The Howard Journal Vol 37 No 4.

Nov 98
ISSN 0265–5527, pp. 407–422

Going Down the Glocal: The Local

Context of Organised Crime

DICK HOBBS
Professor of Sociology, University of Durham

Abstract: Transnational organised crime is currently regarded as a threat to contemporary

political and economic regimes. This paper will query the use of the term transnational, and
suggest that a better understanding of organised crime can be gained from interrogating its local
manifestation.

‘For the moment we are not only without an adequate cartography of global capital-
ism, we lack political maps of our own backyards’. (Cooke 1988, p. 489)
‘And sometimes a person from the underworld?’
‘Yes’ said the witness, ‘some might drop in’.
‘Pimps and thieves and things?’ queried the judge.
‘Possibly so’ replied the gambler. (Landesco 1968, p. 72)
The destruction of national boundaries, and in particular the redundancy
of cold war narratives, have resulted in an enormous growth in concern
regarding transnational organised crime (see Godson and Olson 1993;
Labrousse and Wallon 1993; Williams 1993, 1994; Williams and Savona
1995; Sterling 1994; Calvi 1993). ‘Transnational’ is especially problematic in
referring to organised crime, as it is a term that normally relates to cross
border activity involving the explicit exclusion of the State (Hobsbawm
1994). The relationship between the State and serious crime is now estab-
lished as so varied and indeed ambiguous that the term ‘transnational
organised crime’ only has some meaning when situated within the political
science inspired moral panics that have emerged as a response to the frag-
mentation of the Eastern bloc and found a home within the budget wars of
declining western states (Naylor 1995). This paper, while not seeking to
engage with the new apocalypse, will highlight a complementary conceptual
trend, that of localisation.
Current trends in the study of organised crime express both the concept’s
global nature and the redundancy of any perception of organised crime that
does not embrace the centrality of transnationality. Yet this trend persists
without the hindrance of empirical evidence. For instance at a conference on
organised crime in Aix en Provence during the mid-1990s, the Chinese repre-
sentative explained that organised crime had been eliminated in 1949, and
blamed the slackening of social controls and the infiltration of outsiders on
its recent manifestation in Chinese society. The French blamed the Russians,
and the Interpol representative spoke mysteriously of the threat from the
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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
East. Only the Italians saw the phenomenon as a home-grown phenomenon,
and for them the Italian experience was the sole authentic one (Borricand
1997). As Potter (1994) expertly explains: ‘To suggest that righteous citizens
are being perverted, intimidated, and forced into vice by alien forces is far
more palatable than suggesting that “native” demands for illicit drugs, sex,
and gambling invite the creation of organised crime groups’ (p. 10).
The persistence of Alien Conspiracy theories has not been limited to
academic debate (cf. Cressey 1972). Threat assessments contrived by the
National Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) have concentrated upon
Triads, Yardies, Russians, Colombians, Italians and Turks (NCIS 1993a,
1993b). The identification of Aliens as the principal organised crime threat
to British society, is a device that conveniently excludes British society from
taking responsibility for its own maladies, conforming to a mythological
version of globalisation (Ferguson 1992). An overriding of the particular,
that is little more than a reworking of ‘mass society’ rhetorics crossed with a
jingoistic belief that this sceptred isle’s crime, like its beef products, is
perfectly harmless if only meddling foreigners would desist from dipping
their toxic bread in our gravy.
As indicated by Robertson (1992, 1995), globalisation has intensified the
distinctiveness and viability of locality as a context for a distinct social order,
and as Hobbs (1997) and Ruggiero (1995) argue, the organisation of crim-
inal labour mirrors trends in the organisation of legitimate labour. Local
criminal organisation was always deeply entrenched in the cultures of the
urban working class, and de-industrialisation and the consequent fragmen-
tation of traditional communities has resulted in their transformation into
disordered mutations of traditional proletarian culture (Hobbs 1995).
Transactions within the new criminal market, in common with its legitimate
counterpart, are within networks of small flexible firms featuring short-term
contracts and lack of tenure.
As the dialectic between the local and the global substantiates, the indi-
rect nature of the power wielded by large multinationals confirms
elements of flexibility, autonomy and independence that were absent
during previous eras dominated by increasingly arcane institutions such as
the mob, the firm or the gang. Trading relationships between coalitions of
criminals of different national origins involves a coagulation of local inter-
ests. It is at the local level that organised crime manifests itself as a tangi-
ble process of activity. However, research indicates that there also exist
enormous variations in local crime groups (Hobbs and Dunnighan 1997).
It is possible to draw close parallels between local patterns of immigration
and emigration, local employment and subsequent work and leisure
cultures with variations in organised crime groups. In this article I will
concentrate upon two aspects of organised crime at opposite ends of the
serious crime spectrum. In the first section I will summarise preliminary
findings from Hobbs and Dunnighan that relate to traditional local neigh-
bourhood organised crime in two areas of England. In the second section
I will refer to organised crime personnel and suggest that for a contem-
porary understanding of organised crime the career trajectories suggested
by life histories emphasise characteristics of the current serious crime

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market that require a very different reading from that required of the
traditional model.

