Heroin, organized crime, and the making of modern Turkey / Ryan Gingeras.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gingeras, Ryan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Organized crime--Turkey--History.

Organized crime.

Mafia--Turkey--History.

Mafia.

Heroin--Turkey--History.

Heroin.

Narcotics--Turkey--History.

Narcotics.

History.

Turkey.

Physical Description:

xii, 290 pages : map ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

"Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the centre of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the 'Turkish mafia', from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the 'deep state' revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past." -- from the publisher.

Contents:

1 The Imperial Origins of the "Turkish Mafia" 19

Contextualizing Criminal Syndicates and the (Un-)Making of the Ottoman Empire 21

The Politics of Ottoman Macedonia and the Origins of the Modern "Qete" 25

Portrait of a Bandit: Migration, Ethnicity, and the Ottoman Roots of Turkish Organized Crime 29

Paramilitarism and the Politics of Ottoman Wartime Security 36

Smugglers, Neighborhood Toughs, and Other Foundational Elements of Turkish Organized Crime 41

The Imperial Roots of Turkish Organized Crime in a Global Context 47

2 Turkey, the United States, and the Birth of the Heroin Trade 53

The Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Opium Trade 55

The Vanguard of Prohibition: The United States, Opium, and the Building of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics 59

The First French Connection: Turkey, the United States, and the Prewar Opium Trade 65

Turkey in the Context of the Interwar Drug Trade 75

3 The French Connection 82

The First Babas: The Wholesalers and Chemists of Istanbul 84

Farmer's and Smugglers: Rural Opium and the Turkish Black Market 93

Heroin's Middle Passage: Syria, Lebanon, and the Turkish Opium Trade 101

Beirut, Marseille, Montreal, New York: Turkish Heroin, the Corsican Mafia, and the Blossoming of the North American Underworld 105

"A Common Habit of an Eastern People": The Iran-Turkey Connection 112

Heroin, Cocaine, and the Early Cold War Years: Turkey within a Global Context 119

4 Police Work: Counter-narcotics Operations and Intelligence Gathering in the Early Cold War 128

Agents, Budgets, and Methods: Critical Factors in the Making of the FBN's Crusade in Turkey, 1945-67 133

Narcotics and National Security in Postwar Turkey 143

Building Cases: The First Years of FBN/DPS Collaboration 153

Corruption and Espionage 163

A Point of Reckoning: The 1960 Coup and the Fall of Kemal Aygün 172

The Lost Decade: FBN/DPS Investigations in the 1960s 174

Acceptable Losses: Turkey, Counter-narcotics and the Cold War 180

5 The Great Turn: The Transformation of Heroin and Organized Crime in the 1970s 185

The War on Drugs Begins: Nixon, Turkey, and the Opium Crisis of the Early 1970s 187

Dissecting the Heroin Epidemic: Turkey and Changing Patterns of the International Drug Trade 205

The New Babas: Violence, Clandestine Politics, and the Birth of the "Turkish Mafia" 217

Making Sense of the 1970s: Conclusions, Sources, and Comparisons 231

Conclusion: The Deep State and Its Discontents: Heroin and Organized Crime in the Contemporary Age 239

From Susurluk to Ergenekon: Revelations from Turkey's Deep State 246

The Deep State Abroad: Organized Crime within Contemporary "Deep" Political Debates 261.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-286) and index.

Other Format:

Also available online: Gingeras, Ryan. Heroin, organized crime, and the making of modern Turkey.

ISBN:

0198716028

9780198716020

OCLC:

866737324