Contacts, Opportunities, and Criminal Enterprise

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Successful criminal entrepreneurs, argues Carlo Morselli, are similar to
legitimate ones in their reliance on networks of trusted contacts to
advance their careers. In this short study, the author seeks to
illuminate the dynamics of such networks by focusing on two model cases
of criminal success that demonstrate how criminals prosper in their
chosen fields. The first case involves Howard Marks, a notorious
cannabis smuggler who made millions over a long criminal career; the
second concerns Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano, a former
high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family.

The book is an important contribution to the study of criminal
organization. Morselli does an excellent job of demonstrating how—at
least in his case studies—career criminals have navigated trade
structures in order to outdo their competitors, reap massive profits,
and, for a time, foil law enforcement. His application of various
statistical approaches to the careers of Marks and Gravano is astute and
rewarding. A “surprisingly small number of key others” are critical
to criminal enterprises, Morselli shows, because “[like] successful
legitimate entrepreneurs, successful criminal entrepreneurs are those
individuals who know how to make the most of others in advancing their
goals.” The parallels between the legitimate and the unlawful emerge
here in striking fashion; the role of violence and coercion in long-term
criminal success, for instance, is shown not to be as important as many
had believed: “criminal entrepreneurs use conventional means to gain
criminal achievement, but they do so in criminal trades.” One of the
limitations of Morselli’s analysis, as he admits, is that it is
dependent on the (no doubt self-servingly limited) information provided
by the subjects’ published accounts of their lives. Nevertheless, the
author is able to draw compelling conclusions from the available facts
about the dynamics of successful criminal enterprises.

Contacts, Opportunities, and Criminal Enterprise should be of great
interest not only to criminologists, but to those interested in learning
more about management theory from an unusual angle.