The Local Firm

1. Downton
The Downton scene reflects the diversity of both the legitimate economy and
the ethnic mix of its population. Since the 1960s the fragmentation of work-
ing-class populations and disintegration of extended family networks have
been extensive (see Beck 1992). When the material base for such communi-
ties is removed, crime becomes located within loose collectivities of ad hoc
groupings. All that is left behind from the family firms of the 1960s are
remnants, some of whom can be found wandering around the public bar in
a shiny suit with inappropriate lapels mumbling ‘they only hurt their own’
into a glass of flat beer. Others however, often trading under the family name
operate successfully as individuals, while other family firms have mutated into
all-purpose disorganised deviant scavengers operating at the edge of any
coherent society, criminal or otherwise; the kind of family recently described
as ‘Steptoe and Son written by Tarrantino’ (Campbell 1996). What is
suggested here is not a denial of the importance of families in nurturing and
generating deviant collaborations, rather than the fragmentation of both the
traditional working-class neighbourhood and of the local labour market has
made it difficult for family-based units to establish the parochial dominance
previously enjoyed by the feudal warlords of the 1950s and 1960s. ‘The disso-
lution of the traditional working class milieu with its particular domestic
arrangements, organisation of leisure time, neighbourhood patterns and
oral networks’ (Pakulski and Waters 1996, p. 110) has led to the dissolution
of those traditional forms of organised crime that were so reliant upon this
milieu, and upon traditional family structures in particular. The new entre-
preneurial based arenas are supportive of networks that function as fertile
terrain for an abundance of entrepreneurial options, both legal and illegal
(Ruggiero and South forthcoming). As Potter (1994) explains, these
networks are: ‘. . . flexible, adaptive networks that readily expand and
contract to deal with the uncertainties of the criminal enterprise’ (p. 12).
The new rhythms of consumption and circulation which are bound by
new configurations of bureaucratic and technological capital determine
social incorporation, and are a direct consequence of the emergence of the
market-place as the primary societal dynamic. Any analysis of contemporary
society that is harnessed to the boundaries of traditional cultures and
subcultures (Horne and Hall 1995) is meaningless, and in the case of organ-
ised crime it is apparent that the serious crime community has followed the
same trajectory as that of communities based upon traditional industries
(Soja 1989). It should be stressed that unlike traditional heavily localised
criminal groups, with their overt adherence to the formal relations inher-
ited and adapted from the indigenous socio-economic sphere (Block 1983,
ch. 2), the contemporary serious crime community is the ‘arch enemy of
uniformity’ (Bauman 1992, p. 52).
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 A fine example of the new hybrid form of criminal governance,
concerned with market, as opposed to territorial domination, can be found
in the case of Patrick Tate, Tony Tucker, and Craig Rolph. Not the first
group of criminals to name themselves ‘the firm’ these three men captured
part of the lucrative ecstasy market of south Essex, and were involved in the
importation of cannabis. A small disintegrated firm, located amongst a
mixed, but largely working-class population relocated some way removed
from the traditional inner city alcoves, which along with the neighbourhood
and the extended family serve to nurture the traditional family firm. This
alliance made vast sums of money in a very short time without having any
significant influence upon the local social order. For instance, a near neigh-
bour of Tate, aggravated by the constant barking of the body-building
heroin addict’s dog, was unaware of Tate’s criminal status, or the fact that
he often carried a handgun. Until a couple of days before Tate’s death the
neighbour was threatening to ‘go around and sort him out’. In December
1995 Tate, Tucker, and Rolph were shot dead while parked in a Land Rover
in a remote country lane. While all three men had violent criminal careers,
only one had any significant lineage, retaining close links with his native
East London. Their influence was upon local trade, their territory defined
by the whims of a predominantly youthful market; the normative local order
of south Essex remaining unaffected.

