Asian Criminal Enterprises

Asian Criminal Enterprises impacting the United States are groups organized by criminals predominantly from East and Southeast Asia, including groups whose members are of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese descent. However, other Asian Criminal Enterprises are emerging as domestic and international threats, including groups from the South Pacific Island nations as well as groups from Southwest Asia such as Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Iran. In the United States, Asian Criminal Enterprises have been identified in more than 50 metropolitan areas, but are most prevalent in Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

These Asian Criminal Enterprises utilize extensive networks of national and international criminal associates that are very fluid and extremely mobile. They adapt easily to the changes around them, have multilingual abilities, can be highly sophisticated in their criminal operations, and have extensive financial capabilities. Some Asian Criminal Enterprises have commercialized their criminal activities and can be viewed as business firms of various sizes, from small family-run operations to large corporations, depending upon each group's maturity in the criminal business in which they specialize.

In the early 1900s, the beginning signs of Asian Criminal Enterprises emerged in the United States with the onset of criminally influenced Chinese tongs. In less than a century, not only have criminally influenced tongs thrived in the United States, but also other Asian Criminal Enterprises have developed, primarily because of the globalization of the world economies, communications technology, and international travel. Also, generous immigration policies have provided many members of Asian Criminal Enterprises the ability to enter and live on every populated continent in the world today undetected.

Asian Criminal Enterprises can be categorized as traditional and non-traditional. Traditional criminal enterprises include the Chinese triads based in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau as well as the Japanese Yakuza or Boryokudan. Non-traditional criminal enterprises include groups such as Chinese criminally influenced tongs, triad affiliates, and other ethnic Asian street gangs that are situated in several continents with sizeable Asian communities.

The criminal conduct engaged in by Asian Criminal Enterprises include not only traditional racketeering activities normally associated with organized crime such as extortion, murder, kidnaping, illegal gambling, prostitution, and loansharking, but also international organized crime problems like alien smuggling, heroin and methamphetamine drug trafficking, financial frauds such as illegal credit cards, theft of automobiles and computer chips, counterfeiting of computer and clothing products, and money laundering.

Several obvious trends have emerged regarding Asian Criminal Enterprises. First, it has become common to see the cooperation of criminal groups that cross ethnic and racial heritage lines. Also, the maturing Asian gangs and some other Asian Criminal Enterprises have begun to structure their groups in a hierarchical fashion to be more competitive, and the criminal activities they engage in have become globalized. Finally, more and more of these criminals enterprises are engaging in white collar crimes and are co-mingling their illegal activities with legitimate business ventures.