Systemic Corruption: Weapons of the Twenty-First Century, Organized Crime and the Mafia

Abstract

The twenty-first century organized crime converts itself from a passive subject to an active subject, breaking the ethic and cultural ties which characterized the traditional Mafia. Second-generation criminal enterprises provide goods, production and illegal services, manage activities within legal sectors of the economy and infiltrate the financial and commercial circuits at a local, national and international level. The development and transformation of the organized crime as “enterprise” and its participation both in the illegal and legal markets have produced a remarkable increase of money laundering and corruption, placing itself in close correlation with the economic and financial structures, as well as political-administrative structures of the civil society. In the last years, corruption – based on the traditional nexus corruptor/corrupt – has transformed itself in a triangular model because of the affirmation of the new role of the intermediary: It actually fosters the intermediation between actors with the aim to let their own interests converge. The evolution of the criminal complex phenomenon has to be considered an issue related not only to security and control – stricto sensu – but also much better related to political and economic power. The study also analyses corruption in Italy. It has become both “pervasive and systemic”, due to its ability to negatively affect the whole social-economic fabric and politics: it stresses the triangulation “organized crime-company-politics” and examines the development of “systemic corruption”.