Organised Crime Quotes

Life was better than he expected with his new Italian family inheritance, and it felt good to take a deep breath without fear of someone attacking him or his family.

I sat there in the lobby with a 7Up and a hog-tied Japanese nymphomaniac locked in my room

The local dealers were cutting their coke with crystal meth

I heard another disembodied voice: you're going to release a daemon

That’s it. Let’s go.” “Yep,” whispered Suley. He turned to leave. “This is crazy.” He had his phone in his hand. “Look, we’re still in Rowland Forest. What’s this fence doing here? How come it’s not marked?” “We’ll tell your father about it.” Saskia pulled at his arm, looking anxiously around and up. To her horror, she saw a surveillance camera mounted on an overhead tree branch. It pointed straight at them. “Merde! Suley, we’ve got to go!” she hissed, pointing to the camera. His eyes widened. Distant shouts and an engine roaring to life exploded the forest calm. Suley and Saskia bolted back the way they’d come.

Another mound of boulders reared up before her. She scrabbled along the base of the mound, slipping and sliding, barely catching herself from tumbling down the slope. She caught sight of the person coming after her. It was a man, brown hair in a halo around his white face. He glared up at her, lips drawn back over stained teeth in a snarl, long, bare arms eating the ground in leaps against her ineffectual progress.

You have a virus time bomb in your software. The active boot partition of your system has been encrypted. You must respond to this message within fifteen minutes to prevent detonation.

It was odds on they would find out one of the team had escaped the blast, and it wouldn’t be long before they knew which one. Then they would come looking for him. And Conor intended they should find him.

She reached the door to the forbidden room. The door with the light escaping through the cracks. Her hands shook. Her eyes watered from the pull. She panted, her chest visibly moving in and out. Her teeth clenched. She switched off the flashlight, turned the knob, and pushed. 

Before I started killing people, I like to think I was a fairly normal kid.

Birdie slid out the chair to his left, crawled up onto it, shifted to sit, and crossed her arms on the table. “I heard my daddy tell Mommy somebody painted your picture on a barn. He said the police are going to imbestigate you.” “He did?” She bobbed her head. “He said you looked like the devil. Are you the devil?

He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars,

Killing people is considered not just illegal Sally, it’s generally accepted as bad behavior.

Anika walked to the workbench, which was flanked by two metal cabinets. She opened the cabinet on the left and spotted sundry items—nails, paint, and whatnot—that one expected to see. Even the rat poison with skull and crossbones on the bag made sense. She also saw, however, several boxes wrapped in white and labeled, “Explosive Plastic Comp-4 (C-4).” Paralyzed, she tried not to panic or stare. 

She pulled open the reception area door, bright sunshine causing her to pause, momentarily blinding her. Her eyes adjusted and she saw Josh, Peta and Daryl in deep conversation at an outdoor table. Saskia retreated, holding the door open. She saw Daryl lunge out of his bench, reach across the table, grab the front of Josh’s shirt and haul him close. Daryl’s mouth worked in angry lines and Josh’s head bowed, shaking back and forth slowly. Peta glanced nervously over her shoulder and towards the door of the administration building. She laid a hand on Daryl’s arm, leaning towards him. Daryl let Josh loose, sinking back into his seat. Josh also sat back, tugging his shirt into place.

It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes.

Bobby was a pretty boy. All looks no substance. Oh you know the kind, on the fringe, never gonna be a roller, but always gonna be the roller’s best friend. Never gonna hit the homerun, but damn sure gonna be happy with the singles, doubles and maybe a few triples.” She shrugged, “that was Bobby Dey-Dey.

