Original subtitles

Rising from influences

of the American mafia,

the United Kingdom spawned its own hard men,

still to this day regarded as good-natured villains.

The Swinging Sixties in Britain was darkened

by death and extortion from the Great Twins

to the Great Train Robbery.

But do these old dogs learn new tricks

as the wave once again rises

in a new style of organized crime in Britain.

One of the remarkable things about organized crime

and the way it operates is how closely it mirrors

the corporate world.

It seems only a thin line separates legitimate business

and the business of the underworld.

After watching its enterprises prosper for 30 years,

the mob in America by the early 1960s had to face a problem

that confronts many legitimate businesses,

the pressing need to expand their markets

to ensure economic survival.

In fact, it could be said the mafia

was one of the first American enterprises to go global,

a trend that has brought together criminal groups

from all corners of the earth.

As the 1950s came to a close,

the mafia began for the first time

to really feel the heat of law enforcement.

The code of silence began to crack

and increasingly, American lawmakers and the American public

began to peel away the mask

that had long hidden the mob from scrutiny.

With the election of John F. Kennedy as President

and his brother Robert as Attorney General,

the winds of change were blowing through America.

Under increasing public scrutiny

and increasing economic pressure to find new customers

for criminal activities,

the hunt was on to find new territories.

This uncertainty at home,

coupled with a loss of lucrative crime markets

in nearby Cuba after the leftist revolution

led by Fidel Castro, forced some mafia bosses

to think beyond the boundaries of America.

They turned their gaze across the Atlantic

to the green fields of England,

a country that seemed naive by American standards

and ripe for the picking.

Meyer Lansky, the mafia's financial brain trust

was a man heading the mob's push

to set up business offshore.

One of Lansky's most trusted deputy, Dino Cellini,

who had been banned from The Bahamas,

was set off to England.

In London, Cellini ran a croupier's school,

cashing in on the boom in Britain

which followed the legalizing of gambling clubs.

At the same time,

one time Hollywood motion picture star George Raft

with longtime mafia connections also moved to Britain

to run the Colony Club

and act as an ambassador at large for the mafia.

The Americans had much to offer the ringby speaking cousins

across the Atlantic,

especially when it came to the fine points

of exploiting gambling,

which had just been made legal in Britain.

But the British authorities had other ideas

and most surely did not put out the welcome mat.

After an initial slowness to act,

authorities suddenly moved in the mid 1960

to deport both Dino Cellini and George Raft.

The stately Dorchester Hotel in central London

was a setting for an international crime convention in 1966.

It was a meeting of the kings of crime

called to carve up the spoils in Europe and Britain.

But the meeting had a downside too,

eventually leading to the deportation of mafia members

who've been operating unhindered in Britain for some years.

The Dorchester Hotel meeting brought together

representatives of the mafia in the United States,

the French Mafia, the heads of British crime firms,

and representatives of the Bally Corporation,

which operated poker machines in both America and Britain.

Gentlemen.

Firstly, I'd like to say a fine welcome

to our colleagues from France and Germany,

members of our local firm in the Kray lads,

and a very special welcome

to our friends from across the Atlantic, the Cosa Nostra.

Now gentlemen, we all know why we're here.

So as to prevent any squabbling and bad feelings,

we've all come around the table as civilized gentlemen

to see who gets what.

And believe me, there is plenty to go around.

The task was to work out

how best each could exploit gambling,

which had recently become legit in Britain,

and how organized crime could gain control

of gambling in Spain.

But the crime bosses didn't know

is that there was a spy in their midst.

American lawyer Herbert Itkin

had infiltrated the mob several years earlier,

and routinely reported back to the FBI.

Intelligence gathered by Herbert Itkin

at the Dorchester Hotel Convention of Crime

led to pressure on the British government

to deport mafia figure Dino Cellini

and American actor George Raft.

Their forced departure left British authorities convinced

the American menace had been driven off.