2. Upton
Despite the destruction of its industrial base, Upton’s cultural inheritance is
one of a static population grounded in traditional notions of family and
neighbourhood, both of which remain coherent and relatively intact. The
principal crime groups reflect this traditional profile by being family based
and territorially orientated and are persistent features of the local landscape
across generations. Their focus is the drug trade and the protection business
generated by the city’s highly concentrated leisure industry, and they repre-
sent in both style and content an overt, identifiable and heavily localised
image of organised criminality that is totally in accord with the city’s cultural
inheritance (Ianni 1971). The form of protection that is referred to here, is
as specific and particular as that considered by Gambetta (1988, 1993), as
being central to the development and persistence of the Sicilian Mafia. The
creation of an illegal drug market centred on amphetamines and Ecstasy
generated a necessity to police the trade in and around the point of
consumption; youth orientated pubs and clubs. Unable to turn to more
conventional methods of regulating trade and protecting market share, club
owners and managers rely heavily upon the violence and violent potential
that is central to the existence of the traditional neighbourhood crime
groups that are so prominent in Upton. Their reputation and longevity
inspire a sense of trust that is crucial to the continued prosperity of any old
established firm (Hobbs 1995, chs. 3, 6), while simultaneously enhancing its
future prospects by expanding its operations beyond the confines of the old
neighbourhood into the newly defined leisure ghettos of the post industrial
city (Hollands 1995). The spectacle of physically imposing, frequently
uniformed security staff policing both the interiors and public exteriors of

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pubs and clubs, afford an elevated and highly marketable profile for crimi-
nal entrepreneurs seeking to establish a monopoly via the image of super
competency implicit to the working of any market that leans heavily upon
the marketing of trust (Gambetta 1988, 1993). Unlike the now dated form
of protection described by Schelling (1984), the protection that is provided
within the context of Upton is extremely ambiguous, in that the entity being
protected is essentially a mutant of both market and territorial domains.
The ambiguity lies in the question whose market? and whose territory? For
although the premises are seldom owned by the crime groups concerned,
and their services have been purchased to discourage disorder, when the
market is manifested as contested space it can become an arena for old
feuds between families and individuals, as well as more innovative conflicts
concerning market dominance.
Their primary concern is to translate territorial priorities into market
prerogatives, and this is reflected in the essentially conflictual relationships
that exist between the groups. The style of organised crime in Upton repre-
sents an ideal synergy with the past, and internal order and identity is main-
tained by ‘lifting out’ (Giddens 1991, p. 18) and rearticulating those routine
traditional strategies that retain coherent market potential, and shift them
to the forefront of pragmatic consciousness (see Horne and Hall 1995; Davis
1990, ch. 5; Hobbs 1988). The dilution and eventual disappearance of the
legitimate employment market redefines criminality in the context of the
new decentered, unpredictable trading economies created by the harsh
post-industrial thrust that has laid waste to traditional communities,
‘emptied out’ of marketable labour and traditional forms of governance
(Wilson 1987).
Overt organised crime in Upton is firmly entrenched in the locations,
working practices, occupational cultures and oppositional strategies of the
industrial working class, which was in itself a pragmatic response to the
demands of the craft and artisan based market-place that became valorised
as a distinct life form in the configuration of a material community (Samuel
1981). There are, no doubt, bigger money-makers operating locally, but in
terms of their effect on the local order of this city, the impact is made by
these traditional neighbourhood firms who provide a form of spatial gover-
nance that fits with the immobility of the working-class population, and the
continuity of neighbourhood boundaries and the relevance of familial ties.
We consider Upton to be an exception. The fact that it is possible to
conduct mapping exercises indicating the origins and operations of the
city’s organised crime groups suggests that compared to Downton where
such mapping exercises have been futile for a quarter of a century, Upton’s
mode of organisation is very simple.
New networks of criminal entrepreneurs, some with ancient affiliations,
have no need to limit themselves to the parameters of specific neighbour-
hoods, and operate across locales, while local thieves and dealers no longer
require the benefaction of the local lord of the manor to make a fast Ecu.
The Downton scene is diverse, fragmentary and temporaneous: the ancient
feuds that mark much of the violence to be found on Upton are largely miss-
ing. With so few traditions or reputations to protect, violence at this level in
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Downton is far more likely to be either economically instrumental or purely
recreational1. The important issue here is to stress that this is not a wholly
‘culturally constituted world’ (McCracken 1988). Material success is depen-
dant upon performance within the constraints of the structural dynamics of
a local class milieu that is realigned in negotiation with global markets.
Consequently the ever evolving ecology of late 20th century urban Britain is
as influential upon structures of criminality as it was in the writings of
Mayhew (1861) or Booths (1889; cf. Chesney 1968). The east ends and the
west ends of our cities, and their signature deviant coalitions were created by
the ‘ecological communities’ (Burgess 1929; cf. Thrasher 1927; Landesco
1968; Morris 1957, chs. 2, 4, 11), of both pre-industrial and industrial worlds,
which in turn were framed by the economic exploitation of particular
topographies (Hobbs 1988, ch. 5) as well as the municipal strategists of the
19th century (Stedman-Jones 1971, ch. 8) and their contemporary heirs. This
is the backcloth upon which contemporary serious crime networks operate.

