Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
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Last annotated on June 28, 2016
CHAPTER 1 Criminal CredentialsRead more at location 312
Note: l incontro di domanda e offerta nel mercato criminale c è chi allungherebbe volentieri la bustarella se solo sapesse a chi agenti sotto copertura. come sgamarli? il linguaggio con cui si parlano i criminali il segnale è tanto più accurato quanto meno criminali ci sono. in russia le tariffe della corruzione si riportano sui giornali come capiamo se abbiamo di fronte un criminale? frequentare i posti giusti x esempio le prigioni o i bar nelle ore di lavoro o tardi la notte... vivere in zone malfamate dove altri criminali possono controllarti le referenze le amicizie essere visti con tizio la prigione come pubblicità efficace. il reinserimento?: sì nel mondo criminale: se il reinserimento nn è anonimo diventa un accrefitamento la recidiva è proporzionale alla durezza della prigione un azione criminale garantisce e può essere richiesta o anche l assunzione di droghe e altre sostanze... nella criminalità organizzata l omicidio vale più come giuramento che come crudeltà manuale del xfetto infiltrato: niente fretta... scommettere molto (i criminali sono propensi al rischio)... mosrarsi connesso mai isolato... lanciare segnali costosissimi... infrangere la legge... i mafoosi nn sono stupidi vogloono vedere che fai realmente cose cattive... la mafia ha preso contromisure: ora il novello deve avere due referenti ed è reintrodotto l omicidio iniziatico non è poi così difficile rendere un organizzazione impermeabile agli infiltrati: vedi il trrrorismo islamico ci sono casi di infiltrati che sono andati talmente al di là che è persino dubbio da che parte stessero: quando rischi la vita fai di tutto. questo apre un dilemma x i criminalu: minacciare punizioni troppo dure x i traditori impedisce di scoprire gli infiltrati i prblemi nn sono finiti: ok nn sei un infiltrato ma magari sei comunque un traditore!... di solito in questi casi i criminali preferisvono minacciare e punire che segnalare Edit
Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@INFO. PRIGIONE. CRUDELTÀ OSTENTATA. DILEMMA DELL INFILTRATOE DEL TESTATORE. UN CRIMINALE ONESTO Edit
like ordinary business, most criminal endeavors are not solo affairs. Thieves need fences; robbers rely on informants;Read more at location 313
Among the few economists to pay attention to criminal communications, Thomas Schelling wrote: “The bank employee who would like to rob the bank if he could only find an outside collaborator and the bank robber who would like to rob the bank if only he could find an inside accomplice may find it difficult to collaborate because they are unable to identify each other,Read more at location 315
Even before worrying about their partner's trustworthiness or competence as a criminal, people who want to commit a crime need first of all to identify who is potentially prepared to cooperateRead more at location 321
A building contractor once told me that he would have been delighted to pass on a brown envelope to end his long wait for a planning permission if only he knew whom to approach.Read more at location 324
The contract killer he sought to hire, however, turned out to be an undercover policeman posing as a criminal.Read more at location 327
How do you go about, for instance, finding a black-market buyer for eight bars of enriched uranium? This question taxed the brains of eleven Italian mobsters, an unholy coalition of Sicilian mafiosi and Roman and Calabrian organized criminals,Read more at location 333
The identification problem is further intensified by the fact that, contrary to a widespread belief, criminal groups are unstable. In the underworld, people have a higher rate of mobility (and mortality) than in most professions:Read more at location 358
This is partly because criminals are chased by law enforcers and have to keep moving and hiding, and because they are more inclined to use violence against each other than regular businessmen are. It could also be for “endogenous reasons. The more lucrative the business, the more potential entry it will attract, resulting in (literally) cutthroat competition and short expected life for an incumbent.”Read more at location 363
Making identification hard is arguably the most powerful deterrent against crime that the force of the law brings about, by discouraging the countless dormant criminals who refrain from acting unlawfully for fear of being caught when searching or advertising.Read more at location 366
When trying to identify partners, criminals can make two types of mistakes. First, they can miss opportunities,Read more at location 370
Mimicking a law-abiding citizen, which sometimes simply means keeping a low profile, is something most criminals have to do. This, however, can succeed too well,Read more at location 373
Second, searchers may approach a law-abiding citizen or, worse, an undercover agent,Read more at location 375
searchers may approach a law-abiding citizen or, worse, an undercover agent,Read more at location 376
Where corruption is known to be widespread, for instance, corrupting others or signaling one's willingness to accept bribes is not much of a problem.Read more at location 391
In Russia, which may have approached this state of affairs in recent times, the values of corruption “fees” for different positions of authority were openly reported in the press.Read more at location 394
So our question is: what do criminals look for, what kind of signs do they attend to, in order to identify their kindred spirits or catch the undercover agents?Read more at location 397
criminals claim to possess a special ability that enables them to identify other crooks by “gut feelings,” “a look in the eyes,” “vibrations.”Read more at location 399
But, carefully scrutinized, the evidence we can gather from the many ethnographic accounts of criminals' activities strongly suggests that they do not go about it erratically.Read more at location 401