The mafia had not gained a foothold on British soil.

Organized crime, however, was not dead.

Britain's homegrown gang

simply stepped into the mafia's shoes,

claiming the fields of crime and corruption

all to themselves.

By the early 1960s,

Great Britain was awakening from the conservatism

that had followed World War II.

These were the Swinging Sixties,

a time of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Looming large in the landscape of need and greed,

two men the British underworld and the public alike

called the Terrible Twins, Ronald and Reginald Kray.

The Krays controlled half of the crime in London

while the Richardson gang mastered the rest.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray were truly typical of criminals

who grew up in postwar London,

tough, self-assured, resourceful, sometimes dangerous,

and always able to exploit human weakness.

Back then, Larry Pope was a raw recruit

who had just joined the police force.

Now retired, he recalls how much of an impact

the Krays had on London and police officers like himself.

The United Kingdom organized crime back in the seventies,

the face of it was the Kray twins type of crime.

When it wasn't the violence amongst themselves,

one of the most violent crimes we had

in the sixties and seventies was bank robberies.

There were other gangs around at the time,

the names that come up are the Richardsons,

pretty well known and recorded.

There was other ones, the Tips brothers,

I seem to recall with a scrap metal yard.

There were various ones on the ascent,

and then things would happen

and they would either be neutralized by a police effort

or neutralized by some other internal problems.

Professor of Sociology

at Durham University in England,

Dick Hobbs, who's made a detailed study of British villains,

says the Kray twins were heavily influenced

by movies of American gangsters of the 1930s.

In many ways, what has to be remembered

about the Kray twins is that they operated

in the shadow of the mafia.

They liked the mafia, they dressed like Chicago gangsters.

Sometimes they talked like Chicago gangsters.

They drove American cars.

The American gangster model was an ideal type

for people like the Kray twins to actually copy.

In many ways, if you look at them now,

it makes them look absolutely ridiculous.

So I think the influence of the American mafia

on the British crime scene is money in terms of imagery

rather than structure.

Dick Hobbs, who is the author of a book

called "Bad Business" which examines English criminals

and their moneymaking rackets, believes the American mafia

never intended to directly control organized crime

in the United Kingdom.

The American mafia, American organized crime

has always had a presence in Britain.

It certainly in the 1960s had a presence in Europe,

in London, rather, as regards to gambling.

And they were welcomed by the local villains

because they brought with them a great deal of clout,

they brought with them money,

and also they brought with them a glamour

that British organizers crime has never had.

So for instance, in the Colony Club

in London's West End, you had a situation there

where George Raft, who was the American film star

who's closely connected to the American mob,

was almost resident there.

A lot of mafia money passed through the Colony Club.

And I think that really was an introduction to the way

in which global organized crime was gonna go in the future,

in that you could have a presence,

you could have a commercial presence,

and you would have formal but mainly informal collaborations

will be set up with local villains.

Even if the mafia had wanted full control

of Britain's underworld,

it was unlikely they would've achieved that goal

according to investigative journalist

and author on organized crime Bob Bottom.

It really epitomizes a sort of a syndrome

that's peculiar to the UK and that is that the UK

as an old imperial power may have sent people

all over the world, but they don't take too kindly,

whether it's the Triads, American mafia,

or Australian or whether they call down under,

you know, gangsters coming in.

And that protects the patch of the organized type group.

To understand the workings of British organized crime,

we have to go back to the Docklands of London

before World War II,

when a man with the unlikely name of Billy Hill

was the name in organized crime.

Billy Hill was probably the best organized criminal

Britain has ever had,

maintaining a firm grip on illegal gambling dens

and nightclubs in London by out-thinking would-be rivals.

And when necessary, using his not inconsiderable body bulk

to instill fear.

Hill, who died a millionaire at the age of 73,

was a role model for a whole generation of villains,

including Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

Years later in a book titled "Villains We Have Known,"

Reggie Kray wrote that when he was 20,

a man he most wanted to emulate

was a former gang boss of London's underworld, Billy Hill.

