Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:46:03.129Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When finance met security: Back to the War on Drugs and the problem of dirty money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Anthony Amicelle
Anthony Amicelle*
Affiliation:
University of Montreal, Canada
*
Corresponding author: Anthony Amicelle, Department of Criminology, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150, Rue JeanBrillant, Montréal (QC) H3T 1N8, Canada. Email: [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

When and how did the laundering of ‘dirty’ money become an object of public concern, debate, and ultimately policy at the intersection of finance and security? This article sheds light on the social construction of money laundering as a public problem in the context of the U.S. War on Drugs during the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, the article also stresses the heuristic value of questioning the finance-security nexus through an analytics of public problems. Its aims are to: (1) avoid interdisciplinary debates around the finance-security nexus becoming trapped in a zero-sum game between the ‘securitization of finance’ and the ‘financialization of security’; and (2) understand better the emergence, re-configuration, and internal tensions of social spaces at the interface of finance and security.

Keywords

Dirty moneyfinancepublic problemsecurityWar on Drugs
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 3 , Issue 2: Finance and security , 2017 , pp. 106 - 123
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017

References

Aitken, R. (2011) Financialising security: Political prediction markets and uncertainty. Security Dialogue, 42(2): 123–41.Google Scholar
Amicelle, A. (2011) Towards a ‘new’ political anatomy of financial surveillance. Security Dialogue, 42(2): 161–78.Google Scholar
Amicelle, A. (2017) Policing through misunderstanding: Insights from the configuration of financial policing. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-017-9752-9.Google Scholar
Amicelle, A. and Jacobsen, E. (2016) The cross-colonization of finance and security through lists: Banking policing in UK and India. Society and Space, 34(1): 89–106.Google Scholar
American Bankers Association (2008) A New Framework for Partnership: Recommendations for Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering Reform. Washington, DC: American Bankers Association.Google Scholar
Andreas, P. and Nadelmann, E. (2006) Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, H.S. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe.Google Scholar
Bernstein, C. and Woodward, B. (1974) A passion for the covert: The response to the threat of discovery. The Washington Post, 9 August.Google Scholar
Best, J. (ed.) (2016) Social Problems: Constructionist Readings. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Blakey, G.R. (1994) RICO: The federal experience (criminal and civil) and an analysis of attacks against the statute. In: Kelly, R.J., Chin, K.-L. and Schatzberg, R. (eds.) Handbook of Organized Crime in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 451–89.Google Scholar
Boy, N. (2015) Report on the Theory of Risk as a Societal Security Instrument. Oslo: PRIO.Google Scholar
Boy, N., Burgess, P. and Leander, A. (2011) The global governance of security and finance: Introduction to the special issue. Security Dialogue, 42(2): 115–22.Google Scholar
Briquet, J.-L. and Favarel-Garrigues, G. (2010) Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Caporossi, O. (2007) La figure du faux monnayeur dans le cinéma américain de propagande de la fin des années 1940: T-Men d'Anthony Mann. Criminocorpus, 2:1–9.Google Scholar
Chambliss, W. (1978) On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Cefaï, D. (1996) La construction des problèmes publics: Définitions de situations dans des arènes publiques. Réseaux, 14(75): 43–66.Google Scholar
Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cuellar, M.-F. (2003) The tenuous relationship between the fight against money laundering and the disruption of criminal finance. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 93(2/3): 312–466.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2010) Financial security. In: Burgess, J.P. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies. London: Routledge, 100–109.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2012) Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (forthcoming) A finance/security assemblage: Banks in the firing line. In: Colin, C., Walker, C. and Gurulé, J. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Criminal and Terrorism Financing Law. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Electronic Privacy Information Center (2003) The Right to Financial Privacy Act.Google Scholar
Entman, R.M. (1993) Framing: Toward a clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4): 51–58.Google Scholar
Epstein, E. (1977) Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America. New York, NY: Putnam.Google Scholar
Epstein, G. (ed.) (2005) Financialization and the World Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.Google Scholar
Financial Action Task Force (2017) P. 1..Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1977) Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Bouchard, D.F. (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 139–64.Google Scholar
Friman, R. (1996) Narcodiplomacy: Exporting the U.S. War on Drugs. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gilmore, W.C. (2005) Dirty Money: The Evolution of Money Laundering Countermeasures. Council of Europe Publishing.Google Scholar
