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Posts Tagged ‘law’

The Mexican Mafia

21 Oct

The Mexican Mafia is a fairly small prison gang (perhaps 150-300 made members) and it has significant operational control only within prisons in Southern California yet the Mexican Mafia is extremely powerful. In fact, the MM taxes hundreds of often larger Southern California street gangs at rates of 10-30% of revenues. How can a prison gang tax street gangs? In Governance and Prison Gangs (also here), a new paper in the APSR, David Skarbek explains the structure, conduct and performance of the Mexican Mafia.

The key to the MM’s power is that most drug dealers will sooner or later, usually sooner, end up in prison. Thus, the MM can credibly threaten drug dealers outside of prison with punishment once they are inside prison. Moreover, prison is the only place where members of many different gangs congregate. Thus, by maintaining control of the prison bottleneck, the MM can tax hundreds of gangs.

One of the most interesting aspects of Skarbek’s analysis is that he shows–consistent with Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit theory–that as the MM grew in power it started to provide public goods, i.e. it became a kind of government. Thus, the MM protects taxpayers both in prison and on the street, it produces property rights by enforcing gang claims to territory and it adjudicates disputes, all to the extent that such actions increase tax revenue of course. The MM is so powerful that it often doesn’t even have to use its own enforcers; instead, the MM can issue what amounts to a letter of marque and reprisal, a signal that a non-taxpaying gang is no longer under its protection, and privateers will do the rest.

The MM even internalizes externalities:

In addition, the Mexican Mafia regulates drive-by shootings…because any particular street gang only suffers a portion of the increased attention of law enforcement from drive-by shootings, each street gang has an incentive to do too-many (Buchanan 1973). In 1992, Mexican Mafia members sent notes throughout the prison system and Sureño neighborhoods that any gang member participating in an unauthorized drive-by shooting would be killed. Shortly after the Mexican Mafia announced this rule, drive by shootings declined.

The Mexican Mafia has much to teach us about crime and governance.

 
 

The Mexican Mafia

21 Oct

The Mexican Mafia is a fairly small prison gang (perhaps 150-300 made members) and it has significant operational control only within prisons in Southern California yet the Mexican Mafia is extremely powerful. In fact, the MM taxes hundreds of often larger Southern California street gangs at rates of 10-30% of revenues. How can a prison gang tax street gangs? In Governance and Prison Gangs (also here), a new paper in the APSR, David Skarbek explains the structure, conduct and performance of the Mexican Mafia.

The key to the MM’s power is that most drug dealers will sooner or later, usually sooner, end up in prison. Thus, the MM can credibly threaten drug dealers outside of prison with punishment once they are inside prison. Moreover, prison is the only place where members of many different gangs congregate. Thus, by maintaining control of the prison bottleneck, the MM can tax hundreds of gangs.

One of the most interesting aspects of Skarbek’s analysis is that he shows–consistent with Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit theory–that as the MM grew in power it started to provide public goods, i.e. it became a kind of government. Thus, the MM protects taxpayers both in prison and on the street, it produces property rights by enforcing gang claims to territory and it adjudicates disputes, all to the extent that such actions increase tax revenue of course. The MM is so powerful that it often doesn’t even have to use its own enforcers; instead, the MM can issue what amounts to a letter of marque and reprisal, a signal that a non-taxpaying gang is no longer under its protection, and privateers will do the rest.

The MM even internalizes externalities:

In addition, the Mexican Mafia regulates drive-by shootings…because any particular street gang only suffers a portion of the increased attention of law enforcement from drive-by shootings, each street gang has an incentive to do too-many (Buchanan 1973). In 1992, Mexican Mafia members sent notes throughout the prison system and Sureño neighborhoods that any gang member participating in an unauthorized drive-by shooting would be killed. Shortly after the Mexican Mafia announced this rule, drive by shootings declined.

The Mexican Mafia has much to teach us about crime and governance.

 
 

How the FBI nabbed a Russian spam king in Las Vegas

02 Dec

On October 30, Oleg Nikolaenko flew from his home in Moscow to JFK airport, and then on to Las Vegas. He checked in to the Bellagio Hotel, where he attended the Speciality Equipment Market Association car show, a show he had attended last year as well.

Bad move—because the feds nabbed him in Vegas just before the show ended, leaving his wife and young son back in Russia. At a November 4 hearing before a judge in Las Vegas, Nikolaenko needed a Russian interpreter and a public defender, but it didn't take much interpretation to see that he wasn't about to go free. That's because Nikolaenko was one of the biggest spammers in the world.

Nikolaenko doesn't come across in court documents as a man who learns his lessons well. He's allegedly one of the parties behind the Mega-D botnet, at one time "the largest botnet in the world, accounting for 32 percent of all spam," according to the FBI.

Yet he keeps coming to the US. When he was in Vegas for the 2009 car show, a security firm called FireEye actually managed to cripple Mega-D by shutting down its US-based command and control servers and redirecting much of the botnet traffic to "sinkhole" locations. Nikolaenko, poor guy, had to leave the US two days early to "repair the damage caused by FireEye."

Nikolaenko's home outside Moscow

So how did the FBI get its man this time around? By busting the US-based distributor of fake Rolex watches who used Mega-D to send a good chunk of his spam. That led them on a trail that culminated in ePassporte, a money transfer service, and they found Nikolaenka's name and e-mail addresses attached to his account.

Nikolaenko had made another mistake: the e-mail accounts were Gmail addresses, and it was no trouble at all for the US to get a subpoena, forcing Google to cough up the account information. FBI agents found copies of the botnet software and much else of interest among the e-mails.

With what they needed in hand, they waited—and it didn't take long for Nikolaenko to enter the US again at JFK. A few phone calls later and he was located at the Bellagio in Vegas. The FBI obtained and then executed an arrest warrant, and now Nikolaenko faces CAN-SPAM Act charges in, of all places, Milwaukee (where the FBI agent tracking him was located).

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