L.A. Gangs Seek Profit in Peace | Hacker News Reader

L.A. Gangs Seek Profit in Peace

online.wsj.com

14 pointscwan13 comments

This has to be influenced by The Wire.

CSI teaches murders how to not get caught. The Wire shows how drugs can be run like a serious business.

In the show the top dealers from all the different neighbourhoods meet up in hotel conference rooms to organize deals and prevent turf wars.

The Wire premiered in 2002, and the New Day Coop (what you refer to with the hotel conference rooms) really started around Seasons 2 and 3 (2003 and 2004).

So why did this idea take five years to reach the streets then?

I think this theory is a little too cute to be true.

If you want to get particular, I'll abide.

How do we know that it took five years for these gang collaborations to happen? Maybe it took 5 years for it to progress to them high-fiving and hugging in public.

My original point was that it may have helped the criminals become comfortable with the idea. Of course it didn't instantly end decades long feuds after an afternoon of watching season 3 of The Wire.

Plus, change take time, even I'd imagine in organisations such as gangs.

This reminds me simultaneously of Dr. Dre ("The Day the Niggaz Took Over" from The Chronic [1]) and a recent report stating that the average Afghan makes more money siding with the Taliban than they do with the U.S.-backed Karzai government [2].

[1] http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

[2] http://washingtonindependent.com/70114/we-pay-afghan-soldier...

I wonder if this type of morphing from street gangs to smarter criminal business units the way the mafia started in Europe?

Perhaps these street gangs have learned from their drug suppliers?

When drug cartel planes out of Colombia started getting shot down as a result of anti-drug operations, the cartels started pooling cocaine shipments together in airplanes as a means of sharing the risk amongst each other.

That doesn't sound like a great idea. If you're one of 10 cartels, it seems like your chances of being shot down are 1/10. (Not really, but let's just posit that the gov't can shoot down one plane a day.) If you pool everything together on one plane, suddenly your odds of making some deer and coyotes very jittery shoot up by 10.

Only a finite amount can be pooled on a plane though. So instead of possibly losing 100% of your shipment if you are one lone cartel flying your cocaine to the US and it is shot down, you can now only lose 10% of your shipment.

This could be one of many reasons why VCs team up and do deals together.

I would also assume that less flights overall equals a lower amount of shot-down planes.

I wonder if there is a criminal management consulting service that exists.

Or HR consulting?

So when can I expect to be able to stop by a Cosa Nostra franchise?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com