Faces in the clouds: criminology, epochalism, apophenia and transnational organized crime

Transnational organized crime is a construct that has emerged from a specific set of converging political economic forces. Yet it is rarely critically interrogated. Criminology, with few exceptions, sees it as an identifiable malady to be extinguished by the heroic efforts of administrative criminology. This chapter proceeds to critique the tendency towards epochalism in the study of organized crime and suggests that to overplay the notion of organization is a symptom of apophenia, the human tendency to seek patterns in random information. By focusing on the British experience, accessed through a series of conversations that the author carried out with veteran London-based criminals, it is hoped that a more nuanced view of organized crime might be established.