On the Importance of Trust in Criminal Relations
INTRODUCTION
According to conventional wisdom, trust is an essential feature of organized crime. Because criminals have no recourse to the judicial system in the event of contract violations and deceit, they have to rely largely on trust to cope with the risks that are inherent in interactions with others under conditions of illegality. Because trust is a necessary component of criminal relations, it is further argued, organized crime tends to be embedded in ties of kinship, ethnicity, and ritual kinship within Mafia-like fraternal organizations (Black et al., 2001:58; Bovenkerk, 1998:122; Kenney and Finckenauer, 1995:43; von Lampe, 1999:220-1; 2001b; Lupsha, 1986:33-4; Paoli, 2002:84).
Others have cast doubt on the general validity of these assumptions by arguing that organized crime is better characterized by a lack of trust (van Duyne et al., 2001:99, 127), as people who tend towards criminality are unlikely, in the words of Gottfredson and Hirschi,...