Saskia groaned again. She threw back her bed covers, the last vestiges of sleep leaving her. It would be evening in Lyon. Clarissa would be expecting to hear from her. A call-in at least once every 24 hours was part of several protocols Clarissa had established. The instruction at the end of the conversation, “Give the dogs a pat for me”, reassured Clarissa that all was well. Leave the words out, replace any one of the words in the sentence with another or not place a call in a 24-hour period, and Clarissa would alert authorities. In her younger years, Clarissa had served in the British army. Her experiences in those years had caused the trauma she now lived with, though she used her expertise by teaching her three partners basic self-defence, how to operate firearms and how to wield weapons. She also programmed their watches and phones to enable her to constantly track their whereabouts, explaining, “I want to know that my three charges are safe”. Another protocol was to always check accommodation venues for listening devices. Saskia did this before calling Clarissa. “Clarissa. Ça va?” “What have you to report?

Whoo-eeee!” From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Peter. He was on the road to the side, probably waiting to ensure she’d managed to negotiate the first part of the track. She didn’t stop, her adrenaline pumping. He’d catch up. “Come get me!” she yelled, making a slight counter-direction turn in the air to help her blow into the berm on the other side of the road. The trail crossed a short flat, a marked rock garden, a beam over a bog, another rock drop and berm, a zigzag around massive trees, roots and rocks that kicked the bike’s tyres this way and that and tested her balance, more air over another drop – this one caused by a massive log – enough air for her to do a back flip from a kicker over another part of the forestry trail, steep to the left. The first wall appeared. She took it fast, skidded around to slam into the side of a berm and round off on to another gully crossing. “Whoo-eeee!

Down here in the street, there is a lot less of the law and a lot more personalities. Everyone has found their way around the particular law that influences their endeavors. No one absolutely adheres to the guidelines of the one true law. Everyone is just trying to get by; there’s no room or time for the law or the courts; everyone finds their own way. That’s how things get done, you get yours best you can and I get mine best I can, but sometimes we can get at crossed purposes with each other and then we sort it out ourselves. We don’t call the police, we don’t file a legal suit; we negotiate, we butt heads, but we resolve the issue. That’s what you are seeing Tom, how the real world goes around. Now have a drink, relax and see our other side of life.

the influence of organised crime reaches into the economy, our politics and everyday life- dongri to dubai

The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

We just have to sort through the junk. You know, like organising a jumbled box of beads. All we have to do is put each piece in its proper place, and we'll be able to see what we have.

Governments, nations, borders, they're all surface, they always have been. The real structure underlying it all is money, and the institutions which control it. Finance houses, banks, organised crime; if you drill down deep enough, it's all the same. Money has no nationality, no allegiance. While nations rise and fall, it remains the same. It's the most powerful polity of all.

It is a commonplace that every age, or almost every age, thinks that its own time is one of special difficulty. The barbarians seem always to be at the gate. Alas, in our present day this is rather too literally so. But what many fail to realise is that the barbarians are a more various and numerous group than just those unspeakable villains who behead hostages in the desert. Barbarians might also wear ties and travel business class, they might occupy seats of power in government. They might be us, ourselves, when we give up certain civil liberties and betray our own values in the spurious belief that this will protect us from terrorism, organised crime, unwelcome immigration. Forms of dismantling civilisation might differ, but the result is the same.

An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organised crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged.

I find it disturbing that one anthropologist's readings of transcripts are being listened to more seriously than 40 senior health service clinicians. [Referring to Jean La Fontaine's 1994 research paper for the DOH]

We hold that the State is incapable of good. In the field of international as well as of individual relations it can only combat aggression by making itself the aggressor; it can only hinder crime by organising and committing still greater crime.

Mostly because of the harm they do. Not just to users,’ he says, ‘but the whole way along the chain, from poor farmers in Latin America who are terrorised by the cartels, to the organised crime and violence that goes with distributing drugs right here in Australia. And, of course, the damage it does to your body and the pain and criminal behaviour that comes with addiction. Using drugs recreationally might seem like fun in the moment but you’re supporting a whole world of violence and crime.

Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet. There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years. If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived. The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them or abuse them only on certain days of the week. They might do a hundred other things which are ritualistic, but aren't always called that - partly, I think because we have a terror of the word and of accepting just how premeditated abuse actually is. Abusers instill fear in their victims and ensure silence; they do all they can to avoid being caught. Sexual abuse of a child is rarely a random act. It involves thorough planning and preparation beforehand. They threaten the children with death, with being taken into care, with no one believing them, which physical violence or their favourite teddy being taken away. They are told that their mum will die, or their dad will hate them, the abusers say everyone will think it's their fault, that everyone already knows they are bad. Nothing is too big or small for an abuser to use as leverage. There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light. I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen. p204-205

A little of this caviar finds its way to the fish restaurants around Istanbul's Taksim Square, but the bulk is sent on to the United Arab Emirates to be enjoyed by wealthy Westerners and Arabs in the preposterous hotels that have set new standards in unnecessary opulence.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of the abuse. Children are often forced to abuse other children. Pornography and prostitution are sometimes part of the abuse as is the use of drugs, hypnotism and mind control. Some groups use complex rituals to terrify, silence and convince victims of the tremendous power of the abusers. the purpose is to gain and maintain power over the child in order to exploit. Some groups are so highly organised that they also have links internationally through trade in child-pornography, drugs and arms. Some abusers organise themselves around a religion or faith and the teaching and training of the children within this faith, often takes the form of severe and sustained torture and abuse. Whether or not the adults within this type of group believe that what they are doing is, in some way 'right' is immaterial to the child on the receiving end of the 'teachings' and abuse.

Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more generally.

I'm just asking you to accept that there are some people who will go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the facts that they are abusing children. What words are there to describe what happened to me, what was done to me? Some call it ritual abuse, others call it organised abuse. There are those that call it satanic. I've heard all the phrases, not just in relation to me, but also with regard to those I work with and try to help. Do you know what I think? It doesn't matter how you dress it up, it doesn't matter what label you put on it. It is abuse, pure and simple. It is adults abusing children. It is adults deciding - actually making a conscious decision, a conscious choices that what they want, what they convince themselves they need, is more important than anything else; certainly more important than the safety or feelings or sanity of a child. However, there can be differences which are layered on top of that abuse. I'm not saying that some abuse is worse than others, or that someone 'wins' the competition to have the worst abuse inflicted on them, but ritual and organised abuse is at the extreme end of the spectrum. If we try to think of a continuum where there are lots of different things imposed on children (or, for that matter, anyone who is forced into these things — and that force can take many forms, it can be threats and promises, as well as kicks and punches), then ritual and organised abuse is intense and complicated. It often involves multiple abusers of both sexes. There can be extreme violence, mind control, systematic torture and even, in some cases, a complex belief system which is sometimes described as religion. I say 'described as' religion because, to me, I think that when this aspect is involved, it is window dressing. I'm not religious. I cried many times for God to save me. I was always ignored — how could I believe? However, I think that ritual abusers who do use religious imagery or 'beliefs' are doing so to justify it all to themselves, or to confuse the victim, or to hide their activities. Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.

There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste. There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians. In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.

Universes were organized on the shelves according to my will. I exerted absolute control according to my own order and rules, putting Tolstoy's essays on the same shelf as Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment and a yellowed copy of Othello next to King Lear. Soon I could guess the age of a book just by its scent and understand a book's core from a quick glance at the table of contents, like a farmer who could tell the maturity and sweetness of a fruit from just its colour and the texture of its skin.

The weakening of the state and the emergence of failed states contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm emphasises the decline of governmental authority, the disintegration of states, the intensification of ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts, the rise of international criminal organisations, refugee numbers growing into the tens of millions, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the spread of terrorism and the prevalence of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!