Billy Hill was probably as near as we've gotten

to a godfather of British crime.

This guy was very, very clever, involved in burglary,

involved in receiving, involved in illegal drinking clubs,

and also involved in gambling.

And he taught the business of gambling to the Kray twins.

And this coincided in the early 1960s with the Gambling Act,

which made gambling legal.

So suddenly these guys with a knowledge of gambling

were able to go legitimate or semi-legitimate.

And the Kray twins very, very quickly

built up this reputation for themselves

of running gambling clubs, but they could never let go.

They could never let go of the illegal life.

The illegal life, the life of the villain,

is very attractive to young men and certainly to the Krays,

it was far too attractive to go legitimate.

In the 1960s,

the influence of the Kray twins spread rapidly.

Ronnie Kray was the public front man,

often photographed in nightclubs with entertainers

and leggy showgirls.

But it was all just show.

Ronnie Kray was homosexual.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray had an almost obsessive affection

for their mother Violet, a cheerful and strong-minded woman

who largely brought the boys up on her own

with the help from her eldest son Charlie.

Apart from their mother the twins had another passion,

boxing, something they shared with big brother Charlie.

The twins showed real promise and at 17

looked set for careers as professional fighters.

But they were called up for military service

and the army refused to let the twins work

as physical fitness instructors.

The pair spent most of the next two years

either in the brig or on the run.

They were now heading towards the life of crime.

Discharged from the army,

the Krays took over a snooker club

that was not only in financial trouble,

but had patrons who did nothing but brawl.

Within months, the Krays turned it around

and the rise up the ladder of London's underworld had begun.

By 1959, Ronnie Kray's behavior

became more and more bizarre.

He was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia,

something that added to the Kray's reputation for violence.

Ronnie was put on medication

which he took all the rest of his life.

Despite his mental illness,

the Kray firm continued to prosper.

They took over nightclubs and gambling lounges,

largely thanks to the more serious and sane efforts

of Reggie Kray.

In 1963, the Kray twins,

along with the rest of the nightclub set,

watched the Profumo affair unfold.

John Profumo, the senior minister

in the McMillan government, was exposed for his dalliance

with call girls Christine Keeler, a brunette beauty

and Mandy Rice-Davies, a blonde bombshell.

The girls in turn had links to a Soviet diplomat

operating in Britain.

The Profumo scandal had hardly subsided

when Britain was rocked again,

this time by an audacious military-style robbery of a train

carrying millions of pounds worth of old notes

which were destined for destruction.

The Kray twins had originally been offered

a part in the robbery, but for reasons unknown declined.

On August 8th, 1963 in the dead of night,

a dozen villains held up the London to Glasgow Mail train,

and in just half an hour,

unloaded two and a half tons of used bank notes

worth at least 60 million American dollars in today's money.

For the Krays it was fortunate they stayed out of the heist.

Most of the villains were quickly rounded up

and sent to jail for 30 years or more.

Today, the gang nicknamed the Great Train Robbers

are all either still in jail for other crimes or dead.

All that is except one, Ronald Biggs,

who still lives in Brazil

after fleeing there nearly 30 years ago

following a prison breakout.

For the Kray twins, the next big deal

was involvement in a dubious housing project in Nigeria.

That brought Ronnie Kray into contact

with bisexual labor politician Lord Boothby.

Ronnie wanted Boothby to help finance

the unstable Nigerian project.

One of Britain's tabloids got hold of pictures

of the pair at a business meeting

and ran the whole story under the banner

"The Peer and The Gangster."

Lord Boothby sued and got 40,000 pounds damages.

The publicity helped propel the Kray twins,

especially Ronnie, to public notoriety.

Despite widespread reportage of his homosexuality,

Ronnie Kray was nevertheless touchy

about his sexual tendencies.

