Transnational organized crime : media, myths and moralities

Whether as news, fiction or hybrid docudrama, crime has been a consistently popular subject for media attention, prompting a stream of academic debate on the nature and impact of the diverse representations (Erikson et al. 1987; Jewkes 2004; Reiner 2007). Despite differing opinions as to this relationship there exists a broad consensus that the media tend towards oversimplification, particular forms of selectiveness and hyperbole, focussing largely on individual pathologies and violence. Structural factors such as poverty, the political and social construction of crime, or the interface between the legal and illegal are given considerably less coverage across the various genres. This is especially the case with representations of organized crime, in which Hollywood-style fiction is frequently fused with dubiously sourced facts, to provide a pulsating account of excitement and danger in an age when the media is driven by rapid news turnover and profit maximization. These hyperbolic and ‘exotic’ representations are further enhanced in the context of transnational or global crime, which by definition intensify the normative concepts of ‘foreignness’ and ‘other’. Engaging with simplistic dichotomies between good and evil, us and them, media-inspired narratives on TOC are replete with easily digested images and data that hide the semantic and moral messiness that lie behind the myths (Albini 1997). This chapter critically examines some of these representations in the context of TOC, paying particular attention to fictional and docudrama genres. The fictional genre, especially television and film, has played a significant role in the social construction of organized crime, the creation of stereotypical protagonists and associated criminal activities to the point that the border between fiction and reality has become seriously distorted (Woodiwiss 1990; see also Woodiwiss, Chapter 6). For many of the public, and more worryingly, policymakers and crime fighters, Hollywood-created characters, most famously the Corleone family in The Godfather trilogy, have come to dominate the perception of the nature, behaviour and modus operandi of a phenomenon with no ontological reality and an ever-increasing list of ethnically determined labels, from the Sicilian Mafia to the Yakuza to Yardies to Triads to the Russian ‘Mafiya’.