Constitutional government, the balance of power, legal guarantees, the whole edifice of political civilisation slowly built up over the course of the ages and always incomplete, is calmly pushed aside. They accept an absolute State, allegedly in the service of the Revolution; they are not interested in the plurality of parties and the autonomy of working-class organisations. They do not protest against lawyers bullying their clients and accused persons confessing to imaginary crimes. After all, is not revolutionary justice directed towards the ‘radical solution of the problem of coexistence’, whilst ‘liberal justice’ applies unjust laws?

Le récit achevé, l'abbé réfléchit profondément. « Il y a, dit-il au bout d'un instant, un axiome de droit d'une grande profondeur, et qui en revient à ce que je vous disais tout à l'heure, c'est qu'à moins que la pensée mauvaise ne naisse avec une organisation faussée, la nature humaine répugne au crime. Cependant, la civilisation nous a donné des besoins, des vices, des appétits factices qui ont parfois l'influence de nous faire étouffer nos bons instincts et qui nous conduisent au mal. De là cette maxime : Si vous voulez découvrir le coupable, cherchez d'abord celuià qui le crime commis peut être utile  ! A qui votre disparition pouvait-elle être utile  ?

This is an existential threat to the social and economic order, which is why countries wage a stubborn, bloody and hopeless war on biochemical crime. The state hopes to regulate the biochemical pursuit of happiness, separating ‘bad’ manipulations from ‘good’ ones. The principle is clear: biochemical manipulations that strengthen political stability, social order and economic growth are allowed and even encouraged (e.g., those that calm hyperactive kids in school, or drive anxious soldiers forward into battle). Manipulations that threaten stability and growth are banned. But each year new drugs are born in the research labs of universities, pharmaceutical companies and criminal organisations, and the needs of the state and the market also keep changing.

Many professionals have to sign gagging clauses or face the sack if they speak out. The social worker and therapist was familiar with the scare that revelation brings to the survivor. […] We are in this story. It isn't ours, but we are in it nonetheless, not least because of the viscous campaign which has followed us over the last ten years. Any organisation with which we work may receive correspondence from the accused adults’ and ‘false memory’ movements. Some of these propagandists are confidentially dominating the professional and political arguments using new information technology to spread what we consider to be smears, innuendo and misinformation. P8 (refers to authors Beatrix Campbell & Judith Jones – a journalist and a social worker/therapist)

Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35 offences including 11 rapes. three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organisation, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Batley was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution. (Morris 2011) There are, after all, no paedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered memories cannot he trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)

People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.

Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!

Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.

It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media. By the summer of 1987 Cleveland had become above all, a hot media story. The Daily Mail, for example, had seven reporters, plus its northern editor, based in Middlesbrough full time. Most other news papers and television news teams followed suit. What were all the reporters looking for? Not children at risk. Not abusing adults. Aggrieved parents were the mother lode sought by these prospecting journalists. Many of these parents were only too happy to tell — and in some cases, it would appear, sell— their stories. Those stories are truly extraordinary. In many cases they bore almost no relation to the facts. Parents were allowed - encouraged to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a runaway witch-hunt and these accounts were duly fed to the public. Nowhere in any of the reporting is there any sign of counterbalancing information from child protection workers or the organisations that employed them. Throughout the summer of 1987 newspapers ‘reported’ what they termed a national scandal of innocent families torn apart. The claims were repeated in Parliament and then recycled as established ‘facts’ by the media. The result was that the courts themselves began to be paralysed by the power of this juggernaut of press reporting — ‘journalism’ which created and painstakingly fed a public mood which brooked no other version of the story. (p21)

There simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence.

First published in its entirety in the March 1914 edition of Munsey’s Magazine, this novel tells the tale of a small boy that is abandoned in a Parisian hotel and falls under the spell of a crook. The crook takes to him and teaches him the ways of his business and soon the student, who has adopted the name Michael Lanyard, becomes greater than his master. After a job in London, which nets him a valuable jewel and aeroplane plans that a German spy had stolen from a French inventor, Lanyard falls in love and decides to renounce his ways. But ‘The Pack’ — an organised crime gang — wants the Lone Wolf to join them and won’t take no for an answer…

The annual cost of organised crime to people in Britain itself is estimated at £37 billion, with fraud costing another £193 billion – that’s almost £4,000 for every adult in the country.

