Measuring organised crime infiltration in legal businesses

Measuring organised crime infiltration in legal businesses requires addressing several issues. Building on Black, Vander Beken and De Ruyver (2000) and von Lampe (2004), three methodological steps can be identified. First, key concepts – the notion of organised crime and that of infiltration – must be defined and specified through a set of inclusion rules. Second, key concepts must be operationalised into variables to be used for their measurement. Third, the variables must be linked to available empirical data. This chapter first discusses the challenges in defining, operationalising and measuring organised crime (hereafter OC); it then focuses on how to define and operationalise infiltration in legitimate businesses. It describes the strengths and weaknesses of existing measures and explores further directions in terms of research and data collection.