Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK

Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK is an absorbing account of organized crime in the East End of London. Its author, Professor Dick Hobbs, has a distinguished record of research in the field over many decades. His previous books include: Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (1988); Bad Business: Professional Crime in Modem Britain (1995); and Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night time Economy (2003). Together his considerable corpus of work has made an important contribution to our understanding of the underworld of professional criminals, the workings of police detectives, and of private security. Lush Life has as its particular focus the constructed nature of organized crime and its changing history. However, it continues Hobbs' exploration of themes addressed in his earlier works: not least the operation of illegal markets, criminal entrepreneurship, and the implications of the development of the night-time economy for both. Yet again, Hobbs has immersed himself in the life of the East London neighbourhoods in which he was born and grew up to reveal the myriad ways in which criminal activity is an everyday feature of urban existence in this very impoverished part of the city.