Hubs
During our, at times, vain search for structure amongst the plethora of
deviant identities that inhabit the urban landscape, we became all too aware
of the biographies and career trajectories of individuals who were free to
seek out money-making opportunities as sole traders, yet will often collabo-
rate with established criminal firms. These individuals operate within multi-
ple cross-cutting networks of criminal and legitimate opportunity: they are
not ‘gang members’, nor have they pledged allegiance to some permanent
structure, but constitute hubs of action and information linking networks
featuring webs of varying densities. In some cases these individuals are
better money-makers than the household names who make up the criminal
firms that will be recognisable to any local cab driver.2
Bill and Ben
Bill and Ben’s criminal careers began separately as local teenage burglars.
They started working together in their late teens, robbing offices and facto-
ries, operating within various amorphous coalitions of part-time thieves. In
his early twenties Bill received two years imprisonment for theft and receiv-
ing stolen goods, and on his release he teamed up with Ben and an associ-
ate from prison in order to plunder building sites. They worked in
collaboration with building workers and contractors to steal large quantities
of builders supplies, and then switched to equipment and light plant
machinery. With the close collaboration of contractors, in particular, they
became over a five-year period wealthy men, and both were able to invest in
property. Ben bought a suit and moved into property development funded
by mortgage frauds, using family members on his wife’s side as a front.
During the property boom Ben had invested in the importation of cannabis
and by the time his business went bust he was borrowing money to invest in
dope. The property market collapsed, his marriage failed, and the familial
fallout of the mortgage scam intensified the chaotic divorce proceedings.
Ben’s lack of funds and an unrelated dispute with his partners assured the

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decline of the dope importation business which had been located within a
legitimate transport company, and Ben joined the massed ranks of small-
time local dealers.
Bill meantime had prospered, buying a share in a thriving pub. He
teamed up with Ben as part of a loose collectivity of men who plundered
lorries in all night car parks. They would borrow a lorry, put false plates on,
enter the lorry park, pay the fee to the security guard, park the lorry and the
driver would leave. During the night the thieves, who had been playing
cards in the back of the lorry, would exit, locate a target or targets and load
up their own lorry. At dawn the driver would return and drive thieves and
plunder to the goods yard of Ben’s dope partner, change the plates back to
the original and distribute the goods via a network of outlets constituted
mainly of legitimate businesses.
Bill struck up an association with a group of men importing and dealing
in amphetamines. The myriad of connections that this led to in the pub and
club fraternity proved more profitable than robbing lorries, an activity from
which he gladly retired and opened a secondhand furniture business, using
his contacts in the clubs to move large quantities of stolen CDs and designer
clothes. Bill, lost in drink, remarried and left the area, and Ben’s business
partners have become ‘heavier’ as his wealth has increased.
There are no key players in this network, no ring leaders, bosses or godfa-
thers. It is a co-operative, a series of temporary social arrangements that
enables a constantly changing group of actors to make money from predom-
inantly criminal opportunities.

Dave Peters
Dave Peters was an all-purpose thief who by the late 1970s regularly collab-
orated with various criminal coalitions to import and wholesale cannabis.
His criminal career has featured a long-term relationship with Gary Smith.
He was involved during the early 1980s with the administration of a team of
burglars who were working freelance with Gary Smith, and later went on to
assist in the management of a number of prominent pubs that now form a
chain across Downton. In the early 1990s, Dave moved to Spain and set up
a business as a shipping agent: he deals primarily with consignments to Ibiza
and owns both commercial and residential property on the Costa Del Sol.
Gary Smith owns clubs on Ibiza and has for at least eight years been import-
ing and distributing Ecstasy and amphetamines, and for about five years he
has been involved in importing cocaine. Dave also owns warehouses on the
periphery of Downton, which apart from their legitimate use, are also used
by thieves as a ‘slaughter’, a venue for the ‘cutting up’ of loads and distrib-
ution of stolen goods.

