Ethnographies of Organized Crime

This chapter discusses how the ethnographic method has been used to study organized crime (OC). The first part defines OC, the mafia, and ethnography. The second section reviews early field studies, and the third focuses on the seminal contribution by W.F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (1943/1993). Whyte has set the model for subsequent ethnographies of OC and the mafia as involving (1) extensive periods in the field, (2) a project that is independent of authorities, (3) developing an intimate knowledge of the place or an organization, (4) the observation of interactions, and (5) a concern for the validity and the reliability of the data collected, including the impact of the ethnographer’s position on the information gathered. The fourth section offers a selective review of subsequent ethnographies of OC which are compared and contrasted with Street Corner Society. The final section discusses risk, the use of official data, the issue of anonymity, “rapid ethnographies,” and the limitations of fieldwork.

A life lived on the corner

<p>This thesis explores the everyday life of Brother, a well-known street dweller and local identity, who lives everyday life on a busy street corner in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Brother’s way of doing ‘being ordinary’ attracts strong public curiosity, media interest, and monitoring by informal and formal social control mechanisms, including medical intervention. This research provides a comprehensive account of what can happen to those at the margins who dare, or are impelled, to do things differently. My research is inspired by the longstanding tradition of street corner sociology, and grounded within the sociology of everyday life orientation. My street ethnography involved participant observation over a three-and-a-half year period. In that time, I observed Brother and other street people, capturing the depth and nuanced complexities of a life lived in the open. Central to this thesis is an examination of the ways in which wider social structures and institutions bear upon the local micro-setting, in particular how classification processes act to ‘make, remake, and unmake’ people. Three core concepts of space, body, and social interaction are explored to examine, through the situatedness of everyday talk and social action, how social meanings are locally produced and understood. I argue that by developing spatial, bodily, and interactional methods, Brother has established organisational and social capacities, and lines of conduct, that are firmly founded in autonomous actions. Through his rejection of ascribed ‘homeless’ membership and his clear embracement of a street lifestyle, Brother’s street life is shown to subvert and trouble normative understandings, while engendering and maintaining a lived sense of home in the city he calls his whare [house]. My research contributes an Aotearoa New Zealand perspective to the international sociological street corner landscape, and provides a Wellington perspective to the emerging domestic literature on street life. More broadly, my study aims to stimulate critical sociological reflection regarding different modes of being and belonging in the world and how we, as a society, respond to this.</p>

A life lived on the corner

<p>This thesis explores the everyday life of Brother, a well-known street dweller and local identity, who lives everyday life on a busy street corner in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Brother’s way of doing ‘being ordinary’ attracts strong public curiosity, media interest, and monitoring by informal and formal social control mechanisms, including medical intervention. This research provides a comprehensive account of what can happen to those at the margins who dare, or are impelled, to do things differently. My research is inspired by the longstanding tradition of street corner sociology, and grounded within the sociology of everyday life orientation. My street ethnography involved participant observation over a three-and-a-half year period. In that time, I observed Brother and other street people, capturing the depth and nuanced complexities of a life lived in the open. Central to this thesis is an examination of the ways in which wider social structures and institutions bear upon the local micro-setting, in particular how classification processes act to ‘make, remake, and unmake’ people. Three core concepts of space, body, and social interaction are explored to examine, through the situatedness of everyday talk and social action, how social meanings are locally produced and understood. I argue that by developing spatial, bodily, and interactional methods, Brother has established organisational and social capacities, and lines of conduct, that are firmly founded in autonomous actions. Through his rejection of ascribed ‘homeless’ membership and his clear embracement of a street lifestyle, Brother’s street life is shown to subvert and trouble normative understandings, while engendering and maintaining a lived sense of home in the city he calls his whare [house]. My research contributes an Aotearoa New Zealand perspective to the international sociological street corner landscape, and provides a Wellington perspective to the emerging domestic literature on street life. More broadly, my study aims to stimulate critical sociological reflection regarding different modes of being and belonging in the world and how we, as a society, respond to this.</p>

A street corner education: Stop and search, trust, and gendered social norms

Drawing on work into procedural justice and legal socialisation, we test the empirical link between experiences of stop and search and the extent to which male adolescents hold negative gendered beliefs regarding sexuality and intimate partner relations. We reason that procedurally unfair stop/searches can signal to young people that it is ‘ok’ to abuse power at an interpersonal level. Using data from a survey of male Londoners aged 14-16, we find support for the notion that unjust stop and search experiences are associated with lower levels of trust in the police, higher levels of involvement in and exposure to gang-related activities, and believing it is acceptable to harass females in public space and control one’s intimate partner.

Lord of the flies: a psychoanalytic view of the gang and its processes

Gangs are usually seen to exist on the edge of society, in the Mafia, on the street corner, or among those engaged in people- or drug-trafficking. In this article I take a different approach and argue that, especially in response to trauma, gang functioning may be present at the very centre of our society, and is sometimes to be found in governmental, business, public and voluntary sector organisations, as well as the groups and teams within them. Using Nobel-prize winner William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies to give shape to my ideas, I develop a psychoanalytic theory of gang functioning. I draw in particular on Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas as well as concepts from the psychoanalytic study of groups and organisations. I argue that the establishment of the gang involves primitive splitting and projective identification and the perversion of adult authority. I suggest further that gang functioning involves the destruction of the sensory and communicative apparatuses that alert the gang to reality, coupled with the creation of a substitute, false "reality". These features enable the avoidance of painful truths and experiences and facilitate the enactment of hatred that is so characteristic of ganging behaviour.