to advertise by sending signals that only another genuine criminal type will pick up.Read more at location 404
“language is not in itself a sufficient means of determining whether a person is trustworthy,Read more at location 408
a convincing signal of a criminal type is that which only a true criminal can afford to produce and to send.Read more at location 414
A good, indeed the best, sign of a criminal type consists, of course, of observing someone committing a crime.Read more at location 418
A common strategy that allows criminals in search of one another to exchange signals consists of frequenting places where noncriminals are not likely to be found, which is like patronizing a “singles bar” when searching for a mate.Read more at location 421
They hang out in bars, gambling dens, boxing gyms, and social clubs full of other men during normal working hours or late at night,Read more at location 424
By itself, though, this strategy works only up to a point. It saves criminals from dealing by mistake with law-abiding citizens. However, if the cost of hanging around in such environments is not very high for a noncriminal, they may become very dangerous places for criminals, precisely the places where undercover agents will converge when attempting to infiltrate criminal networks.Read more at location 430
“Another method [to establish someone's criminal credentials] is by finding out what people the stranger knows.”Read more at location 437
criminals have to be extra vigilant about whom they are seen with, as other criminal onlookers may interpret the association as an implicit endorsement,Read more at location 446
Prisons promote crime in many obvious ways,Read more at location 451
Just being a prisoner is a clear and simple sign that one is criminally inclined.Read more at location 453
the better the criminal justice system is, the safer it is to assume that the company put behind bars will be invariably villainous.Read more at location 455
Doing time in prison can thus be both a stigma and a badge, depending on who is looking at it.Read more at location 461
But, once in prison, there is an abundance of opportunity to make villainous acquaintances who will be useful after one leaves:Read more at location 466
organizations that are supposed to help ex-inmates to reenter mainstream society also help unreformed criminals in their business.Read more at location 474
other effects of incarceration, such as the learning of criminal techniquesRead more at location 479
The Russian criminal fraternity known as vory made having been in a prison camp a formal requirement of membership.Read more at location 492
Thus, the expected cost of incarceration was low and the expected benefits were high.”Read more at location 496
There is also some evidence that the type of prison in which one is incarcerated has an effect on recidivism.Read more at location 516
Since prisoners are assigned to minimum-, low-, or high-security prisons on the basis of their score on a scale from 1 to 10 points “intended to reflect [their] need for supervision,”34 Chen and Shapiro were able to compare the rearrest rates of ex-inmates who had been on either side of the cutoff boundaries that had led them to be incarcerated in prisons with different security levels: “in essence, we argue that within a small interval around a cutoff the allocation of prisoners to different security levels amounts to a random assignment.”Read more at location 520
villains can certainly ask a potential partner or recruit to give them evidence of having committed crimes, and can do so without resorting to an intermediary.Read more at location 539
Internet child pornography ring, the Wonderland Club. To join the ring one had to show that one possessed ten thousand photographs and be prepared to share them with other members. The photographs were screened by a computer program, which checked whether they were different from one another and from those already available from other sources.Read more at location 543
Five or six times each month, undercover investigators are now forced to use cocaine or heroin at gunpoint, to prove to dealers that they can be trusted.Read more at location 554
At least twice a month, an officer is shot or otherwise wounded during a staged purchase, say police commanders,Read more at location 556
Before initiation, mafia novices—especially those not already members of families with a mafia tradition—are asked to commit a murder (sometimes would-be members move first and commit serious crimes before anyone asked them to do so).Read more at location 558
Aryan Brotherhood in prison adopted the same test: to gain membership, candidates “had to kill whomever the Brotherhood targeted.”Read more at location 561
But there are cases in which heinous crimes are committed purely as tests. In a hair-raising account of life in youth gangs in Colombia, the writer Efraim Medina Reyes claimsRead more at location 564
Being asked to commit a murder was, for instance, a common practice in the Algerian FLN. Sometimes the leaders would pick victims more or less at random, to see if prospective members would obey even meaningless orders.Read more at location 568
THE CASE OF SPECIAL AGENT JOSEPH PISTONE, AKA DONNIE BRASCORead more at location 582
During J. Edgar Hoover's reign at the bureau, undercover work was rarely used, “because it could be a dirty job that could end up tainting the agents.”Read more at location 584
“The fewer [lies] you have to tell, the fewer you have to remember,”Read more at location 593
He needed a “profession” and settled on jewelry theft,Read more at location 595
confiscated stolen jewels to sell so he would not have to break the law to steal them.Read more at location 597
Every good undercover agent I have known grew up on the street,Read more at location 600
You learn how to read situations and handle yourself. You cannot fake the ability. It shows.”Read more at location 602