Villain George Cornell, a large bull-necked man

who some described as a sick sadistic bastard,

enjoyed taunting Ronnie Kray about being gay.

The Krays had another reason to dislike Cornell.

They believed he was responsible

for the earlier shooting death of their cousin Dickie Hart.

And the Kray twins greatly built up

a certain animosity to a rival gang

on the south side of the Thames

called the Richardson Brothers.

It was heading for a war,

for an all out war between these two groups.

And an old enemy of the Kray twins called George Cornell,

who had allied himself to the Richardsons,

was drinking in a pub in the East End

called The Blind Beggar.

Reputedly, George Cornell had said something

to the words of that Ronnie Kray was a fat poof.

Ronnie Kray got a gun,

took his driver to The Blind Beggar pub.

Hi there, Ronnie!

He walked up to George Cornell,

Cornell turned around and muttered something to him.

You poof there, Ronnie.

I've had enough of you.

Ronnie Kray shot him in the head.

And sometime later he died, he died in hospital.

Police wasted no time arresting

Ronnie and Reggie Kray over the Cornell killing.

But by now, the Kray's reputation both as ruthless men

and celebrities preceded them.

Witnesses to the slaying in The Blind Beggar Hotel

either couldn't or wouldn't identify the Krays in a lineup.

Authorities are left with no choice but to drop the case.

The decision not to prosecute

seemed to spur the Krays on to new excesses.

I think what's happened with the Kray twins

in East London is they've become quite iconic figures.

We had, I think at last count,

there was something like 15 books written

about the Kray twins.

There's a film, a feature film been made about the Krays

featuring the Kemp brothers, a couple of pop stars.

There are endless TV programs about the Krays

and they've become cult heroes.

They become cult heroes

'cause they seem to represent to people

a kind of golden age of East London,

a golden age of working class society

where villains were villains, men were men,

women knew their place,

and disputes were worked out as men should work them out.

This actually isn't true.

The reason that the sixties were good for East London

was there was full employment and not because the Kray twins

were walking the streets carrying Lugers.

In mid 1967,

Reggie Kray's estranged wife Frances

killed herself by overdosing on pills.

Her death had a profound effect on Reggie,

plunging the normally sensible and placid Reg

into a deep depression.

That depression ultimately led to the self-destruction

of the Kray twins' crime empire.

Reggie Kray started drinking heavily and became morose,

plotting the death of fellow villain Jack the Hat McVitie,

who was not much more than a hanger on in the Kray gang.

Jack the Hat, who never took his hat off

because it hid a bald patch,

irritated Reggie because he was a loud mouth, a drunk,

a drug taker, and a woman basher.

In the autumn of 1967,

Jack the Hat was invited to a party at Stoke Newington.

It was to be his last.

Waiting for him, Reggie Kray plunged the knife deep

into the unsuspecting Jack McVitie.

The murder of Jack the Hat

was the last straw for the British establishment,

which until now had put up with the Kray brothers' antics.

In the spring of '68,

police swooped and arrested both Ronnie and Reggie Kray

for the murders of Jack McVitie and George Cornell.

Once it was obvious

the Krays were in real trouble with the law this time,

many of their criminal cohorts gave evidence against them.

If you look at the organization of the Kray twins,

the Kray twins had back in the sixties, for instance,

you had the twins at the top,

then there were two or three lieutenants under them.

And then after that,

it was a completely disorganized mutating group

of mainly of hangers on.

If you look at the way that the Krays were wiped out

or dealt with by the authorities, by the police,

whoever, that's quite interesting

is that once they got one or two informants

within the so-called structure

of the Kray twins' enterprise,

then the whole structure collapsed.

It went very, very quickly.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray

were sentenced to life imprisonment

with a minimum of 30 years to serve.

The twins were 35 years old

and had no prospect of being free again

until the turn of the century.

Walk into The Blind Beggar pub today,

you'll not only find the decor unchanged from the sixties,

but also the attitudes to these local folk heroes

called the Kray twins.

