This is how it usually goes. Mafias’ eyes shine with joy for the enormous profits coming from the illegal drugs, prostitution and weapons markets. But money is simply too much, really. A problem that some economists call "too much capital disease". Organised crime solves the issue by employing accountants, lawyers, brokers.

They will know how to re-invest the gargantuan surplus in companies, real estates, stocks and securities. In this way, the mafioso becomes a financial investor. He elevates himself to the apex of our current society, lover of deregulated capitalism. The opposite process, though, may well happen: finance professional workers can turn into criminals. They can form groups which present characteristics that are not so different from conventional organised crime’s.

This occurs when insider trading is exploited. As with virtually the entire financial jargon, the term might seem obscure in meaning. In fact, the concept is extremely clear as soon as the very basics of finance are understood. Financial markets move money from one asset to another. To put it blandly, agents acting within these markets will always point towards the most profitable assets.

However, future is not predictable. Assets’ future yields cannot be known in advance. What can be solely evaluated is expectations about them (how such expectations are obtained is a topic beyond this article; many of the readers would righteously commit suicide for the highly mathematical and tedious contents). Nevertheless, there is who gets rid of the need for a Delphi’s Oracle by appropriating information about assets that nobody else has. That is insider trading. Obtaining confidential information and using it to move capitals before the other financial gamers.

Insider trading magically brings millions in your pocket in seconds, literally. There is a strong incentive to take advantage of it by forming a secret group of associates that exchange sensible information. The smell of large sums of money criminalises. It is a dismal moral that appears to be proven true too often. The last case of criminalised finance comes from the United States, with FBI operation Perfect Hedge.

Rajat Kumar Gupta is 62. He is a former board member of Goldman Sachs – one of the largest global investment banks – and of Procter & Gamble, the hyper-multinational company behind many of the goods found in supermarkets. From Pampers nappies to the dust remover Swiffer, from Duracell batteries to Hugo Boss fragrances. Last but not least, he even headed The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A good and powerful man, one could say. And perhaps that power was not enough, given the conspiracy charges against him that amount to 105 years of prison.

Gupta’s privileged working positions allowed him to gain access to information on the performance of certain investment assets well before anyone else. He used to happily share it with his old pal Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group investment fund. A pair of clicks from a computer terminal has then been enough to let Galleon earn $72 million by speculating on the stocks of Goldman Sachs, Intel Corporation, Google, ATI Technologies and Clearwire Corporation. The two finance professionals created an intricate and well-hidden network. The FBI has already identified the identity of 56 members, 50 of which have already been convicted or pleaded guilty.

The FBI also shows why such kinds of fraud must be considered (and countered) as instances of organised crime. As in a mafia, the criminal group was tightly closed, difficult to penetrate. The condemned Arthurs Cutillo and Jason Goldfarb, for example, were roommates at college. Others were even lovers. It is simply not possible to infiltrate an undercover agent in a criminal circle characterised by strong, trust-based relations among members.

Anti-mafia measures shall therefore be adopted. In the US, they usually consist in blackmailing the least relevant individuals after having identified their offences, and gathering evidence against the leaders through them. This is just what the federal agency did, and succeeded in making minor associates of the investment fund its own informants.

The trash that came out of operation "Perfect Hedge" has been one of the factors that fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement. After the blow that hit the majority of the world population during the financial crisis sparked in 2008, white collars at the vertexes of the globalised economy lost much of their credibility. Behaving as Mafiosi, as corrupts, just worsened their perceived status. The financial system must be changed. Not only to prevent future economic collapses, but also to avoid the creation of mafia-like criminal groups at the top of the world’s legitimate economy.

Gupta’s e Rajaratnam’s story only showed what potential this kind of criminality conceals. Allowing the existence of more elaborate forms of it engenders an economic and social impact that can outperform that of the ‘hidden mafias’ we are used to.