As I left the Dayaks I felt torn. They had been endlessly welcoming to me, but they were also openly admitting involvement in, and responsibility for, mass killing. It reinforced what I had found during the previous decade, when I had been investigating terrorism, arms smuggling and organised crime, which was that situations are rarely clear-cut, hardly ever black and white, and good people can do bad things, while bad people can definitely do good. Humans are just so damn complicated.

As were his Mafia connections. As he played the Desert Inn on the Vegas Strip his hoodlum pals were on display at the government hearings being held across America and in Los Angeles which had been his home since 1944. Organised crime had gone corporate, and the Mob’s national consigliere Sidney Korshak had established an influential network along with his closest friend Lew Wasserman, a Sinatra mentor and supporter and arguably the most powerful show-business tycoon – and major Presidential fixer – in America until his death in 2002. Their funny business was conducted in plush offices not street corners.

An old man, thin as a rake, with cheap Clicks Pharmacy reading glasses perched on his nose, was leaning on the counter, paging through Die Burger newspaper. When he looked up, Leon involuntary took a step back. The man had the most intense blue eyes, strikingly contrasting his tanned bony skull. But it wasn’t the colour of the eyes that stopped Leon in his tracks, it was the expression on the man’s face. His eyes were limp, blank, incarcerated by an unfocused daze. He stared straight through Leon into, what felt to Leon as if into a vast abyss of nothingness.

I’ve often been asked; how do you rob a bank? The answer to that is that there is no instruction book. The fact is you never know what will happen when you step through the door of a bank and declare yourself. Certainly, you can work hard on preparations; have everything organised from vehicles to weapons and set out the getaway, but there are no set rules.

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! … ’ ‘You are wrong there,’ cried Porfiry Petrovitch – he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever. ‘Nothing is admitted,’ Razumihin interrupted with heat. ‘I am not wrong. I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is “the influence of environment”, and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That

Cry Wolf' is a hard-boiled thriller written at break-neck pace of political corruption and organised, very violent crime.

THE ROAR of the death blast on the Avenue of the Americas cannot be heard in faraway Johannesburg. With eight weeks to go to the opening game in Soccer City, Sepp Blatter and his South African capos have enough problems. Outraged by price gouging, fans are staying home. In the townships citizens protest every day; ‘Service riots’ send messages to politicians that public money should be spent on homes, water, sewage plants and jobs, not stadiums that will become white elephants. Why should they listen? They have the police beat back the protestors. The World Cup is good news for Danny Jordaan, leader of the bid and now chief executive for the tournament. Quietly, his brother Andrew has been given a well-paid job as Hospitality liaison with MATCH Event Services at the Port Elizabeth stadium. A stakeholder in the MATCH company is Sepp Blatter’s nephew Philippe Blatter. The majority owners are Mexican brothers Jaime and Enrique Byrom, based in Manchester, England, Zurich, Switzerland and with some of their bank accounts in Spain and the Isle of Man. The Brothers are not happy. Sepp Blatter awarded them the lucrative 2010 hospitality contract aimed at wealthy football patrons, mostly from abroad. If that wasn’t enough, Blatter also gave them the contract to manage and distribute the three million tickets. The brothers are charging top rates for hotels and internal flights and expected to make huge profits. Instead, they are on their way to losing $50 million. They plan to recoup these losses in Brazil in four years time.

The irony of the present day is, the more human rights jurisprudence seems to be fortified, the more there are human rights violations in newer and newer forms and some recidivism all due to the conflicting deductions of protecting even human rights of offenders. No doubts offenders deserve their rights to be protected but in cases of serious offenses such as ‘rape’ where the offender consciously commits the act while being aware of the justice system in his particular country, prefers to cross the precincts of the law. Worst still, is increasing crime rate of offenses such as rape committed against children and infants.

