Yes, actually, the American mafia has declined severely since its heyday. There are surely many reasons, as it's part of a broader decline in crime in recent decades, but the increased difficulty of cleaning dirty money is part of it.
And crime has definitely gone up because of cryptocurrency. I'm not sure how much it has affected the more traditional sorts of crime, as I don't think it's much of a help in turning dirty cash into clean assets thanks difficulty of exchange and the ledger acting as "prosecution futures". But ransomware has grown massively thanks to cryptocurrency. And ransomware gangs have grown correspondingly in size and sophistication thanks to having all that money to spend.
AML regulations prevent about %0.05 of criminal proceeds from being 'harvested' and the cost of these compliance regimes costs vastly more than the value they bring. And it enables a vast financial surveillance system and a huge industry of AML analysts doing pointless busy work writing SARs nobody cares about.
The US mafia declined because of the rico act and the fact that there was less racism and better integration of italian americans. The current ethnic crime groups of today are different.
IMO AML is security theatre, much like the post 9/11 flying regulations making everyone's lives worse, especially if your name is Mohammed sending money to family back home in the home country.
> AML regulations prevent about %0.05 of criminal proceeds from being 'harvested' and the cost of these compliance regimes costs vastly more than the value they bring.
I look forward to your proving these two very numerical claims. But you can't just count existing criminal proceeds. That'd be saying, "The current level of speeding is so low that we can get rid of traffic cops." You have to measure the crime prevented, too.
AML is a boil the ocean way to prevent crime, except the ocean isn't being boiled because there isn't enough energy to actually boil the financial system. Instead it just annoys everyone with the financial equivalent of the ineffective TSA, where the TSA's own auditors bring everything and anything through with ease.
With all the money and human time used to prevent crime via AML, that could've been redirected to far more productive things. Especially in a country like the USA, where crime prevention issues are fairly obvious but not acted upon, such as robbery, murder, assault, rape, car break ins, property theft, damage, etc in California which aren't things effected much by AML either way.
“Money laundering” became a crime in 1986. The bank secrecy act originally just introduced the $10000 threshold ($80000 now) and record keeping requirements. It was later amended in the 90s to add suspicious activity reporting. Nearly all of the major mafia cases predate this. There are many reasons for this decline (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/706895) but mostly it has to do with RICO, wiretap evidence becoming admissible, the witness protection program, changing demographics, and more federal prosecutions where the people involved were smarter, less corruptible and where the sentences were greater. I am incredibly skeptical that it had anything to do with the decline of organized crime in this country.
So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline? And further, has nothing to do with other criminal organizations not rising to prominence to fill the same role? I agree other things played a role, of course. You get to believe what you want, obviously, but I'm sure not persuaded.
> So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline?
Very few transactions hit the CTR threshold at the time it was instituted. It was nearly $80000 in today's dollars. Computerization was also very new so doing anything useful at scale with the records was difficult for the government.
I'm not a lawyer but I read RECAP and have read the appeals from a lot of these cases and very rarely were financial records mentioned as investigative leads. They almost always relied on informants who were a part of the scheme and electronic surveillance to figure out how the crime worked. Even now, how many criminal investigations do you think start from SARs? Obviously we'll never know because they don't release that, but I don't think there's any reason to think it is a substantial fraction. Money laundering in most cases nowadays is just tacked on after they discover that someone used money from the crime they already knew about.
And this, right here, is the fundamental problem with all of this. "Legal" vs "illegal" doesn't really tell us much these days about the value of the thing in question. Civil asset forfeiture losses per year long ago crossed the amount lost to simple robbery, politicians engaging in insider trading has long been seen as perfectly normal and acceptable, and large multinational corporations buying off politicians and getting return on investment in the tens of thousands of percent, likewise.
Very little separates the state from an organised criminal enterprise. A particularly cynical person might point out just how comfortably well the operating logic of states and large multinational corporations fits into the world of organised crime. The only thing that separates the two is legality.
You want to enslave a bunch of people and profit off their labor in some far flung corner of the world to whom nobody is much paying attention? No problem, just don't do it yourself. Invest in cobalt mining or diamonds in Africa, or manufacturing in China. A territory is getting uppity? Support the governmental structure that wants to brutally repress them by buying from their corporations or investing in their treasuries. Want to promote some nightmarish theocratic brutality? Saudi Aramco stock is a steal these days. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with something that organised crime has historically profited from, which you could not do in a white market context in the modern world by simply trading in the full breadth of financial instruments, particularly in concert with the state financial actors already promoting these very things.
The thing that really scares me though is that as I get older and more cynical and see the way people are responding as the boot stamps down harder on them, I find it harder and harder to care or see the above as something to get righteously indignant about. Why should I find the slavery of people abhorrent when they so clearly crave the lash?
I look forward to your evidence of this. But things like robbery, selling stolen goods, protection rackets, extortion, prostitution, and drugs are still all generally illegal.
Things like alcohol and marijuana have become legal, but I don't see much evidence that Budwiser/InBev is a mob front.
And crime has definitely gone up because of cryptocurrency. I'm not sure how much it has affected the more traditional sorts of crime, as I don't think it's much of a help in turning dirty cash into clean assets thanks difficulty of exchange and the ledger acting as "prosecution futures". But ransomware has grown massively thanks to cryptocurrency. And ransomware gangs have grown correspondingly in size and sophistication thanks to having all that money to spend.