The Gig Mafia

CHAPTER 5

Overview of the Size of the Problem

It is difficult to identify and estimate the problem of organized crime. Politics has suffused the subject matter (Critchley 2009, 234). While public prosecutors proudly proclaim and publicize their purportedly high-profile convictions of organized crime bosses and underbosses, the public may not perceive any material difference in their immediate attendant circumstances, that is, organized crime may seem almost invisible to most residents before and after the much-ballyhooed official enforcement actions. Contrast this perception with the hypervisibility of social and individual problems implicating, for example, drug abuse (e.g., opioid addictions). Thus, the effects of organized economic crime are ...