This book - whose contributors are all major European scholars - steps back from the sometimes overblown and over-homogenised imagery of 'organised crime' and unpacks its local, regional and international variations, emphasising the barriers to crime globalisation created by low ambition, language, contacts and trust. Articles on drugs, exortion, fraud, money-laundering and their control provide a more sober platform for the understanding of how crimes are organised and might be controlled than is offered in contemporary media and law enforcement debates.