Shlomo Carlebach

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (b. 1925–d. 1994) was a spiritual guide, charismatic religious leader, and influential composer of popular modern Hasidic tunes. Through his musical storytelling, inspirational insights, and personal contacts, he inspired a new form of heartfelt soulful Judaism and became a progenitor of the 20th-century neo-Hasidic renaissance. Born in Berlin on 14 January 1925, he grew up in Baden near Vienna where his father, Rabbi Naphtali Carlebach, served as chief rabbi (1931–1938). Shlomo was named after his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo (Salomon) Carlebach (b. 1845–d. 1919), chief rabbi of Lübeck, Germany. Shlomo’s maternal grandfather was Rabbi Dr. Asher (Arthur) Cohn (b. 1885–d. 1926), Chief Rabbi of Basel, Switzerland. Young Shlomo was destined by his parents to continue in the family’s rabbinic calling. With the ominous Nazi rise to power, the Carlebach family fled, eventually arriving in New York on 23 March 1939. Shlomo studied in the Haredi yeshiva high school Mesivta Torah Vodaas until April 1943, and then joined a dozen students who helped Rabbi Aharon Kotler establish the first Haredi full-time Torah-learning yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey. Then, in 1949, Shlomo embarked upon a career as the outreach emissary for the Chabad Lubavitch Rebbe. From the home base of his father’s synagogue, Kehillath Jacob, in Manhattan, Shlomo set up the first Hasidic outreach program in America. But by 1955 he had begun charting a unique “outreach” career as a “singing Rabbi.” Highlights of his career include establishing the House of Love and Prayer (HLP) in Haight-Ashbury (1968–1978) and Moshav Meor Modi’in in Israel (1976). He was the featured singer at rallies of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), and his most famous song, “Am Yisrael Chai,” was composed for their protest movement. In 1989, he led the first Jewish music tour in Russia, reaching fifty thousand people in three weeks and inspiring Soviet Jewry. He also visited Poland 1–10 January 1989 with eight concerts in ten days and thus was the first openly religious Jew to perform in Communist Poland after the 1967–1968 wave of anti-Semitism. But in his own eyes, his major achievement was as “Rebbe of the Street-Corner.” His potential constituency could be found in any forlorn corner that he encountered. And since he traveled around the world sharing his utopian vision of love and peace, he assumed a unique role as a charismatic iconoclast rebbe.

Day Laborers

Day laborers are immigrant men who seek daily employment on street corners, often next to home improvement stores and other venues trafficked by contractors and do-it-yourselfers. The combination of a strong construction market and rising undocumented immigration powered the growth of day labor through the 1990s. Although part of the underground economy, day laborers were some of the most visible immigrant workers, standing on the corners in affluent communities to find jobs. Over the next decade, they became the target of legal backlash, with more than forty cities in the greater L.A. area passing anti-solicitation ordinances making it a crime for day laborers to solicit work from the street corner. This chapter examines the coordinated legal and organizing campaign to challenge these ordinances led by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The campaign challenged local jurisdictions in the greater L.A. area that actively enforced anti-solicitation ordinances. The strategy developed by MALDEF and NDLON focused on organizing day laborers at enforcement hotspots into committees that served as plaintiffs in federal court lawsuits claiming that ordinances violated laborers’ First Amendment right to seek work. The campaign thus adopted a libertarian, rather than an anti-discrimination, legal frame. This frame was used to build precedent toward the end goal of invalidating the most aggressive ordinances: those modeled after Redondo Beach’s pioneering 1987 law banning solicitation in any public right-of-way, including sidewalks. The chapter charts the trajectory of this test-case strategy, which culminated in a seminal 2011 federal appellate court decision striking down Redondo Beach’s ordinance and thereby clearing the way for day laborer solicitation in public space regionwide.

On the Path of the Prophet in Unsettled Times: Sudan’s Republican Brotherhood Looks Abroad

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985) founded the Republican Brotherhood in the early 1950s to promote social reform through a new understanding of divine revelation which had emerged during his two years of khalwa or retreat. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Republican Brotherhood attracted a few thousand followers to Ustadh Mahmoud’s teachings, whose foundation was the discipline of tariq Mohamed, “the Path of the Prophet.” This Path was a challenging design for life that embraced gender equality and social justice against the backdrop of an increasingly Islamist-oriented Sudan. In the 1980s, the height of the Brotherhood’s membership, the Republicans confronted Sudan President Gaafar Nimeiry’s imposition of his version of “Islamic Law,” with publications and street corner lectures. Through peaceful protest, the Republican’s point was that Islamic Law would only be oppressive to the millions of non-Muslims in the country and to women. The result of this resistance was the 1985 arrest and execution of Taha for trumped-up charges of apostasy. In the decades following the passing of their teacher, the Republicans have kept a low profile in Sudan while trying to maintain both their faith and some social cohesion. In reaction to both the Islamist political conditions in Sudan and the failing economy, many Republicans have joined the Sudanese flight abroad, with modest communities of Republicans now established in the Gulf States of Qatar and UAE, as well as the United States. Through field work and interviews with members of these three communities, I have tried to understand the effort to sustain the discipline of the Path of the Prophet by Republican brothers and sisters under circumstances of the extremist orientations of Gulf politics, or the “moral ambiguity” of the United States. This study is part of a larger book project on the Republican Brotherhood following the execution of Ustadh Mahmoud.