ORGANIZED CRIME HAS LONG HISTORY

Crime goes back a long way. Probably as far back as the first caveman
who realized he could pummel his friend with a rock and steal his
slice of mastodon steak.

Organized crime probably is a little younger. A week or so, maybe.
That's when three cavemen banded together to beat up anyone walking
by their cave, and took all their stuff.

Human beings are inherently sociable, and a fraction of them are
always willing to break the rules to get what they want. Combine
those two traits, and you get criminal gangs.

What we think of as organized crime didn't really get started until
the medieval era, when smuggling became a big industry. They were
probably smuggling wine or wool, not drugs or guns, but the principle
is the same.

The other thing about ancient organized crime is that the scale could be vast.

The Vikings stole entire countries, for example.

It's easy to see how this started. Two frigid Norsemen, standing in a
howling gale somewhere near Uppsala, wiping snotsicles off their moustaches.

"Hey, Svein?"

"Yeah, Leif?"

"Is there anywhere warmer we could be right now?"

"Ireland is nice, I'm told. They have lots of monasteries stuffed
with priceless icons."

"And we're enormous, terrifying lunatics with massive swords. We
could take all that stuff, and maybe get ourselves a couple of
vacation homes farther south."

"Good plan. I'll build a ship shaped like a dragon, you round up 50
unemployed berserkers."

The Vikings invaded and conquered parts of England, Scotland,
Ireland, and France.

Sure, Vikings would take your stuff and kill you, maybe even take
over your country. But they were up front about it.

Later, organized criminals hid in shadows.

In the late 1800s, a scheme known as the Black Hand became widespread
among Italian gangs in the United States. The victim - usually a
reasonably prosperous Italian immigrant - got a letter marked with
the hand, and a threat: pay up, or else.

The thing about it that made the Black Hand so terrifying was that
the gangs using the scheme backed up their threats. Favourite methods
included shotgun blasts to the face and blowing up whole buildings.
Many people believed the Black Hand was a single organization, but it
was just a crude business plan used by many unconnected gangs.

The greatest organized criminals in history were undoubtedly the
politicians of the 18th and 19th century British Empire.

No, I'm not kidding.

The official plan of the government and the East India Company was to
get as much addictive opium as possible into China. (This was known
as free trade.) The Chinese Empire had made it illegal to sell opium
since the 1700s, but that didn't bother the British. They wanted to
make money, period, so China was forced to open its doors to the
world's greatest drug dealers. They fought two wars in the mid-1800s
to force China to bow to the pressure of the drug sellers. England
was the world's first narco-terrorist state.

Of course, the British and other westerners weren't complete
hypocrites. Opium was freely available in the west, too, including in
children's cough medication, until the early 20th century.

As for future organized crime, I predict black market head-swap
operations and chop shops for our flying cars can't be far away.

Visit Matthew Claxton's blog, Evolving Langley, at
http://tiny.cc/A0D3W at www.langleyadvance.com