Gusfield, J. (1980) The Culture of Public Problems. Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, G. (1969) God and the Mafia. The Public Interest, 14: 24–51.Google Scholar
Helleiner, E. (1999) State power and the regulation of illicit activity in global finance. In: Andreas, P. and Friman, R. (eds.) The Illicit Global Economy and State Power. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 53–89.Google Scholar
Hugues, W.J. (1990) RICO Reform: How much is needed? Vanderbilt Law Review, 43(3): 639–49.Google Scholar
Hülsse, R. (2007) Creating demand for global governance: The making of a global money-laundering problem. Global Society, 21(2): 155–78.Google Scholar
Hülsse, R. (2009) Why greylag geese and money-laundering are not objective problems: A rejoinder. Global Society, 23(2): 183–90.Google Scholar
Irey, E.L. and Slocum, W.J. (1949) The Tax Dodgers: The Inside Story of the U.S. Treasury's War with America's Political and Underworld Hoodlums as told to William J. Slocum. New York, NY: Greenberg.Google Scholar
Johnson, L.B. (1968) Special message to the Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement: ‘To Insure the Public Safety’. Public Papers of the President, 7 February.Google Scholar
Langley, P. (2008) The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Langley, P. (2013) Toxic assets, turbulence and biopolitical security: Governing the crisis of global financial circulation. Security Dialogue, 44(2): 111–26.Google Scholar
Levi, M. (1991) Pecunia non olet: Cleansing the money-launderers from the temple. Crime, Law and Social Change, 16(3): 217–302.Google Scholar
Levi, M. (2002) Money laundering and its regulation. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 582(1): 181–95.Google Scholar
Levi, M. and Reuter, P. (2005) Money laundering. In: Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime and Justice: A Review of Research. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 289–375.Google Scholar
Levi, M. and van Duyne, P. (2005) Drug Money: Managing the Drug Trade and Crime-money in Europe. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Martin, R. (2002) Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, R. (2007) An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mitsilegas, V. (2003) Countering the chameleon threat of dirty money: “Hard” and “soft” law in the emergence of a global regime against money laundering and terrorist finance. In: Edwards, A. and Gill, P. (eds.) Transnational Organised Crime: Perspectives on Global Security. London: Routledge, 195–211.Google Scholar
Morselli, C. and Kazemian, L. (2004) Scrutinizing RICO. Critical Criminology, 12(3): 351–69.Google Scholar
Naylor, R.T. (1997) Mafia, markets and myths: On the theory and practice of enterprise crime. Transnational Organized Crime, 3(3): 1–45.Google Scholar
Naylor, R.T. (2004) Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy. Revised edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Neveu, E. (2015) Sociologie Politique des Problèmes Publics. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Nelson, B. (1984) Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nichols, L.T. (1997) Social problems as landmark narratives: Bank of Boston, mass media and ‘money laundering’. Social Problems, 44(3): 324–41.Google Scholar
Palmer, T. (1985) Uncle Sam's eye on the banks has a winning record. The Boston Globe, 22 October.Google Scholar
Peebles, G. (2012) Filth and lucre: The dirty money complex as a taxation regime. Anthropological Quarterly, 85(4): 1229–255.Google Scholar
President's Commission on Organized Crime (2001) The Cash Connection: Organized Crime, Financial Institutions, and Money Laundering. Interim Report to the President and the Attorney General. New York, NY: Books for Business.Google Scholar
Reinarman, C. and Levine, H.G. (2003) Constructing a War on Drugs. In: Best, J. (ed.) Social Problems: Constructionist Readings. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 154–61.Google Scholar
Reuter, P. (1983) Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schelling, T. (1971) What is the business of organised crime? Journal of Public Law, 20(1): 71–84.Google Scholar
Scherrer, A. (2009) G8 Against Transnational Organized Crime. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Sheptycki, J. (2005) In Search of Transnational Policing. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Simon, J. (2008) Choosing our wars, transforming governance: Cancer, crime and terror. In: Amoore, L. and de Goede, M. (eds.) Risk and the War on Terror. London: Routledge, 79–96.Google Scholar
Smith, J. (2013) A tip of the fedora to Elmer Lincoln Irey, the patron saint of the IRS. Daily Beast, 7 July.Google Scholar
Spector, M. and Kitsuse, J.L. (1977) Constructing Social Problems. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sutherland, E.H. (1949) White Collar Crime. New York, NY: Dryden.Google Scholar
van Duyne, P.C. (2003) Money laundering policy: Fears and facts. In: van Duyne, P.C. et al. (eds.) Criminal Finance and Organizing Crime in Europe. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Wolf Legal, 67–104.Google Scholar
Villa, J.K. (1988) A critical view of Bank Secrecy Act enforcement and the money laundering statutes. Catholic University Law Review, 37(2): 489–509.Google Scholar
Woodiwiss, M. (2003) Transnational organized crime: The strange career of an American concept. In: Beare, M.E. (ed.) Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering, and Corruption. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 3–34.Google Scholar
Woodiwiss, M. (2005) Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime. New York, NY: Constable & Robinson.Google Scholar