Both of them, in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals.

Why has no one, not the Hawks with their serious commercial crimes unit or the police's crime intelligence unit, ever investigated the shenanigans of this family? The State Security Agency (SSA) has a unit that specialises in organised crime. What have they been doing all these years? Why have the Guptas and their associates been allowed to amass their ill-gotten fortunes with such impunity for so long? Why, now that evidence of this is out in the open, are our law enforcement agencies still sitting on their backsides?

The situation has deteriorated substantially. In 1980, 32% of biomedical research in the United States was financed by the industry, and in 2000, it was 62%.21 Currently, most trials are industry sponsored, both in the EU and in the United States.18,22

Corruption. Everywhere else we call in the IMF; in Italy they call it family values. And northern Europeans, whose countries don’t allow politicians to accept a doughnut, happily pay endless bribes to get electricity put into their holiday homes in Tuscany. And what’s more, they feel happy and privileged to be allowed to join in the rustic corruption of Italian politics and pay the mayor. Italy is a trough of special interests, fixing, foul play, pay-offs and excommunications. Italians wave their hands in mock exasperation, and the rest of the world smiles benignly, and goes, aww, those Italian scallywags. If Italy happened to be in the Middle East, there’d be a Yankee aircraft carrier in the Venice lagoon and sanctions. But Italians get away with it simply by being Italians, and we all know what they’re like – and they know we know. Every other nation in the world tries to make life be as it should be; the Italians make the most of how it is. We all say corruption is a bad thing; we must stop it. The Italians say we are all fallible; to pretend otherwise is arrogance. Everywhere else has crime, but in Italy, it’s organised by professionals. All men are lecherous bastards who only want one thing; surely, say the Italians, it’s better to be seduced by Casanova than Attila the Drunk. Instead of pitting virtue against vice in an eternal war of abstinence, failure and guilt like the rest of us, Italy has made the vices virtues, and vice versa. If you come from a prescriptive, prudent, parsimonious society, this seems hypnotically attractive, and I am as mesmerised and seduced as any gap-year convent girl. Most years I try to find myself in Siena for the Palio. The Palio is a horserace held twice a year. But

stages. There was a door that opened at the bottom of the steps. From his position, Jake was unable to recce the inside of the room. He didn’t know whether anyone was

Organised crime, double murder and terror activities,” he said. “It’s your lucky night, DI Finch.

The gangster and the tough guy are not the ones involved in organised crime, who pay others to do their dirty work while making easy money, the gangster and the tough guy are the ones, who can keep going to work each day, to earn their daily living honestly, to feed his family

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphaz­ardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of govern­ment vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be the result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man's fate.

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! . . .

Her mother bought her a burgundy pair of VANS summer shoes in Italy, and they took a picture of her laughing happily while holding them in her hand in an exaggerated scene, as if they had been teasing him to take a picture of her for her boyfriend in a park somewhere in Italy. Shortly after, she started wearing them in Barcelona and cut off the tiny VANS logo with a scissor. When I asked her why, she tried to avoid answering at first until she said something like she didn't like it, or that they looked better without the tiny black VANS logos. It was suspicious that someone must have told her the urban legend in Barcelona soon after her Italian vacation, that VANS stands for „Vans Are Nazi Shoes.” It became more and more obvious in Barcelona that my life was in danger, as an awful vibe surrounded us due to the construction. It was mostly caused by rich tourists who I had never seen do much work in life, too high to take on a task as simple as changing a password on a bank account on an iPhone app – a crime organisation, quite international already and increasingly so, with a growing number of participants and secrets becoming more and more dangerous, I thought, and I wasn’t wrong, I just couldn’t see the whole picture yet as I was blindfolded. As if her nickname, Stupid Bunny which she had printed out at Ample Store with Adam, was a cute, nice thing, a reassurance after the day before she had been crying for some unknown reason and printing out the phrase, “You never loved me, you just broke my heart.” That couldn't have been further from the truth. She would fidget around and draw at home, and I didn't realise she was bored of being with me when she had so many other options in her mind because of what others had fed her, as if I was a monogamist who wouldn’t forgive her for cheating or making a mistake. Even if I had seen her, when she showed up at home she seemed in love with herself, watching herself in the mirror in her new tight, short shorts. It was weird. I had noticed something strange in Martina for a while now and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was only the drugs she was secretly doing behind my back, but I was far away from having all the answers.

