dge Giovanni Falcone (subsequently murdered by the Mafia in 1992) had called "a shattering and terrifying portent" of things to come (quoted by Sterling 22). These two groups sold drugs and other contraband with an annual turnover of $300 billion and they were only the first to begin to cooperate in order to protect this income from each other. Their agreements specified the shared use of money and people and the division of markets. In the years since the 1987 summit Chinese, Japanese, and Russian groups have also made arrangements with the Italians and Colombians -- basically there exists, "an agreement to avoid conflict, devise common strategy, and work the planet peaceably together" (Sterling 23). The various parties may sometimes war among themselves but their cooperative operations, especially for laundering money and shipping contraband all over the world, dwarf the divisions among them.
Few people were truly prepared for the idea of international criminal syndicates on a large scale and resistance to the idea, as well as a mistaken belief in the ability of the police and judiciary to fight new criminal organizations, have put the U.S. and Europe in jeopardy. For example, in a 1990 article on organized crime in the British Journal of Criminology Fijnaut had dismissed what he named the "Americanistic " view of "so-called crime syndicates" (324). This is the view of the U.S. government that "there was one single, albeit segmented, nationwide crime syndicate, which was alien to American society, posing a serious threat to it in various areas, hungry for power and money" and, in this pursuit, "surreptitiously making use of all possible r
...