Although organized crime is likely to become involved in almost any profitable illegal venture or activity, the organization of vice and racketeering services forms the core of organized crime's entrepreneurial activities. The legitimate market's refusal to serve sizable consumer populations is responsible for the existence of most vice operations which include gambling, prostitution, pornography, drug trafficking, and loansharking. Consequently, organized crime capitalizes on such market voids and profits from services to these consumers. Students of organized crime have noted similarities between legitimate and illegitimate businesses. Of course, organized crime's consumer goods and delivery of services are predominantly defined as illegal. Nonetheless, demands by a huge consumer population make the creation of such criminal organizations inevitable.
How much money organized crime realizes from these illegal activities is the subject of considerable and widely varying speculation. In 1986, the President's Commission on Organized Crime calculated organized crime's annual gross income at $66 billion (1986: 423). If that figure is even close to being correct, organized crime is one of the largest American industries, having roughly the same income as the textile and apparel industries, the metal industry (iron, steel, and aluminum), and a greater income that the rubber and tire industry. However, some authorities have suggested that the Commission's estimate is low. For example, James Cook, writing for Forbes magazine in 1979, estimated organized crime's revenues to be closer to $150 billion. As the President's Commission points out, that would be about $226 billion in 1985 dollars (President's Commission of Organized Crime, 1986: 419).
Organized crime provides a wide array of illegal goods and services to millions of customers on a daily basis. While this seems an obvious fact, its implications are important for an understanding of the inner workings of the business of organized crime. First, the scope of organized crime activities and the volume of business engaged in by organized crime require a massive and pervasive series of organized crime networks covering the globe. Second, it means that organized crime groups must be prepared to deliver illegal goods and services on a regular and continual basis. Thus, crime syndicates must achieve a highly efficient and effective level of organization. This is vital to understanding that organizations dealing in different goods and services are likely to have different forms of organization and are inevitably going to specialize in a specific good or service. For example, the efficient organization of a numbers gambling syndicate would most likely preclude that syndicate from engaging in the hauling of toxic wastes. The most effective type of organization in loansharking would be disastrously inefficient and ineffective in drug trafficking.
The idea of an overreaching syndicate controlling all aspects of illegal service delivery is, at least, improbable. In addition, in order to deliver illicit goods and services on a regular and continuous basis to millions of customers, organized crime must conduct its business in a public way. People cannot place bets if bookmakers are inaccessible and hidden in the deep recesses of a criminal underworld. Customers cannot find illegal drugs if drug traffickers are so concealed from the police that they cannot be located. Inevitably, this means that where organized crime exists, and it exists and flourishes almost everywhere in the United States, some form of official accommodation must also exist. Corruption is integral to the organization of crime. As we explore the different types of goods and services engaged in by organized crime and the scope of those activities, keep these basic principles of organization in mind. The exigencies of the market and the requirement for political corruption tell us more about the organization of crime than any rogues gallery of "foreign miscreants."