That was one of the main problems in dealing with an organisation that believed all your crimes could be forgiven if you just prayed hard enough.

In short: the Ringvereine regulated organised crime in Berlin and had divided the city into different precincts. The police did nothing since the underworld was easier to control if it regulated itself, and excesses like those on Breslauer Strasse were rare.

Not that laws and penalties were wanting for the prevention of private violence: the laws were most express; the offences enumerated, and minutely particularised; the penalties sufficiently extravagant; and if that were not enough, the legislator himself, and, a hundred others to whom was committed the execution of the laws, had power to increase them. Notwithstanding this, or, it may be, in _consequence_ of this, these proclamations, reiterated and reinforced from time to time, served only to proclaim in pompous language the impotence of those who issued them; or, if they produced any immediate effect, it was that of adding to the vexations which the peaceful and feeble suffered from the disturbers of society. Impunity was organised and effected in so many ways as to render the proclamations powerless. The proclamations were efficient, it is true, in fettering and embarrassing the honest man, who had neither power in himself nor protection from others; inasmuch as, in order to reach every person, they subjected the movements of each private individual to the arbitrary will of a thousand magistrates and executive officers. But he, who before the commission of his crime had prepared himself a refuge in some convent or palace where bailiffs never dared to enter; or who simply wore a livery, which engaged in his defence the vanity or the interest of a powerful family; such a one was free in his actions, and could laugh to scorn every proclamation. Of those very persons whose part it was to ensure the execution of these decrees, some belonged by birth to the privileged class, others were its clients and dependants; and as the latter as well as the former had, from education, from habit, from imitation, embraced its maxims, they would be very careful not to violate them. Had they however, been bold as heroes, obedient as monks, and devoted as martyrs, they could never have accomplished the execution of the laws, inferior as they were in number to _those_ with whom they must engage, and with the frequent probability of being abandoned, or even sacrificed, by him who, in a moment of theoretical abstraction, might require them to act. But, in addition to this, their office would be regarded as a base one in public opinion, and their name stamped with reproach. It was therefore very natural that, instead of risking, nay, throwing away, their lives in a fruitless attempt, they should sell their inaction, or, rather, their connivance, to the powerful; or, at least, exercise their authority only on those occasions when it might be done with safety to themselves; that is, in oppressing the peaceable and the defenceless.

Sergei Mikhailov – Alleged head of the Solntsevskaya organised-crime group, Moscow’s most powerful, with close ties to many of the KGB-connected businessmen who later cultivated connections with New York property mogul Donald Trump.

We believe that for this diabolical discovery to take its place in the armament of the nations of Europe, at a time when jealousies and fears and the rumours of wars are again lifting their heads, would be a refinement of ‘civilisation’ which the world could well be spared. You may say that the exclusive possession of this invention would confirm Great Britain in an unassailable supremacy, and perhaps thereby secure the peace of Europe. We answer that no secret can be kept for ever. The sword is two-edged. And, as Vargan answered me by saying, ‘Science is international’ – so I answer you by saying that humanity is also international. We are content to be judged by the verdict of history, when all the facts are made known. But in accomplishing what we have accomplished, we have put you in the way of learning our identities; and that, as you will see, must be an almost fatal blow to such an organisation as mine. Nevertheless, I believe that in time I shall find a way for us to continue the work that we have set ourselves to do. We regret nothing that we have already done. Our only regret is that we should be scattered before we have had time to do more. Yet we believe that we have done much good, and that this last crime of ours is the best of all. Au revoir! Simon Templar (‘The Saint’).

each man convicted of crime is to be regarded as an individual, as a separate entity or morality, who by the application of influences, of discipline, labour, education, moral and religious, backed up on discharge by a well-organised system of patronage, is capable of reinstatement in civic life. (Ruggles-Brise 1911: 74)

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! …

[Socialists] don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process!

