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Gambling: Illegal gambling takes place on a wide scale and generates enormous profits. Illegal operations include lotteries, off-track betting, illegal casinos, numbers, and dice games. Such operations can be located practically anywhere-in a restaurant, garage, tavern, apartment complex, or even on business premises.
Drug Trafficking: Drug trafficking is an industry that makes billions of dollars annually in the United States. With such profits, it is little wonder that organized crime is involved in the importation and distribution of drugs such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana, crack, amphetamines, and hallucinogens. A recent trend in the illicit drug trade in the United States is the growth of new organizations unassociated with older crime families. Some of these new organizations have ethnic group identities, such as Colombian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Nigerian, African American, or Russian.
Loan Sharking: This crime involves lending money at interest rates above the legal limit. Interest rates have been reported to go as high as 150 a week. Syndicated crime can ensure repayment by the threat of violence. Major borrowers from loan sharks include gamblers who need to cover losses, drug users, and small-business owners who are unable to obtain credit from legitimate sources.
Infiltrating Legitimate Businesses: The huge profits from illegal activities provide organized crime with the capital to enter into legitimate operations, including the entertainment industry, banking, insurance, restaurants, advertising firms, bars, the automotive industry, and real estate agencies-to name but a few. Infiltrating legitimate business provides organized crime with tax covers for its members, gives them a certain respectable status in the community, and offers additional profit-making opportunities. With its cash reserves, a syndicate can temporarily lower prices and bankrupt competitors. It can also use strong-arm tactics to force customers to buy its goods and services.
Labor Racketeering: This activity involves the systematic extortion of money from labor unions and businesses. Racketeers can extort money from union members by forcing them to pay high union dues and fees in order to obtain and secure employment. Racketeers can shortchange employees by paying less than union wages and by misusing the union's pension and welfare funds. Finally, racketeers can extort money from employers by forcing them to make payoffs for union cooperation (for example, to avoid a strike).
Prostitution: Because prostitutes offer a service for which some people are willing to pay high prices, prostitution can be a highly profitable endeavor, which makes it appealing to organized crime. Mobsters serve as brokers for prostitutes and customers and also protect them from arrest and prosecution by bribing law enforcement officials. Organized crime has also gotten involved in other sex-related forms of crime, such as the illegal distribution of pornographic films and magazines.
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