You push a little here and there, but very gently. Brief introductions, short conversations, appearances one place and another,Read more at location 619
Above all, you cannot hurry. You cannot seem eager to meet certain people,Read more at location 621
The quickest way to get tagged as a cop is to try to move too fast.Read more at location 622
“You can't go in all the time by yourself, because they think you're either a fag or a cop. And it's good to vary companyRead more at location 631
exposed to the risk of being discovered and killed.Read more at location 641
Donnie came up with many other signals believed to be of a kind that a cop could not afford. He pretended to beat up someone who owed money to Lefty. He roughed up a comedian who had annoyed LeftyRead more at location 649
FBI was later criticized for operating very near or even beyond the limits of the law.Read more at location 661
Donnie Brasco, by faking, forging, and pretending, successfully mimicked a real bad guy but also in the sense that he did some real bad actions.Read more at location 663
removed—Lefty was described as “the biggest idiot in the history of La Cosa Nostra.Read more at location 665
And yet Lefty was careful even years after Donnie had been accepted as a connected guy.Read more at location 666
To test whether Rossi was an undercover agent, Lefty deliberately “lost” a plane ticket that Rossi had booked on his own credit cardRead more at location 668
I did not want to know more that I could logically know as a connected guy. It would be just as risky to know too much as to know too little.Read more at location 674
The mobsters learned their lesson and increased the price of the tests. Now not just one but “two mafiosi have to vouch for the proposed member.”Read more at location 679
not since childhood, then at least for fifteen to twenty years.”Read more at location 680
“a proposed member must ‘make his bones’ or kill someone, before he can become a made guy. They have done so because no agent would commit murderRead more at location 682
Sonny paid for his mistake with his life. He was killed in 1981,Read more at location 692
it can be near impossible to infiltrate groups protected by an array of features that cannot be successfully imitated—which,Read more at location 697
For instance, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative, has raised serious doubts over the feasibility of infiltrating Islamic movements.Read more at location 698
And sometimes the undercover agents themselves, unbeknownst to their employers, choose to break the law because they worry about their credibility in the eyes of the host group and the consequencesRead more at location 708
A grand case of infiltration that went well beyond the limits of the law occurred in Russia in the early 1900s. In their struggle against the terrorist bombers of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the tsar's agencies made ample use of infiltration. According to incomplete calculations, there were about 6500 agents, provocateurs,Read more at location 710
Matters concerning the security of the secret agents were of top priority, and maintaining the strong positions of agents within the terrorist organizations of the Socialist-Revolutionaries was considered more important than preventing assassinations,Read more at location 715
He knew about the majority of terrorist acts being planned by the SRs, but he did not always report to his bosses about them. Nevertheless the police paid him well for his services.Read more at location 721
Episodes of this kind are not restricted to predemocratic societies.Read more at location 722
At its peak in 1993, the Heritage Front was the largest and best-organized neo-Nazi group in Canada, boasting a contact list of 1,800 names. Grant Bristow, cofounder and a leading member of this white racist group, turned out to be a paid informant of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.Read more at location 723
The question we were faced with was whether the CSIS source [Grant Bristow] had remained within the bounds of appropriate behaviour while trying to maintain his credibility. The answer we arrived at was that in certain circumstances he had notRead more at location 733
They tend to become agents provocateurs not necessarily for the conspiratorial reasons why Joseph Conrad's protagonist in The Secret AgentRead more at location 737
When one's life is threatened, the costs of breaking the law may suddenly appear smaller than those of obeying it.Read more at location 742
This raises an interesting quandary for the criminals or terrorists who are trying to test the bona fides of others. For, by increasing the severity of the punishment meted out against undercover agentsRead more at location 745
If the punishment is kept low—and amounts, for example, just to a refusal to deal with those who will not swallow a spoonful of drug—the undercover agent may find it preferable to refrainRead more at location 748
Once someone intent on crime identifies a potential partner as a bona fide criminal, he has solved one problem only to land in another, equally difficult, one. He now has to establish whether his partner is not just a crook but an honorable one.Read more at location 758
Anyone who works outside the law is more exposed than ordinary businessmen to becoming the prey of other criminals who mimic being a criminal of the honest sort.Read more at location 761
A criminal has to be on guard against both kinds of mimics, law-enforcement agents and criminals of the wrong sort.Read more at location 764
The same kind of costly signals would be required for criminals to persuade one another that they were the honest type.Read more at location 766
criminals tend to think of each other as being of just one type, namely the dishonestRead more at location 768
The only way in which they can come almost to “trust” each other enough to cooperate is, therefore, not by signaling their type, but either by enforcing their partners' honesty with the threat of some kind of retaliationRead more at location 769