Victoria’s heart was a stranger to every gentle, noble, or superior feeling. The ambitious, the selfish, the wild, and the turbulent were her’s. Her’s were the stormy passions of the soul, goading on to ruin and despair—Berenza’s were mild, philosophic, though proudly tenacious. His were as the even stream, calm, yet deep—her’s as the foaming cataract, rushing headlong from the rocky steep, and raging in the abyss below! She was not susceptible of a single sentiment, vibrating from a tender movement of the heart: she could not feel gratitude; she could not, therefore, feel affection. She could inflict pain without remorse, and she could bitterly revenge the slightest attempt to inflict it on herself. The wildest passions predominated in her bosom; to gratify them she possessed an unshrinking relentless soul, that would not startle at the darkest crime. Unhappy girl! whom Nature organised when offended with mankind, and whom education, that might have corrected, tended only to confirm in depravity.

Somewhere in the organisation, high in its upper reaches, were minds that churned out page after page of guidance notes, instructions, and policy statements. Most of these were filed and forgotten; seldom did they make any difference to the way in which people carried out their duties. But the procedure for procedures had to be gone through, in accordance with further procedural guidelines.

There’s nothing concrete. But you know Randle. Both of them have been working for the same organised crime gang. But the difference is, Osman’s turned. We can use him. And I trust you to keep an eye on him.

Ian had lied to them all. To her, and to Carl. He’d made them think he was working for Professional Standards, when in reality he was still working for organised crime.

You look – at least, I do, or I did – at the emperor and the nobility, lording it over the people while they starve and suffer, and you say to yourself, something’s got to be done about all this. This can’t be right. The lions of the earth must not destroy the worms any more. And then you do something about it, and what do you discover? The people turn out to be – well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons. When push comes to shove, thick as bricks, the lot of them. You wouldn’t trust any of them with the helm of a ship, or the regimental welfare fund, or your dog if you were going away for a few days, or anything sharp.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that the psychological literature on organised abuse has not provided a coherent explanation for the emergence of sexually abusive groups in a range of contexts, or for the difficulties that victims experience in disclosing their abuse and accessing care and support. The psychological model of organised abuse emphasises individual rather than social factors and so it tends to characterise organised abuse as a drama of psychological energies. Similar deficiencies can be found in attempts to theorise organised abuse that draw from psychiatric understandings of ‘paedophilia’ (eg Wyre 1996). This is a perspective that has proved particularly influential in public inquiries into allegations of organised abuse (for examples from Australia, see NCA Joint Committee Report 1995, Wood Report 1997, for examples from Britain, see Corby et at. 2001). These public inquiries have integrated the psychiatric notion of ‘paedophilia’ with existing stereotypes of organised crime to generate a model of ‘organised paedophilia’ or the ‘paedophile ring’, in which otherwise solitary sexual offenders with deviant sexual interests conspire to sexually abuse children for pleasure and/or profit. This psychiatric model may accurately describe some abusive men and groups but it has proven problematic as a catch-all explanation for organised abuse. Attempts to establish the existence of ‘paedophile rings’ often founders on semantic debates over whether alleged perpetrators meet the diagnostic criteria of a ‘paedophile’, sometimes leading to the confused and misleading conclusion that no ‘paedophile ring’ existed even where there is strong evidence that multiple perpetrators have colluded in the sexual abuse of multiple children.

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon.