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There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.

In small-business-communities trust is important inter/intra family particularly in relation to familial dynamics. Seldom is mistrust or distrust examined in an academic context. In business families “Black-Sheep” often rebel against familial expectations by engaging in criminal activity. This is important because entrepreneurs are eulogised by society and as an institution, family business is venerated. The very idea that small business owners would knowingly engage in crime is anathema. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using retrospective ethnography and immersion techniques this quasi-longitudinal study of (dis)organized crime in a small-business-community (SBC) starts the bridging process.

There is an assumption that business crime is best accommodated under the rubric of white-collar-criminality typically regarded as an excusable middle-class crime compared to organized working-class crime. By focusing on the black-sheep of business families collectively this work illustrates how there may be a stronger link between organized-crime-groups and the local-business-community than previously assumed because a small minority of businessmen engage in the commission of ordinary crime by choice.

The methodology used is a limitation as is replicating it in other small-business-communities.

This study provides an alternative heuristic through which to understand the application black-sheep-thesis in business settings. The knowledge developed has practical implications for the investigation of crime in such communities and for researchers in the field.

This study extends knowledge of white-collar-criminality within the business domain.

This is an original and novel study which extends our knowledge and understanding of trust based issues in business settings and the SBC.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature and content of the laws relating to market abuse with a view to determining whether they only offer a civil law remedy for the State. The three categories of insider dealing as defined by the Criminal Justice Act 1993 clearly offer a criminal law based response, but as is shown here virtually all cases of market abuse can potentially be a basis for a criminal prosecution.

The methodology adopted is to consider the other relevant areas of law, namely the Fraud Act 2006, the law of conspiracy to defraud and the law relating to misleading communications under s.397 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and then to determine whether between them they cover all the areas of behaviour caught by the definitions of market abuse.

The consequences of this paper are that the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority now have the option in almost any case of market abuse of considering whether a criminal or civil law approach is appropriate.

The approach adopted over the last two years by the prosecuting authorities of using the criminal law to a greater extent in serious cases of insider dealing can now be extended to market abuse generally where it is thought appropriate.

This paper is dedicated to the topic of the emerging challenges of traditional criminal law as posed by the development of modern technology. In certain parts of the world, the automotive industry has already implemented a new generation of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Moreover, there have been incidents where such vehicles have been involved in traffic accidents with deadly consequences. The use of autonomous intelligence is also emerging in other important sectors, such as in medicine and the military.

The issue of the legal liability of autonomous machines has been the subject of numerous philosophical debates and approached from the perspective of tort law. The question of criminal liability, however, has still not been debated more comprehensively. In this text, I will analyze the scope and limits of criminal liability of humans for criminal offenses “committed” by autonomous systems. Firstly, I will describe potential crimes of AI in context of intent and negligence. Secondly, I will propose the new concept of (shared) criminal liability, the concept I will name the Division of Labor theory.

Organised Crime is notoriously difficult to identify and measure, resulting in limited empirical evidence to inform policy makers and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of identifying a greater number of organised crime offenders, currently captured but invisible, within existing national general crime databases.

All 2.1 million recorded offenders, captured over a four-year period on the UK Police National Computer, were filtered across three criteria associated with organised crime (co-offending, commission of specific offences, three years imprisonment or more). The 4,109 “organized crime” offenders, identified by the process, were compared with “general” and “serious” offender control groups across a variety of personal and demographic variables.

Organised crime prosecutions are not random but concentrate in specific geographic areas and constitute 0.2 per cent of the offender population. Offenders can be differentiated from general crime offenders on such measures as: diversity of nationality and ethnicity, onset age, offence type and criminal recidivism.

Using an offence-based methodology, rather than relying on offenders identified through police proactive investigations, can provide empirical information from existing data sets, across a diverse range of legislative areas and cultures. This allows academics to enhance their analysis of organised crime, generating richer evidence on which policy makers and practitioners can more effectively deliver preventative and disruptive tactics.

This is the first time an “offence based” methodology has been used to differentiate organised crime offenders from other offenders in a general crime database.

There is an opinion among decision makers in Western Europe that as far as the ‘Russian organised crime’ problem is concerned it will be largely restricted to Russia and that the real threat to Western Europe will be minimal. The truth is that it is in Russia where the problem has to be attacked in order to limit its impact on Western Europe.

This study aims to critically analyse the Law 9 January 2019, n. 3, on “Measures to fight crimes against the public administration and on the transparency of political parties and movements” (so-called bribe-destroyer law).

This paper draws on reports, legal scholarship and other open-source data to examine a legislative innovation for the corruption in Italy in relation to the general guarantees of the trial process and with the controversial paradigm of the national perception index of bribery.

The Italian legislative initiative that will be examined is innovative in nature and goes beyond the constitutional and conventional principles on procedural guarantees. The new initiative needs to be integrated into the international and European action against bribery that targets criminal proceeds, and at the same time, be anchored in respect for human rights during the process.

The new initiative needs to be integrated into the international and European action against bribery that targets criminal proceeds, and at the same time, be anchored in respect for human rights during the process.

Despite the aggressiveness and lofty proclamations by those who aspire to fight corruption from the highest levels, the goal of rehabilitating Italy from one of the seven “deadly sins” that delay economic growth still seems far off.

In the absence of public ethics, the increase in criminalisation does not seem sufficient on its own to guarantee the containment of the phenomenon.

This study examines the strengths and weaknesses of the important new law, its compatibility with human rights standards and its relationship to international standards of anti-bribery policies. The aggressive legislation critically relies on the pervasive and persistent lack of perception of corruption as a crime. In the confiscation (and now also reparation) of equivalent that normally addresses assets accumulated in a lawful manner, the periculum is even presumed in re ipsa and the classical aims of caution undergo a total torsion revealing an authoritarian face that takes on the meaning of anticipating further sanctioning contents. Finally, the presence of many levels of sanctioning in relation to the same fact poses serious problems of violation of the ne bis in idem rule.

In the Canadian province of Ontario government-funded legal aid underwent significant change in the 1990s in ways that mirror the trajectory of other governmental programs typically referred to in the governmentality literature as a shift to neo-liberalism. Through an analysis of interviews with lawyers and programmatic texts closely linked to legal aid practices this chapter reveals that legal aid is shaped by neo-liberal and pastoral rationalities. The implications of these findings both for legal aid research and governmentality studies are discussed.