Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy

R.T. Naylor has devoted much of his career to researching the illegal economy – organized crime, the connections between guerrilla finance and the international arms trade, smuggling, tax havens, money laundering, and other forms of illegal enterprise. In Wages of Crime he focuses on crime statistics that do not reflect the reality of criminal activities and questions the policy recommendations that these fuzzy numbers support.Outraged by recent encroachments on citizens’ rights that have been justified by claims that new and more restrictive laws will combat the ravages of international crime, Naylor contends that no police campaign that fails to address the demand for illegal goods and services has ever succeeded. He supports this claim with detailed – and often entertaining – accounts of past criminal operations and law enforcement’s attempts to stop them. Wages of Crime makes a persuasive case for the need to address the underlying economic and political factors that encourage criminal enterprises rather than relying on restrictive laws.