Among the four circles of the national defence perimeterNational security encompasses the management of crises affecting the State, society, the economy and institutions, and in particular the effects of organised crime. She is an economist and criminologist at the Security - Defence - Intelligence Department of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM) and a lecturer at the Gendarmerie nationale officers' school, Clotilde Champeyrache explains the criminal mindset, its impact and possible solutions for dealing with it.
HOW CAN ORGANISED CRIME DESTABILISE A COUNTRY, ITS ECONOMY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS?
By its very nature, organised crime, by refusing to respect legislative prohibitions, calls into question the foundations of our societies: it is the common, legitimate and recognised rules that form the basis for belonging to a group. By undermining public order, producing and marketing prohibited goods and services, and improperly appropriating the wealth of others (through fraud, deception, violence and theft), criminal organisations are attacking the functioning of our societies, including symbolically.
More tangibly, the criminal organisations that make illicit profits also disrupt our economies by reinjecting this dirty money into the legal economy. These illicit flows also call into question our national accounting systems: faced with a recurring observation of inequality between "uses" and "resources" at the end of the financial year, in 2014 Eurostat asked EU Member States to include drug trafficking, forced prostitution and alcohol and tobacco smuggling in the calculation of GDP. The aim was to correct statistical biases introduced by the inflow of dirty money into the legal economy (money laundering) and the outflow of money into the illegal sphere (consumption of illegal goods).
"The influx of cash could destabilise the financial system".
The use of laundered money in the legal economy also raises questions of national security. The influx of cash can destabilise the financial system. Indeed, the financial crisis of the 1980s in Japan was dubbed the yakuza recession. Investment in real estate encourages financial bubbles and potentially secures criminal assets. When criminals invest in the construction sector, they do so in order to capture public contracts, thereby diverting public money to their own benefit.
Dirty money can also be used to bribe: the threat must then be assessed according to the professions involved and the recurrence of the process. Criminal organisations can bribe for reasons that could be described as mainly logistical: dockers, customs officers and accountants, for example, could be targets. Others will try to bribe the forces of law and order to avoid repression and conviction. Some will succeed in corrupting right up to the very top of the State, and will deeply undermine the political sphere, thereby delegitimising the institutions.
ARE ANY AREAS OR CRIMINAL GROUPS MORE DESTABILISING FOR A COUNTRY THAN OTHERS?
Not all criminal groups are alike, not all carry out the same activities and not all pursue the same goals. There are criminal hierarchies and models of criminal 'success'.
Mafias, as defined in article 416 bis of the Italian Criminal Code, are truly the elite of organised crime. Fortunately, they are rare: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, but also the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads can lay claim to this title. These are criminal organisations that exploit the strength of the associative bond to produce "subjugation and omerta"; they simultaneously carry out several illegal activities but, above all, they are present in the legal sphere from the outset. Their aim is to condition the legal sphere, from an economic, political, social and even cultural point of view.
To do this, they have declared legal businesses that not only provide cover and serve as money-laundering instruments, but also serve to ensure territorial control by recruiting labour and distributing income, thereby creating a form of social legitimacy around the criminal organisation. From a political point of view, the mafias practise what the Italians call the "exchange vote": the mafia chiefs control - thanks in particular to the social legitimacy they have built up - packages of votes that they offer to candidates in local elections. The politician who accepts the corruption pact, once elected, returns the favour by manipulating calls for tender for public contracts, opportunistically modifying town planning schemes, authorising the construction of shopping centres... So many economic opportunities that will be exploited by legal mafia-owned businesses.
"THE MAFIAS ARE DEVELOPING GENUINE ALTERNATIVE SOVEREIGNTY OVER THEIR TERRITORY".
It's easy to see that camorra is a form of criminality that shapes the daily lives of the people living in the territories it controls. It's not surprising that in Naples, the other name for the camorra is 'o sistema', the system, and that some of the neo-melodic music typical of the Parthenopean city praises the mafiosi on the run and 'honourable society'. The mafias are developing a genuine alternative sovereignty over their territory, a sovereignty that is parasitic on that of the State and directly linked to illegal activities. Because their aim is the quest for power, they escape the overly restrictive definition given by the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organised Crime, known as the Palermo Convention, in 2000, which limits the aim of criminal groups to the quest for financial or material advantage.
One might think that these phenomena are limited to very specific territorial areas and that this anchoring constitutes a limit to mafia expansion. This is only partly true. Today, the 'Ndrangheta poses a very serious threat to governments on every continent. The 'Ndrangheta is not content to simply accompany the global trafficking in which it is involved, particularly cocaine trafficking. It is also moving abroad to recreate territories of Mafia control where it can deploy the full range of Mafia activities: illegal activities and territorial conditioning, infiltration of the legal economic sphere, and manipulation of the political sphere. The 2015 Aemilia investigation had already established that Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, was now a Mafia territory under the control of Calabrian Mafia families.
