Organized Crime vs. White-collar Crime: Which is the Bigger Problem?

Organized crime and white-collar crime have the same objective, but only one of them dominates the public narrative. It is time to change that perception. We fear the former and complain only occasionally about the later. A series of laws and regulations, enacted over the last 50 years, have produced notably mixed results. Examples include bank secrecy laws, drug control laws, anti-money laundering, corruption and racketeering laws. These laws began in the US and Europe, and their provisions have subsequently been enacted in many other countries, largely due to the growing transnational nature of major trafficking, frauds, and corruption—and the development of international agreements to facilitate a more uniform approach (Albanese, 2018; Edelbacher, 2018). The legislative history of these laws reveals they were touted as methods to attack the profits derived from drug trafficking as a feature of organized crime. The narrative was that networks of transnational criminals were making large amounts of cash by catering to the global demand for prohibited drugs, and other illicit goods and services. This accumulation of cash was then inserted into the banking, real estate, and luxury item economies around the world, in jurisdictions that looked the other way when large purchases were made with cash, and sellers did not want to know where all that cash came from (Burgis, 2020; Teichmann, 2020).