Ned
In many respects, Ned is not dissimilar to other successful 50-year-old busi-
nessmen. He lives with his second wife and their two children in a
£100,000 house; he drives a new Mercedes car, is being pursued by the
Inland Revenue for unpaid tax, is a member of his local sports-health club
and has a mistress. Where he differs, however, is in the diversity of legal
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and illegal income-generating activities in which he has been, and is,
involved.
Born into a family who had for three generations been successfully
involved (both legally and illegally) in taking bets on horse races, he had, as
a young man, been accustomed to having access to large sums of ready cash.
However, on leaving school with a handful of GCEs and CSEs, he found the
small fixed wage he received as a trainee shop manager insufficient to satisfy
his developing fondness for women, gambling, drinking bourbon and smok-
ing cannabis. With requests for cash rebuffed by his father, who told him
that ‘you’ve to stand on your own two feet’, Ned sought additional sources
of income. He became a regular visitor to greyhound racing ‘flapping’
tracks where he quickly became involved in the doping of dogs and the
fixing of races. Using pseudonyms and travelling widely, his betting on fixed
races started to generate the income he desired. However, he sought greater
rewards. Using the proceeds of a win on a fixed race, he bought enough
cannabis to set himself up as a small dealer in the predominantly rural clubs
and pubs that he regularly visited to listen to folk music. Initially dealing to
friends and close acquaintances, within months he had established a small
distribution network, directly employed three others and was able to leave
his paid employment. Through that drug network, Ned met Angus who was
part of an active burglary team targeting ‘good quality houses’. Over the
next two years he bought stolen property from Angus and others who had
learned of his abilities to sell-on virtually any item through the extensive
network of contacts he had built up by his drug trading and his gambling at
dog and horse race tracks throughout the UK and Ireland.
The good luck ran out when someone whom the police had caught in
possession of ten crates of stolen whisky, bought from Ned, informed on
him. Ned was sentenced to nine months for handling stolen goods. On
release, he set himself up as a jobbing plumber (having learned the basics
from a family friend) and quickly became reasonably prosperous. Within
two years he was employing a dozen or so men and, by paying backhanders
to ‘oil the wheels’, successfully tendering for large plumbing contracts. At
the same time, Angus introduced him to a wider circle of criminal contacts
– some of who were part of a gang involved in armed robberies at sub-post
offices.
Having found prison a ‘devastating experience’, Ned believed it might be
useful, if he was arrested again, to have a bargaining tool with which to alle-
viate the consequences of the situation. He decided therefore, to inform on
the robbery team. He approached a police detective he had met at a social
event and, over a period of months, provided information that eventually
led to the arrest of a number of gang members. Although money was not his
motivation for doing so, he found the rewards that the police paid for infor-
mation a useful addition to his income. Ned has maintained relationships
with police officers since that time – informing ‘as and when necessary’. His
informing activities went undetected by his criminal acquaintances, and
throughout the 1970s and 1980s Ned continued to dispose of stolen prop-
erty – anything from an industrial generator to a lorry-load of toys. During
this period his legitimate business activities had their ups and downs and,

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while continuing to run the plumbing business, he briefly diversified into
the hire of plant and the selling of upholstery. Neither proved viable and,
after selling them at a loss, he concentrated on consolidating his plumbing
business.
With the awarding of plumbing contracts within the UK and Europe, his
network of contacts grew. Many of those he met through legitimate activities
were wealthy and it was not unusual for Ned to be invited to their homes.
Sometimes, if he thought he could make a reasonable amount of money, he
later arranged for their homes to be broken into and have items he speci-
fied stolen. Believing dealing in drugs to be ‘too risky’ and likely to get him
a substantial prison sentence if caught, Ned had not resumed dealing on his
release from prison. However, during the 1980s while working on a contract
in Holland he was approached by a group of criminals whom he knew by
reputation only. ‘You could not refuse these people unless you wanted to
end up badly beaten or worse’ and on two occasions he allowed a work van
to be driven into the UK from Europe by a third party. Although never
directly told what was being smuggled he had little doubt and was ‘well
rewarded’ for his ‘assistance’.
By the end of the 1980s Ned was relatively well off. Nevertheless, during
the 1990s, while continuing with his flourishing legitimate business activi-
ties, he is persistently on the look out for supplementary sources of income.
Provided he assesses the activity to have a low risk factor, he will still buy and
sell stolen property, dabble in selling counterfeit currency or any other
commodity that will return a profit. However, most days of the week Ned can
be found at his health club where he is considered by the staff as a busi-
nessman reaping the rewards of a successful career.

Discussion
The flexibility that is apparent within the contemporary serious crime
‘community’ assures that there is considerable scope for innovative engage-
ments with the market. These engagements create disintegrated criminal
firms unfettered by ‘nostalgic paradigms’ (Robertson 1995), or the shackles
of arcane practices, and are typified by their flexible nature and increasingly
unpredictable temperament. They are operating within multiple, interwo-
ven networks of legitimate and illegitimate opportunity constituting both
personal criminal networks and specific activity networks, and as Potter
(1994) notes, these networks are: ‘small, fragmented, and ephemeral enter-
prises (which) tend to populate illegal markets – not large corporate syndi-
cates’ (p. 13). Within the drug market in particular, trade is carried out
between networks of these small flexible firms, for disorganised crime
mirrors disorganised capitalism, in that the indirect nature of the power
exercised by large transnationals confirms elements of flexibility and adapt-
ability amongst smaller structures (Lash and Urry 1994).
The heritage of locales such as in Upton, that are steeped in traditional
notions of criminality established by the precedents of indigenous markets,
yet succeed in simultaneously engaging with contemporaneous criminal
opportunities, is an explicit acknowledgement of the distinct characteristics
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inherent in local demographics, of variations in demand, of the indigenous
utility of space, and of the power inherent in the notion of a distinct homo-
geneous and identifiable enacted environment of local serious criminal
activity. Cumulatively, this empowers organised crime with the capacity to
summon some retrospective order, and inject it into a lifeworld that is prone
to chaotic, apparently incoherent interludes (Reuter 1984). By blending
their experiences of the enacted environments of contemporary serious
crime markets with this sense of ‘retrospective unity’ (Bauman 1992, p. 138),
a generalised recipe of locality (Robertson 1995, p. 26) relying heavily upon
an invented tradition (Anderson 1983) is created.
However, in Downton, the territory that defined and shaped organised
crime groups has disintegrated, and serious crime become removed from the
territories that spawned its most prominent practitioners and their elemen-
tary forms of organisation (King 1991, p. 6). As Morris (1957, ch. 11) has so
clearly indicated, the specificities of local housing policies are crucial in
understanding the distribution of delinquency (cf. Baldwin and Bottoms
1976). In the case of organised crime groups, both Downton’s municipal
housing policy, and the region’s private housing market has succeeded in
distributing the serious crime community and its progeny over a wide, amor-
phous territory. This instability along with the globalisation of legitimate
markets, has speeded the disintegration of traditional cultures (Bursik 1986),
and the fact of global drug markets has contributed significantly to the elim-
ination of traditional criminal territories and their accompanying historic
practices, feuds, and alliances. Consequently organised crime groups as
social systems have been stretched across time and space, their practitioners
residing upon a socio-economic terrain indistinct from that occupied by civil-
ians, and contrasting with all prior forms of criminality: ‘. . . in respect of
their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and
customs, and their global impact’ (Giddens 1991, p. 1). In Downton with the
exception of entrepreneurial youth gangs, it is quite simply impossible to
exchange territorial superiority for market domination, and the drug market
is an essentially disintegrated sector. The paradox is that the alleged emer-
gence of transnational crime federations has created markets best served by
‘vertically disintegrated networks of small firms engaged in transaction rich
linkages of market exchanges’ (Lash and Urry 1994, p. 23).
The dialectic between the local and the global (Giddens 1990, p. 64,
1991, p. 22) epitomises and underlines markets in both the legitimate and
illegitimate spheres where complex affinities between global and local
spaces are negotiated, creating an enacted environment consisting of
indigenous renditions of global markets (Robins 1991). This environment is
where:
. . . the business of crime is planned, contacts are made, some crimes are carried out,
the fruits of crime are often enjoyed, and the methodologies for the integration of
organised criminals into civil society are established. (Block 1991, p. 15; cf. Hobbs
and Dunnighan 1997)

