position to make the machinery run the way they want it to. Crime is an excellent producer of capitalism’s oil. Those who want to affect the direction of the machine’s output find that they money produced by crime is as effective in helping them get where they want to go as is the money produced in other ways.
Those who produce the money control the machine. Crime is not a by-product of an otherwise effectively working political economy: It is a main product of the political economy. Crime is, in fact, a cornerstone on which the political and economic relations of democratic-capitalist societies are constructed. ”
Organized crime seeks to find legitimate ways to invest and make money. Today, any law, that goes against most but only to enrich some corporations was created by organized crime groups.
