A New Mob

To these inventive foreign-based groups, the Outfit’s main profit-makers, illegal gambling, loan sharking, and extortion, are laughable. These Eurasian gangsters specialize in entrepreneurship, crooked-style: mortgage fraud, healthcare fraud, and identity theft are common trade.

Chicago Sun-Times crime reporter, Steve Warmbir, called their savvy money-laundering repertoire the mobs’ “niche area.”
“We’re seeing a much greater financial sophistication,” Warmbir said. “[It's] more than the Outfit ever did.”

Their fiscal dexterity also assists them in a list of more blue-collar illicit activities. Wagner said drug and weapons trafficking, auto theft, prostitution, and jewelry theft are among the other charges known to grace the rap sheets of these emerging mobsters.

“They use [foreign] contacts to move stolen cars and jewelry overseas in order to fund narcotics trafficking,” Wagner said. “Narcotics trafficking funds the burglaries and theft.”

Extortion, although more popularly employed by the Outfit, is not below Eurasian thugs. They have implemented intimidation tactics and imposed “street taxes” to earn cash-but it’s a community business, according to Rice.

“The newer groups are doing today what the Outfit started out doing by preying on members of their own community,” Rice said of the Eurasian’s extortion techniques. “Because these communities are scared of law enforcement, they know that they can prey on them”.

The rapport between the Outfit and these strings of Eastern European groups is best qualified as a limited economic relationship, according to Wagner.
“There is a financial understanding between [the Outfit and these nontraditional groups] so both groups can remain profitable,” Wagner said. “It’s all about money.”

Language and culture barriers make it difficult for the Americanized mobsters to engage these smaller, less formalized groups in a richer, more symbiotic fashion. In fact, Walsh claimed the only time that the traditional mafia directly interacts with these untraditional groups is during drug transactions.

Law enforcement has encountered the same problems in its efforts to crackdown on these corrupt posses. Outfit operations can be taken down with more ease-without translators and without cross-cultural understanding.

The diminutive size and lack of hierarchy in these clusters have also rendered a hefty challenge for law enforcement officials. After the September Family Secrets trial, Robert Grant, who heads the Chicago FBI offices, estimated that the Outfit had four street crews-down from six-and estimated its members and associates at a little more than 100. The hyper-local structure of the Eurasian groups, many of which are based solely upon family and cultural ties, makes them harder to gauge, pinpoint, and eventually catch.

It also makes them less likely to achieve the power the Outfit once had, according to Walsh.

“There’s too many splinter groups,” Walsh said. “They aren’t organized into families, and they’ve got their own little entities.”

According to organized crime expert William Kleinknecht’s almost prophetic 1996 work The New Ethnic Mobs, “[No ethnic mob] will be as singularly powerful…as the old Mafia groups, but there will be so many more of them that police will find themselves hankering for the old days of Mafia control.”

Loyola University criminologist Robert Lombardo, an expert in organized crime and a thirty-five year Chicago Police veteran, cautioned against focusing too much time and money on these groups. He argued that Eurasian mafia membership is somewhat sparse compared to the Chicago’s bigger and more violent street gangs-the Latin Kings, the Gangster Disciples, and the Vice Lords, each of which boasts close to 30,000 members.

Walsh asserted that the pressing issues of terrorism and violent crime have also made it much harder for the feds and the police to properly address the mounting problem.

“Fraud is a property crime,” Walsh said. “We just don’t have the manpower for this.”