Contemporary organised criminality is expressed through local trading

networks (Dorn et al. 1992, pp. 3–59; cf. Piore and Sabel 1984), and
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appropriate commercial viability is assured (cf. Hobbs 1995, ch. 7) by the
continual realignment of local precedents in the context of global
markets (Giddens 1991, pp. 21–2; cf. Hobbs 1995, ch. 5). In order to co-
ordinate relations between individuals and groups (Giddens 1979, pp.
65–6), both organised crime and its legitimate counterpart is involved in
‘constant mediations and re-negotiations that are duplicated as perpetu-
ally mutating social systems of culturally indeterminate extraction and
eclectic commercial destination’ (Hobbs 1997, p. 67).
The scope and extent of this activity depends upon the degree of connec-
tivity between sets, and it is this connectedness rather than corporate iden-
tity that forms the structural connotation inherent in ‘organised crime’. The
connections between sets, the relationships that lie at the core of serious
crime groups, can be based upon familial, interpersonal, geographic or
commercial sets, and often some combination of some or all of the above.
These combinations with their multi-dimensional faces, ‘form stars
connected by hubs made up of shared vertices’ (Gould 1991, p. 25; cf.
Johnson 1986). For the purpose of our ongoing study of serious crime
networks (Hobbs and Dunnighan 1997), hubs are represented by individu-
als who by virtue of their interconnectedness with these multidimensional
sets combine flexibility and mobility with crucial qualities of relationality.
The power of these individuals that I have dubbed hubs should not be
underestimated. Even within environments that feature established tradi-
tional family based crime groups, network hubs are licensed to operate in an
infinite variety of deviant collaborations. Dave, Bill and Ben, and Ned are
associated with a whole gamut of criminal entrepreneurship and with
numerous combinations of networked interactions. These interactions
consist of infinite mutations based on socio-economic, spatial, familial and
interpersonal sources which serve as the springboard for negotiated career
trajectories featuring pecuniary arrangements of varying breadth, depth and
intensity. The temporary nature of most of these arrangements is due to
their degree of embeddedness, and their parallel, simultaneous, and inci-
dental engagements with legitimate opportunities (Smith 1980), in no way
diminish their potency. Indeed their elusiveness is considerably enhanced
by these upperworld associations, and the ensuing anonymity that indirectly
follows serves to make them less vulnerable to the kind of informant
inspired corporate collapse that can occur within more formal structures
(Iamnuzzi 1993).
It is vital to emphasise that within networked crime, careers do not neces-
sarily follow a relentless ascent. Ben’s criminal life at the time of writing is
all but over, while Bill’s has yet to peak. Dave’s entrepreneurial activities are
so well spread across Europe and so entwined with legitimate commercial
activity as to make it impossible to weed out the good notes from the bad
money, while Ned’s past collaborators are rather more exotic and indeed
venomous than the punters to whom he sells training shoes from the back
of his car. Peaks and troughs, expansion and retraction all inform the
density, strength, and spread of networks that must be understood as much
for their flexibility and subsequent interactive qualities as for their criminal
content.
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 The local neighbourhood firm is essentially a local social system: ‘. . .
patterns of relationship among individuals, which have the force of kinship,
and which can be changed only by drastic, often fatal action’ (Ianni 1971, p.
35). Its strength and longevity stems from its proximity and therefore
continued identification with a locale that retains a well of historical senti-
ment. It becomes possible to translate the conventions and procedures of
previous eras, and place them in the present, involving what Douglas (1995)
has termed: ‘selective remembering, misremembering and disremember-
ing’ (p. 13). In Downton however where the material base for such commu-
nities is removed, and crime becomes located overwhelmingly within loose
collectivities of ad hoc groupings, the construction of enduring monuments
to obscure and redundant practices is reliant upon the deification of key
individuals as functional touchstones of competence and honour (Hobbs
1997) whose task is: ‘. . . recycling old trade names, refurbishing old prop-
erties, and laying claim to the production of classics . . . their image is inten-
sively marketed on the strength of an aestheticized version of the past’
(Samuel 1994, p. 78; cf. Sinclair 1995).
The eternal recurrences of ancient underworld themes constitute a quest
for order (Bauman 1993, pp. 1–17) that is a retort to the ambiguous quality
of contemporary serious crime, with entrepreneurially orientated commer-
cialism which stands in contrast to the harsh proletarianism of the past.
These ‘cultural chaperones from previous eras’ (Hobbs 1997) perform in
Downton the function of informing the practices of contemporary criminals,
and providing reference points both for their activities and for those civilians
for whom the notion of a distinct homogeneous and identifiable proletarian
based milieu is no longer part of their enacted environment. Any touchstone
with the past, with a social order that resonates of traditional working-class
community empowers those that constitute the debris of the de-industri-
alised emptied-out locales with the ability to derive a sense of order, albeit
retrospective, and implant it into a culture that is disordered, inchoate and
episodic (Pilleggi 1987): ‘where there were no rules, where cheating, lying,
and stealing were accepted, even expected’ (Anastasia 1991, p. 279). As Wilk
(1995) has noted: ‘The same processes that destroy autonomy are now creat-
ing new kinds of locality and identity’ (p. 130), and the recurrence of sacred
myths related to traditional strategies and iconic individuals, preserves an
illusion of an enduring expert system. In Upton, where both the traditional
community and its serious crime prodigy remain relatively intact, it is possi-
ble, to blend their experiences of the enacted environments of contemporary
serious crime markets with a sense of ‘retrospective unity’ (Bauman 1992, p.
138), and create an imaginary community that although it may rely heavily
upon an invented tradition (Anderson 1983), retains market potency as a
spatially defined local order within a post-industrial milieu imbued with
essentially extraterritorial organisation.
It is crucial therefore to be sceptical of models of organised or serious
crime that rely heavily upon transnationality, cross border, international or
other metaphors of globalisation at one end of a spectrum and ‘local street
gangs’ (Rider 1990) at the other. Such a model fails to embrace the
complexity of ‘local contextualities’ (Giddens 1991, p. 22), and although