Abroad, countries such as Switzerland and Germany are also showing worrying signs of the 'Ndrangheta's conditioning capabilities. The 'Ndrangheta's strategy of territorial conquest is extremely worrying.
ARE STATE STRUCTURES ADAPTED TO THE FIGHT AGAINST THE DESTABILISING ACTIONS OF CRIMINAL ORGANISATIONS?
Some countries are better equipped than others to fight crime; historical trajectories obviously play a role in the development of elaborate systems. Logically, Italy has the best anti-mafia arsenal in the world, yet it is still affected by the presence of the mafia. The Netherlands has long been known for its weak criminal penalties for involvement in drug trafficking.
States must be able to hit criminal organisations as a coherent entity and not just as aggregates of individuals. They must also have the tools to track down illegal financial flows and confiscate criminal assets. But asset investigations that enable such confiscation take time and resources. The fight against crime therefore remains a major investment whose global stakes are not always fully understood, because all too often we continue to think of the legal and illegal worlds as two worlds separated by a relatively watertight border. This is not at all the case. The two worlds interact and the illegal world has an impact on the legal sphere.
At the same time, it is imperative that governments learn not to limit themselves to a purely economic view of the issue. Not all criminal organisations are satisfied with the pursuit of profit alone. They may also seek - and sometimes succeed in the case of mafias - to exercise territorial power. But this quest for power is not generally well integrated by States. It should also be noted that many criminal organisations are now involved in a range of activities: fighting in too many silos means that it is not possible to understand how these organisations operate as a whole, and risks producing half-hearted results that will only affect the criminal organisation in part.
Finally, it is important to understand that our economies are extremely fragile in the face of the criminal threat. The over-idealised market has shown that it is incapable of expelling illegal agents on its own. Worse still, some players see complicity with the illegal world as just another economic opportunity. The reaffirmation of the law and the quest for greater security in the flow of goods and capital must provide a better framework for globalisation, the criminal dimension of which has all too often been overlooked.
SOME COMMENTATORS BELIEVE THAT THE NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM ARE ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING "NARCO-STATES" DUE TO THE ACTIVITIES OF THE "MOCRO MAFFIA". WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Words matter. A narco-state is a state on a drip-feed of dirty money from drug trafficking, where the institutions are conditioned by the drug traffickers. At present, in Belgium and the Netherlands, it can be said that the economy is largely irrigated by drug money because of the massive arrivals, mainly of cocaine, which supply the European market. However, it would be an exaggeration to say that political structures have been infiltrated by crime.
The fact that the "Mocro Maffia" has turned to outward-facing violence - as opposed to the internal violence typical of settling scores - and that it is threatening political or princely figures shows that there is an attempt to intimidate, to establish a balance of power. If the State were already in a relationship of complicity or submission, these episodes would be largely pointless. The reaction of governments, with, for example, the accelerated creation of a national drugs commission in Belgium, also shows that Belgium and the Netherlands are taking the threat on board.
However, their reaction was late in coming. The "Mocro Maffia" has been thriving in the Netherlands for some twenty years. From street level and small-scale cannabis trafficking, it has made a place for itself in cocaine trafficking. This move upmarket is the result of an underestimation of the threat, and at the very least a form of naivety in relation to trafficking. The liberal credo based on a "merchant nation" tradition has often pushed security issues into second place in favour of economic efficiency: in the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, only around 2% of goods are checked. The argument is that the quest for competitiveness does not sit well with the slowdowns that customs checks on containers entail. But this overlooks the fact that the economy is interwoven with society and politics.
What about France? The town of Nîmes has just closed a media library because drug dealers were controlling the municipal staff, implicitly denouncing a loss of local sovereignty.
The problem with criminal hierarchies is that the most powerful organisations become a model to be emulated. This is reinforced by the fact that criminal organisations of all kinds, far from operating in an oligopolistic fashion, cooperate enormously and co-manage a number of trafficking operations. This results in learning effects that reinforce the emulation effect. The result is that we end up with "small" criminal organisations which, if they are not Mafia organisations, will adopt the Mafia method and therefore try to create conditions of subjugation and omerta in the areas where they are based. This is the strategy we see in Nîmes, but it can also be observed in the halls of certain housing estates or, more recently, in a district of Valence. Controlling the territory - or attempting to establish such control - shows a desire to express power to the authorities, but also to rival gangs.