If you're lucky, you may get

the Ronnie Kray George Cornell shooting fully described,

or you may get silence.

We found The Blind Beggar regulars

willing to describe just a little of that fateful day.

People still do come in just to take pictures

and ask the same questions you're asking,

where was Georgie Cornell shot?

And they still get the same answer. He was shot in the here.

But most of us don't talk about it

because it's a long time ago and it was just one incident.

That's all. Too much have been made of it.

I didn't know them personally,

but I've been told that they really did help out

the elderly people in the East End.

They looked after them financially,

made sure that nobody was bothering them.

I know they were known as villains,

which they probably were,

but they looked after their own people

and that's what counts, looking after your own.

A lot of people say it's a pity

that the Krays weren't around now,

that they would certainly stop a lot of the violence

that's going on around here.

I accept the observation that was made

and it was made to me as a police officer

that the Krays were good to their own community.

People felt that whilst the Krays were running the show,

if you like, in the East End, then others weren't.

And because the Krays were recognized

as being in the more top echelon of criminality,

then they wouldn't allow other persons to steal from

or damage or injure persons who lived in that same area.

I think that was more myth than reality.

We did have a lot of assaults and ordinary crime,

just not the same degree as we have today.

It was a myth, it was a bit of a Robin Hood myth

or any other Dick Turpin type thing, as a police officer,

of course, Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, any of them you like,

they're just downright crooks

and I have no fondness for them at all.

In March 1995,

Ronnie Kray died of a heart attack in Broadmoor Prison

at the age of 61.

His funeral turned into one of the biggest public events

East End London had ever seen.

Thousands upon thousands of ordinary people

lined the streets to say farewell to Ronnie.

When he was younger, Ronnie told his twin brother

when he died he wanted his coffin drawn by six black horses.

Reg Kray made sure his brother's wish came true.

- You all right, Ronnie? - Yep.

Ronnie Kray left this world

a working class hero.

His brother laid to rest,

Reggie Kray was returned to Maidstone Prison

to see out the last years of his 30 year sentence.

While the Krays were on the inside,

on the outside the whole world had changed forever.

Very little remain of what was London

in the Swinging Sixties when Reggie and Ronnie Kray

were the Mr. Bigs of the underworld.

Even the Dockland,

the heart of the Krays' working class territory

is different.

Smart townhouses now stand

where rundown warehouses once stood.

The personal computer has replaced the shotgun

as a weapon of choice for villains in today's Britain.

Even crime itself has changed.

It has become a mega business

where drugs are the holy grail.

The real difference between then and now

is the marketplace.

The amount of money that is to be made from crime now

is absolutely enormous.

If you look at the Kray twins, for instance in the 1960s,

although they were regarded as the kings

of the London underworld, if you look at the amount of money

they actually made from it,

it wasn't very much at all.

If you look at the amount of money which is available now

in the criminal marketplace, it is fantastic.

And that's mainly due to the drugs trade.

From the mid 1970s onwards,

the drugs trade expanded at such a rate

and the demand for recreational drugs

expanded at such a rate

that there is far more money involved now.

I think you can compare it to the computing industry.

If you go back to the early 1970s,

computing industry in Britain was very, very small

and there wasn't that much money then.

Now it's absolutely enormous.

We've all got computers on our desks,

we've all got computers in our homes.

Similarly with drugs. Drugs are everywhere now.

Drugs are consumed by a considerable proportion

for the British population

and the marketplace to provide those drugs

is absolutely huge.

So I think drugs is very big.

Law enforcement in Britain

couldn't agree more.

The drug trade is a vast money maker and a major problem.

The director of Britain's

National Crime Intelligence Service, Vincent Harvey.

It's been seen heroin has become

a much more fashionable, a much more acceptable drug

over the last few years.

Cocaine is also a steady drug.

We have a lot of that coming over.

