1. Claire Sterling’s book Thieves’ World. The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) offers a good example of this sort of commentary in the very outrageousness of her remarks. Organized crime is held up as an overbearing threat to the West, comparable to what “international communism” was in its time. The “antidemocratic” nature of mafias has also fueled a number of scholarly analyses, for instance, Louise Shelley, “Transnational Organized Crime: The New Authoritarianism,” in H. Richard Friman and Peter Andreas (eds.). The Illicit Global Economy and State Power(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 25–51.
2. On the development of the fight against organized crime on an international scale, see Peter Andreas, Ethan Nadelmann. Policing the Globe. Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
3. Michael Woodiwiss. Gangster Capitalism. The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).
4. Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, “Domestic Reformulation of the Moral Issues at Stake in the Drive against Money Laundering: The Case of Russia,” International Social Science Journal57(185) (2005): 529–540.
5. Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Thierry Godefroy, and Pierre Lascoumes, “Sentinels in the Banking Industry. Private Actors and the Fight against Money Laundering in France,” British Journal of Criminology48(1) (2008): 1–19.