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This book covers organized crime groups, empirical studies of organized crime, criminal finances and money laundering, and crime prevention, gathering some of the most authoritative and well-known scholars in the field. The contributions to this book are new chapters written in honor of Professor Dick Hobbs, on the occasion of his retirement. They reflect his powerful influence on the study of organized crime, offering a novel perspective that located organized crime in its socio-economic context, studied through prolonged ethnographic engagement. Professor Hobbs has influenced a generation of criminology researchers engaged in studying organized crime groups, and this work provides a both a look back and this influence and directions for future research. It will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with a focus on organized crime and financial crime, as well as those interested in corruption, crime prevention, and applications of ethnographic methods

This book covers organized crime groups, empirical studies of organized crime, criminal finances and money laundering, and crime prevention, gathering some of the most authoritative and well-known scholars in the field. The contributions to this book are new chapters written in honor of Professor Dick Hobbs, on the occasion of his retirement. They reflect his powerful influence on the study of organized crime, offering a novel perspective that located organized crime in its socio-economic context, studied through prolonged ethnographic engagement. Professor Hobbs has influenced a generation of criminology researchers engaged in studying organized crime groups, and this work provides a both a look back and this influence and directions for future research. It will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with a focus on organized crime and financial crime, as well as those interested in corruption, crime prevention, and applications of ethnographic methods.

In the early 1990s Greece accepted a large number of immigrants from a variety of contexts. Since then 'organised criminality' has become an important aspect of the immigration nexus in the country, and ethnicity has been viewed as an extremely important-if not the primary–explanatory variable. Simultaneously, there has been very little empirical research on 'organised crime' in Greece in general and 'organised crime' and ethnicity in particular. The purpose of this article, which is based on previous research that the author has conducted on three illegal markets in Greece (a. migrant smuggling business, b. the cigarette black market, and c. the market of stolen cars and car parts), is to show the extent to which these illegal markets are controlled by foreign nationals, and establish whether there is such thing as an 'alien conspiracy' in the particular country.

Drawing on interviews with Greek detectives carried out by the author in 2002, the Greek police's attitudes towards migrant communities and racist violence are surveyed. Not only are migrant communities, particularly the Albanian, viewed as hotbeds of crime but racist violence against these communities is not viewed as a signi-ficant problem by the Greek police, who are usually indifferent to racially motivated crimes and often view racist incidents as acts of self-defence by Greeks against the criminal 'other'. A transformation of such attitudes would require a public recognition of the widespread racism that exists in Greek society.

At the beginning of the 1990s Greece, along with other European countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, was transformed from a country of emigration to a country of immigration. Since then, the phenomenon of migration in Greece constitutes the central topic of an endless debate amongst politicians, social scientists, the public and the media, which influences the perception, and most importantly the 'positions' and reactions of certain individuals and groups (to an unknown extent though), and consequently the state's control apparatus. The notions of ethnicity and migration have started to concern Greece and become intertwined with several other issues in the social sphere. Migration in Greece, as well as in other countries of the EU and generally the western, rich world, has been identified with a number of 'social problems'. Hence, there has been a general negative discourse about migrants and migration. The arrival of migrants has been often compared to unstoppable weather and natural phenomena or to invading hordes, their number has been described as a 'crisis', and their presence in a country has been discussed within the context of problems of integration and assimilation, unemployment, national insecurity, and crime. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 and the recent riots in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities fed debates of such nature. According to a recent Eurobarometer, immigration is a major cause of concern among the citizens of the 15 old member-states of the EU.