Crack came over something like I would guess 10 years ago.

We didn't have the crack explosion that was forecast,

but it has slowly and insidiously spread

throughout the whole of the United Kingdom

and we can find pockets of people taking crack all the time.

And of course, what these people generally do

is mix their drugs.

You know, the incredible high they get

from something like crack,

a lot of people will then take some heroin after that

in order to prolong it.

It gives you a longer lasting escape from reality.

So we're quite heavily users of all those powder drugs.

Very worrying for us in the UK, of course,

is we're probably the world's largest market

for synthetic drugs.

The amphetamines and ecstasy, LSD,

and there's a whole of these,

I won't go through all the titles,

but yes, for the synthetic manufactured drugs,

we're a very large market structured a lot around

some of the club and dance culture

for things like ecstasy, but also amphetamines

and the others I've said have become very popular.

Drugs trade in Britain does reign supreme

in terms of organized crime.

It is different from the US

in that the drugs which are used, I mean, for instance,

in this country in Britain, throughout the 1990s,

ecstasy has been a very, very important drug

as part of youth culture

and therefore, as part of the organized criminal culture

and the organized criminal business.

If you look at the US, it's nowhere near

as central to youth culture or to the business.

So each criminal marketplace

does generate its own kinds of practices

and is different not only in different countries,

but in different parts of the country.

There are parts of Britain, for instance,

that does not have a cocaine culture,

where cocaine isn't popular.

There are other parts of Britain

where cocaine is very popular.

And again, it's to do with the marketplace.

If you look at the price of cocaine,

it's the same price now as it was 10 years ago.

In fact, it's marginally cheaper.

It was 50 pound 10 years ago, 50 pound a gram 10 years ago.

It's now down to about 40 pound a gram.

Well, that's not expensive.

10 years ago it was regarded as quite expensive.

So you've got fashion, you've got prices,

you've got trends which emerge in the criminal marketplace

in the same that they do in a legitimate marketplace.

One of the biggest single factors

influencing organized crime in Britain

and the rest of Europe was the collapse of communism.

Not only did the political walls come tumbling down,

but so too the economic divide between East and West.

With every symbolic blow of the hammer,

Europe began the process of unification.

One market, one currency, one Europe,

and one large new target for organized crime.

The organized crime market

is like the legitimate crime market and it's gone global.

And that's mainly because of drugs.

So if anyone wants to be involved in the drugs trade

in Britain now, they are gonna have some link

with overseas crime groups.

That's the way it is.

And it's certainly the case that every nationality

has its own crime group.

Whether you're talking about Lebanese, Russian, Colombian

German, they've all got their own crime group

and there will be an influence upon British society.

However, it's very important

that we stress that the majority, the huge majority

of organized criminals in Britain are indigenous.

They're home grown.

We haven't got Russian criminals on the streets.

There are no burglars called Boris, for instance.

We've got our own burglars, we've got our own drug dealers.

But certainly I think what we have seen is the influence

of foreign organized crime money on our streets.

Countries like Holland, Belgium, Germany

and France have all had to adapt to the new Europe.

That means even illegitimate business or organized crime

has faced increased competition

for what used to be Eastern Bloc Europe.

Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service

believes that crime in the United Kingdom

has changed so much in recent years,

that what they're dealing with now

is essentially Euro crime.

Predominantly, as I say, it is British criminals

who run the organized crime within the UK.

We have several other groups.

The largest groups are those of the,

we refer to them as Turkish groups,

but it's all from that part of Europe.

They're responsible pretty much for the majority,

something like 90% of the heroin importations.

Of course heroin is the big trade at the moment

and the big profit maker.

And we're seeing increasing signs

of other nationalities coming over

and each ethnic group is bringing its own crime.

And we've seen that on illegal immigration for example,

certain groups are bringing in people

from their own area of the world where they've come from.

Belgium based criminologist Cyril Fijnaut

says there are signs that crime has gone global,

especially the Russians.

