Other Crimes, Other Criminals: Racketeering in Chinatown and Brighton Beach

The phrase nontraditional organized crime has become synonymous with non-Italian crime. Unfortunately, books and investigations examine non-Italian organized crime in the same one-dimensional fashion that Mafia-related crime has been approached. That is, the use of ethnicity as a descriptor of criminal activity is overemphasized and fails to shed light on the existence of the activity itself, and often comes perilously close to ethnic stereotyping. The alternative is to describe organized crime not just in racial and ethnic identities but in terms of the criminal activity itself, and how and why various groups participate in certain activities. In this way, we can see that organized crime is very often the result of complex situational opportunities rather than just a problem or predilection of particular ethnic groups.

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