The organized crime research project is a direct consequence of the commission's need to find a way to fulfill its statutory obligations to deal with organized and major crime. It also rests on the commission's internal need to combine research and law enforcement approaches to organized crime. The project began with an analysis of current models of organized crime as defined by academic researchers and by practitioners working in law enforcement agencies. The major theoretical models are the mafia model, which is sometimes called the evolution-centralist approach, and the social systems approach, which locates organized crime in its social and cultural contexts. Most of the working definitions that law enforcement agencies used are tautologies that have not moved beyond operational definitions. A more appropriate approach would move away from formal definitions toward a specific analysis of three critical factors: (1) the pattern of criminal organization, (2) the degrees of influence over markets and regulators, and (3) the economic significance of illegal activities. This approach has powerful potential for analyzing many activities and implies that law enforcement agencies should focus on research, accurate intelligence, and regulatory mechanisms rather than responses based simply on arresting individual operators and confiscating their assets. Footnotes