But he cautions against exaggeration of the threat.

Many people are talking about the threat

of the Russian mob, of the Russian Red Mafiya.

And indeed also in northwestern Europe

we see clear signs of them,

particularly in the forms of killings and cases of extortion

and to some extent, money laundering operations.

And particularly in those cities or those regions

where you have already traditionally

a more or less large Russian community

that makes it of course quite easy for Russian mobsters

to hide away and to build up a foothold

in foreign countries.

But to say that the Russian or the Red Mafiya

is really a big threat for Germany

or for Holland or Belgium,

that would be an enormous exaggeration.

If you would take the last analysis

prepared by the Belgium police authorities

or the Dutch ones or the German ones,

and then you would come, I guess to the conclusion

that nearly five, six, 7%

of the cases they have dealt with

are related to Russian organized crime.

Professor Dick Hobbs of Durham University

echoes his sentiments about overemphasizing

the threat from abroad.

We need to be very wary

of blaming organized crime on foreign nationals.

And it is a tendency you can see

in some parts of the British police force.

If you blame foreign nationals for organized crime,

it creates more of a shock, it creates more of a panic

and the chances are that your budgets

are likely to go up to deal with this terrible problem

that's coming from overseas

as opposed to dealing with quite mundane, boring,

indigenous criminals who have been around

for an awful long time,

there's not a really good story there.

So I think we need to be wary of saying,

of screaming that the aliens are coming every few weeks

when actually, we've got a good mixture

of villains in this country.

Some of them happen to be foreign,

but the large bulk of them are homegrown.

Across the English Channel

it seems homegrown is also the catch cry of organized crime

as author of numerous books on the underworld

Bob Bottom explains.

The French underworld,

not the underground but the underworld

is pretty powerful in its own right

and I don't think that they'll have much room

for any other outsiders to emerge to any great extent

except that where appropriate,

you'll find that French criminals may link up

with some from Italy or Belgium

or in particular sometimes with those in Britain

to pull off something.

It may well be sometimes more in the realm of a bank heist

or some commercial fraud.

But generally speaking, in organized crime terms,

they run their own race on their own soil.

According to Professor Dick Hobbs,

criminals operating in a Europe with no borders

simply cannot afford to remain insular.

So the borders coming down

have had an influence.

It's easier to get around in Europe now,

it's easier to get stuff across borders.

In terms of policing, however, there are real problems there

in that the European Union is trying to adapt

to the new criminal opportunities which are coming up.

But you've got so many different jurisdictions there,

we're a long way from getting to the point

where police in Europe can cross borders

and cross jurisdictions with the same impunity

that organized criminals

can cross jurisdictions and cross borders.

When the barriers came down

between East and Western Europe,

a signal arise in the fortunes of extreme right wing groups.

Behind the facade of racism though,

often stood good old fashioned criminal thugs

taking advantage of people's fears and frustrations.

Some social scientists believe Europe today

has all the makings for a real problem in the future

with a growing number of street gangs.

Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California

Professor Malcolm Klein

who spent a lifetime studying gangs in America and elsewhere

says Europe is something of a paradox.

We've been looking at the gang situation

in Europe fairly recently, the last several years.

I've had a chance to be over there

and visit some of the cities and see what's going on.

We talk about the Euro gang paradox,

which really means that the many European cities,

many European officials are denying

that they have street gangs

because they say, well, they don't look like

the Cripps and the Bloods in Los Angeles,

or they don't look like the Latin Kings

and the Gangster Disciples in Chicago,

therefore we don't have gangs.

The fact is, of course, that in America,

most American gangs don't look like that either.

So when you look at the real structures of American gangs,

these informal structures, these informal youth gatherings,

if you will, and then you look at those groups in Europe

that have been developing over the last 10 years or so,

you find that Europe does have street gangs

in some of its cities.

We've identified, I have to count, but 12 or 15 cities

that have street gang problems in Europe

and some of them surprising.

