Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control

Michael Woodiwiss is a senior lecturer in history at the University of the West of England. He has written extensively on organized, corporate, and state crime, including Organized Crime and American Power and Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime.

Gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano are infamous as figureheads of organized crime, which is now synonymous with criminal groups such as the Mafia. Michael Woodiwiss reveals a more disturbing side to organized crime, in which government officals and wider business communities are deeply complicit. Woodiwiss shows how control policies on systematized crime are mired in corruption, legitimizing repression and concealing failure. Delving into attempts to implement such policies in the US, Italy and the UK, Woodiwiss reveals little-known manifestations of organized crime among the political and corporate establishments. Woodiwiss examines those who constructed and then benefitted from this mythmaking. These include the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, opportunistic American politicians and officials and, more recently, law enforcement bureaucracies, led by the FBI. -- from back cover.

Gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano are infamous as figureheads of organized crime, which has become synonymous with a small number of giant, hierarchically structured criminal groups such as the Mafia. However, in Double Crossed, Michael Woodiwiss challenges perpetuated mythologies to reveal a more disturbing side to organized crime, one in which government officials and the wider establishment are deeply complicit. Like the War on Drugs, the US's organized crime control policies are mired in deception and corruption. They have not worked, except as a cloak for repressive government action. Despite this, the US, allied with the UK and other G7 nations, exported those policies to other parts of the world, whose kleptocrats and gangsters then washed much of their illegal profits through western financial institutions. Woodiwiss reveals the contribution of organized criminality to the 1929 and 2008 global economic meltdowns and the subsequent cover-ups of corporate corruption. He explains the destructive rise of prison gangs as a direct consequence of the US government's wars against organized crime, amongst many other elements. This book is a revealing and disturbing look at a criminal double-standard in the international establishment.