Georgios A. Antonopoulos

The Hidden Enterprise of Bootlegging Cigarettes out of Greece: Two Schemes of Illegal Entrepreneurship

Abstract Cigarette smuggling in all its forms prevents the Greek state from collecting large amounts of taxes. The phenomenon has been largely neglected by the academic community and this is even more the case when it comes to bootlegging. This article is a presentation of the available evidence on two schemes of bootlegging cigarettes out of Greece. It explores the different entrepreneurial inputs of cigarette bootleggers, and the practices that resemble “normal” entrepreneurial activities, through two case studies. These inputs and practices shed some light on the environment in which unproductive economic activity takes place, offering researchers and policy makers insights into their manifestation.

The smuggling of migrants in Greece: an examination of its social organization

The smuggling of migrants is not a new phenomenon but in recent years it has attracted increasing international attention. Within the European context, Greece represents a unique case because of its social, economic, political and geographical location. Drawing on a variety of information sources, such as interviews with the police, official statistics, informal interviews with migrants in the country, and interviews with two retired migrant smugglers, this article examines the social organization of migrant smuggling in Greece.

The Greek Connection(s) The Social Organization of the Cigarette-Smuggling Business in Greece

Despite the fact that cigarette smuggling has a long history in specific contexts, it has only relatively recently received some media attention in Greece. It is now suggested that contraband cigarettes represent 8 percent of total cigarette consumption in the country and that the cigarette-smuggling business deprives the Greek state of millions in taxes. The purpose of this article, which draws on a variety of data sources and builds on a previous study of a cigarette-smuggling network in Greece, is to provide an account of the social organization of the cigarette black market in Greece.

Police Perception of Migration and Migrants in Greece

The beginning of the 1990s saw a sharp rise in the number of immigrants entering Greece from a variety of contexts. Drawing on notions of ethnicity and immigration, the phenomenon of migration into Greece became a topic of heated debate, and was increasingly identified with a range of “social problems” such as unemployment, national (in)security and, of course, crime. Events such as 9/11 in the US, 7/7 in Britain, and the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, although occurring in other contexts, had a global resonance and heightened these debates. The relationship between migrants and crime in particular has been an important issue in the social and political agenda of Greece with some intermissions. “Organised crime” in the country, for example, had been considered to be unknown before the beginning of the 1990s; nowadays the dominant view among social and political commentators, as well as Greek citizens in general, is that it has evolved in parallel with increasing levels of migration. Simultaneously, according to official figures, migrant groups make a significant contribution to official crime rates across a range of offences.

'Gain with no pain’: anabolic-androgenic steroids trafficking in the UK

Anabolic-androgenic steroids are performance and image enhancing drugs (PIED) that can improve endurance and athletic performance, reduce body fat and stimulate muscle growth. The use of steroids has been studied extensively in the medical and psychological literature, as well as in the sociology of sport, health and masculinity. From the late 2000s, the worldwide trade in steroids increased significantly. However, trafficking in steroids remains a largely under-researched criminological phenomenon with a few notable exceptions. Currently in the UK there are only small and fragmented pieces of information available relating to steroids trafficking in autobiographical accounts of professional criminals. Drawing on original empirical data, the purpose of this article is to provide an account of the social organization of the steroids trafficking business in the UK. The trade in steroids is decentralized, highly flexible with no hierarchies, and open to anyone willing to either order the merchandise online or travel to producing countries and obtain steroids in bulk from legitimate manufacturers. The patterns of trafficking of this specific type of substance are patently conditioned by its embeddedness in the gym/bodybuilding scene and this greatly affects relations between actors in the business. In the steroids market, one typically encounters a multitude of individuals likely to drift between legality and illegality, online and offline, use and supply.

Organized crime and illegal gambling: How do illegal gambling enterprises respond to the challenges posed by their illegality in China?

Since China initiated its economic reforms in 1978, illegal gambling has become the primary source of revenue for organized crime groups. However, there remains a startling paucity of literature on the subject. This paper provides the first scholarly account in English of Chinese illegal gambling organizations and examines how three major types of enterprising entities (local gambling dens, trans-regional gambling rings and online gambling networks) mitigate external uncertainties. Using Chinese- and English-language sources, it explores how gambling organizations develop strategies to achieve optimal efficiency in the face of substantial challenges, including finance, marketing, debt collection, and police suppression.

'Endemic to the species': ordering the 'other' via organised crime

The United States has been the prime mover in the establishment of both the concept of organised crime and the use of the concept in its attempt to establish global hegemony, in which law enforcement became a little more than a front for a government-backed central casting agency, stereotyping both heroes and villains. This article offers an account of how the ‘Other’ has been used as prism for the construction of organised crime primarily in the United States and how this construction, as a franchise, has been exported on the international level and on heterogeneous criminal landscapes.

The changing role of china in the global illegal cigarette trade

This study explores the history of the illegal production, distribution, and smuggling of cigarettes in mainland China. Data were obtained from a content analysis of 931 media reports retrieved from LexisNexis for the time period 1975 until 2010, and from other open sources. The illegal cigarette trade first emerged in the form of violations of state tobacco monopoly regulations. In the course of the restructuring of the legal tobacco sector, which occurred under external political pressure to open the Chinese market to foreign competition, an illegal cigarette industry emerged which at first primarily produced fake Chinese brand cigarettes for the domestic black market. At the same time, China became a destination country for smuggled genuine Western brand cigarettes. It was only after effective crackdowns against cigarette smuggling and domestic distribution channels in the late 1990s that the Chinese illegal cigarette industry shifted to exporting large numbers of counterfeit Western brand cigarettes to black markets abroad. China’s current role as a leading supplier of counterfeit cigarettes is a result of the contradictions of the economic reform process and of external licit and illicit forces that worked toward opening up the Chinese tobacco sector to the outside world.

Cigarette Smugglers: A Note on Four ‘Unusual Suspects’

The smuggling of contraband cigarettes is discussed in relation to numerous financial and social issues. Cigarette smugglers are often portrayed as ruthless and dangerous individuals, and according to official and media accounts a clear link has been established between cigarette smuggling and ‘criminal and terrorist organisations’. The aim of this article is to challenge this stereotypical image of the cigarette smugglers based on the presentation of the stories of four smugglers interviewed in Greece and the UK.

The Supply Side

This chapter focuses on the supply side, examining the dynamics shaping the physical flows of illicit medicines around the world. First, it explores the political economy of supply, which exposes the use of historically established trade routes, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and parallel trading practices in the illicit pharmaceutical supply chain. Second, it offers a zonal model that outlines the most regularly utilised channels and routes through which illicit medicines are produced and distributed. Third, the chapter explores the social organisation of the illicit medicine trade. The data from investigative case files are presented and, along with other sources, highlight the key actors involved in the trade in the UK, their motivations, how they are organised and how the trade can be conceptualised as a by-product of the legal industry.