But on the other hand,

there are many, many, many cities in Europe,

far more than in the US that don't have street gangs.

So it's a fairly new phenomenon.

They're not well organized,

they're not involved in the drug trade.

They have very few firearms

and that's a major difference between America.

We've been talking with European researchers

and in fact, trying to get more of them involved

in looking at this group gang situation

in order to get a sense

for what the European gang looks like,

nevermind whether or not it fits the American tradition,

but to take advantage of American data to start them off.

There is a growing problem in Europe

and if European cities continue to develop

urban underclass problems

with their refugee and immigrant groups,

they will continue to increase their gang problem.

However, European crime expert

Professor Cyril Fijnaut feels Europe

does not yet have a problem of America's magnitude.

We are not confronted with such gang problems

here in Western Europe, neither in Amsterdam,

neither in Paris, nor in Berlin or in Brussels or anywhere.

That doesn't mean that we don't have gangs here.

And we see the last 10, 15 years

and we see, let's say the beginning of such a development

and not only in immigrant communities,

but also in domestic, in the domestic population

that we see indeed that in some quarters of big cities

we see indeed that boys, sometimes girls group together,

try to build up something like a gang,

commit crimes in such a context.

But there's large gang problem linked to organized crime,

to established organized crime families,

like for example, in the Chinese community

in the United States or in the Vietnamese community.

That is a thing we don't see here up to this moment.

European authorities are taking what may be

a more conservatory attitude

than that shown by law enforcement in the United States.

Most European countries

have taken a different approach to delinquency and crime

generally than we have.

They're much less punitive than we are.

They're much more concerned with social service aspects.

For instance, in several European countries,

kids don't get turned over to law enforcement

until they're at least 16 years old.

The police simply cannot handle them.

They have to turn them over to social service agencies

and community committees.

So their whole approach to working with young people

is somewhat different from ours and this will affect the way

in which they're going to handle their gang problems.

Street gangs are one of the very public faces

of organized crime, doing deals openly on the streets,

drugs, counterfeiting, and strong arm tactics.

But there is also a quiet face to crime

in Britain and Europe.

So important financially is that gray zone of business

where the illegal and legal meet,

that whole communities thrive only because of what's called

a night economy.

What we've seen since the late 1980s

is a real revolution, I think,

in organized crime in Britain,

and that is the emergence of a nighttime economy

in cities in Britain, which were basically shut down

after six o'clock at night,

cities which were built upon a Victorian industrial past.

And that industry has now gone,

we live in a post-industrial age.

The only way in which they can attract money,

attract inward investment,

is by developing a nighttime economy.

Now, that nighttime economy

is now riddled with organized crime.

Whether it's bouncers running the door,

whether it's the provision of drugs,

whether it's the provision of criminal services generally,

or whether it's as an outlet to loan them illegal money

through the nighttime economy,

clubs, pubs, and bars has become a very important outlet

for organized crimes to develop.

And I think we're gonna see that,

that's gonna go on in the years to come.

But Professor Cyril Fijnaut

feels that the so-called underground economy

is somewhat overestimated and overemphasized.

Never dare to support this thesis.

And even in Italy where you have a dominant,

where the mafia groupings,

particularly in the southern part of Italy,

to some extent really control

the economic activities in cities.

There of course you have a big problem

like in the big cities in the United States

where Cosa Nostra families control the transport sector

or the waste disposal sector or the construction industry.

There of course you have a huge problem,

but that is not a problem that is common

in Western Europe these days.

Organized crime has always had

a sinister ability to feed off human weakness.

As long as people have unfulfilled needs,

then it seems organized crime will always be close by,

motivated by greed, ready to make desire reality at a price.

British and European crime firms have like old dogs

learned new tricks to meet new customer demands

in a changing world,

a world where crime knows no boundaries,

where crime truly is big global business.

I'm Robert Stack, thanks for joining us.