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the essential connectedness of contemporary organised crime which is
necessitated by trading relationships that stretch across the globe (Harvey
1989) is a major feature, this does not indicate either a local/global
action/reaction polarity, or a cultural homogeneity that will override differ-
ence. As Robertson (1995) notes: ‘it makes no good sense to define the
global as if the global excludes the local . . . defining the global in such a way
suggests that the global lies beyond all localities, as having systematic prop-
erties over and beyond the attributes of units within a global system’ (p. 34).
Current research indicates that even the classic ‘international’ criminal
organisations function as interdependent local units (Dunnighan and
Hobbs 1996), and the more recent activities of Bill for instance, suggests
that the incorporation of locales into overlapping networks of legal and ille-
gal commerce more accurately describes his activities than the compression
of criminal action into a world order of transnational corporations.
Organised crime is, to paraphrase Latour (1993): ‘Local at all points’.
Unlike previous eras, contemporary organised crime with its emphasis upon
drugs, fraud and counterfeiting, simultaneously occupies both the local and
global. Further, these criminal activities offer the possibility of moving from
one sphere to another. For as my examples indicate criminal career trajecto-
ries no longer are limited to specific, often stereotyped geographic locations
of some urban ‘underworld’ (Hobbs 1997). Drug networks in particular
constitute: ‘. . . continuous paths that lead from the local to the global, from
the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary’
(Latour 1993, p. 117). Networks are the media through which individuals
and groups move between the local and the global, but this does not indicate
the kind of structural determinism suggested by many writers on organised
crime. Networks here refer to metaphors for relationality (Strathern 1995, p.
179), and as can be seen from the previous examples relations between indi-
viduals vary according to differentiation in demographic dispersion, familial
composition, ethnic distribution and integration, commercial practice, trad-
ing patterns, the economic backcloth of the legitimate culture and the partic-
ular use of space (King 1991, p. 111; Soja 1989). Organised crime is not
experienced globally or transnationally, for these are abstract fields devoid of
relations (Strathern 1995, p. 179). We experience crime as a local phenome-
non, and our cumulative experiences constitute a global way of seeing which
afford us a sense of scale that allows us the capacity to measure and compare
(Strathern 1995). It is this capacity to measure, to transcend the local and
create scales that lends licence to the kind of universalist discourse that
empowers the creation of scenarios of global expert systems.
The notion of organised crime, particularly in the current vogue form of
‘transnationality’ needs to be reconsidered in the light of empirical
research, which indicates that ever mutating interlocking networks of
locally-based serious criminality typifies the current situation.

Notes
1 For a discussion of the complex relationship between instrumental and non-instru-
mental violence within serious crime networks, see Hobbs (1995, ch. 3 and pp. 121–4).
2 The following case studies are taken from Hobbs and Dunnighan (1997).

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Occasional Assessors

We would like to thank the following people who have helped with
assessments during 1998:

David Downes London School of Economics

Nic Groombridge St Mary’s University College, London
Tony Marshall Home Office
Morag McDonald University of Central England
Eugene McLaughlin Open University
Ed Mortimer Home Office
John Muncie Open University
Doug Sharp University of Central England
Neal Shover University of Tennessee
Ann Worrall Keele University

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