The Rise And Rise Of Illegal Ticket Touting

This book presents an ethnographic study of contemporary ticket touts in the UK. Despite the recent interest in the topic of black-market ticket sales, media coverage and parliamentary interventions over the last ten years have revealed a widespread lack of knowledge with regard to the phenomenon of touting and the players engaging in the practice. The Rise and Rise of Illegal Ticket Touting sheds light on the world of touting and delivers an authentic picture of the individuals involved, of their methods, values, and motivations for performing ticket touting as an organised, entrepreneurial deviant activity. The touts’ varied methods of buying and selling tickets, the hierarchical structures and strict ethos of their criminal organisations, and their specific modi operandi for evading detection and arrest both on the streets and online are focal points of the study. Of equal importance are the touts’ attitudes, perceptions, and adaptations to (or outright dismissal of) society’s legal and moral frameworks. This book illuminates why historic and renewed attempts to challenge ticket touting have been unsuccessful, focusing on inadequate legislation, a lack of enforcement, and the widespread corruption and exploitable loopholes that exist within the official, primary ticket market. An accessible and compelling read, The Rise and Rise of Illegal Ticket Touting will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, social policy, policing and all those with an interest in live music and sport and the hidden practices that lurk beneath the surface.

This book explores the infiltration of Italian and Russian organised crime in the UK real estate market, assessing how vulnerable the UK is to these sorts of activities. It identifies the drivers behind the criminal choices and modus operandi of Italian and Russian organised crime groups, and the factors causing their mobility abroad. Investment of Criminal Proceeds into the Legitimate Economy broadens our knowledge on the relationship between criminal agency and criminogenic opportunity in a socio-economic and legal context. This book offers a critical insight into the criminal actors and operations of Italian and Russian organised crime groups, such as money laundering schemes in the real estate sector, whilst also exploring the role of crime facilitators. Drawing on interviews with prosecutors, law enforcement agents and investigative journalists, Investment of Criminal Proceeds into the Legitimate Economy explores how criminal investments adversely affect both law enforcement operations and socio-economic development in this area. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, law, organised crime, policymakers, and all those interested in how Italian and Russian organised crime operates in the UK real estate market.

Drawing on empirical work and secondary analysis from the UK and Finnish construction industries, this book contributes a deep-rooted analysis of construction industry harms that originate from corporate-industrialstate processes. The UK context arguably represents a classic ‘neoliberal’ system categorised by privatisation of services and minimal regulation, whereas Finland broadly provides a ‘social democratic’ alternative with its relatively strong national regulation and public sector oversight of industry. These concepts interlink strongly with the notion of state-corporate crime, since this perspective shifts attention away from individualistic explanations for crime and harm towards symbiosis between states and corporations. This book argues that existing explanations based on organised crime and individual ‘rogues’ are insufficient to account for the wider range and subtlety of harms that occur in construction, and therefore offers a unique perspective into organisational, industry, and state dynamics in this sector. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, organized crime, and those interested in harms in the construction industry.

Following the rise of the zemiological movement, the concept of social harm has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Using this perspective, a number of scholars have sought to remove the constraining brackets surrounding criminological investigation in order to broaden its legitimate parameters of study and incorporate a wider range of un-criminalized and hidden harms. This book expands the literature on social harm by applying the concept of zemia to human trafficking investigations in Europe, North America, and Africa. This book draws attention not only to various structurally imbedded harms, but also to the wider consequences of such harms. Drawing on a range of international legal cases on trafficking, this book offers a new direction in criminological and zemiological thinking and a reimagining of criminal justice responses to harm.

This book is the first to consider the intersection between mafia power and deviant masonic lodges within the political sphere of the contemporary Italian state. At its core, it offers an analysis of the shifting interactions across powerful actors and the ways in which they balance reciprocal obedience, and a unique insight into the political processes where mafia actors and deviant lodges play a significant role in the allocation of resources. Mafia, Deviant Masons and Corruption draws on a wealth of literature from across criminology and political science and a range of primary data sources including judicial files, indictments, arrest warrants, intercepted materials and sentences for key cases, official documentation from Parliamentary commissions and special committees of inquiry, rituals of affiliation and codes of initiation, and interviews with prosecutors, journalists and experts. In doing so it redefines how we have come to understand the relationship between mafias and power in Italy. It considers how criminal groups are defined and enriched by a relational capital in shifty environments where every actor assumes often a double nature: the mafia boss acts as an entrepreneur; the entrepreneur acts as a politician; the politician mixes with masons; a deviant mason supports mafia organisations. This book is a major contribution to the literature on mafias and organised crime across criminology, sociology and political science, and will be of great interest to students, researchers, scholars, and engaged general readers.

The essence of any sports contest is competition. The very unpredictability of a sporting outcome distinguishes it from, say, an opera performance. This volume presents a state of the art overview of the economics of competitive sport along two main th

In the 1980s and 1990s, Serie A was known as 'Il campionato più bello del mondo' – the most beautiful championship in the world – and had the highest match attendances in Europe. The stadiums were not only full of people, but full of colour, flags, songs and rituals. Italy hosted World Cup 1990 and the stadia and stars on show in Serie A became iconic. Across a ten year period from 1989 to 1999 a remarkable 10 different Serie A clubs occupied nearly half the places in the finals of the Champions League and Europa Cup. They were dominant. But then in the 2000s they began to fall behind and despite the Azzurri winning the World Cup in 2006 and Inter Milan winning the Champions League in 2010, Italian football was on a downwards trajectory that saw the national team fail to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, their first absence from the tournament since 1958. What happened and why? In this extraordinary book, Steven G. Mandis investigates. Given unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Italian clubs and key decision makers and players, Mandis is the first outside researcher to rigorously analyse both the on-the-pitch and business aspects of a club and league. What he learns is completely unexpected and challenges popular explanations and conventional wisdom.