The Organized Crime Community Essays in Honor of Alan A. Block

In his social investigative writings on "the serious crime community" which describes the loose merger of corporate interests, organized crime and political crime, professor Alan A. Block of Penn State University has proven to be one of the most inspiring criminologists in the field. An international group of pupils and friends dedicate this book to him which contains original contributions on the troubled concept of organized crime, the social history of crime groups in the United States, corruption in the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq, the struggle against identity fraud, the world of drugs and the adverse consequences of criminalization, the money-laundering control movement, International Tribunals against war crimes and a Jewish studies chapter on the role of bystanders during the Holocaust.

The book opens with Alan Block's now classic study on the origins of the Iran Contra scandal. Alan A. Block has served for 17 years as the editor-in-chief of Crime, Law and Social Change, one of Springer's major criminology journals.

The Origins of IRAN-CONTRA: Lessons from the Durrani Affair.- California Dreams and Gangster Schemes: The Standley Commission, the Guarantee Finance Company, and the Social System of Organized Crime in post-World War II Southern California.- New Times, New Crimes: “Blocking” Financial Identity Fraud.- The United Nations Oil-for-Food Program: Corruption, Bribery and International Relations in the Serious Crime Community.- Bystander Memories Explored: Dutch Gentile Eyewitness Narratives on the Deportation of the Jews.- Mid East Meets Mid West? Theopolitics, Crime and Terror in the U.S..- Assessing Organised Crime: The Sad State of an Impossible Art.- The Rise of Two Drug Tigers: The Development of the Illegal Drugs Industry and Drug Policy Failure in Afghanistan and Colombia.- Half-baked Legalization Won’t Work.- Pecunia Non Olet? The Control of Money-laundering Revisited.- Any Man’s Death.... Some Reflections on the Significance of International Criminal Justice.- Vita.

Frank Bovenkerk is cultural anthropologist and professor of criminology at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. His main fields of research are organized crime, discrimination and crime and ethnicity. His current interest is moving toward the field of cultural criminology.

Michael Levi has been Professor of Criminology at Cardiff University, Wales, UK since 1991, and has been researching organised and white-collar crime issues since 1972. He has degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton Universities. His books include Drugs and Money (with Petrus van Duyne), 2005; Fraud: Organization, Motivation and Control I and II,1999; Money-Laundering in the UK (with Michael Gold), 1994; The Investigation, Prosecution, and Trial of Serious Fraud, 1993; Regulating Fraud: White-Collar Crime and the Criminal Process, 1987; and The Phantom Capitalists: the Organisation and Control of Long-Firm Fraud, 1981, to be republished by Ashgate in 2006 with a new introduction. He is currently completing White-Collar Crime and its Victims and White-Collar Crime in the Media for Clarendon Press, Oxford, and a variety of research studies on serious and organised crime.