Criminal brokerage: Outsourcing organised violence in Australia

Serious and organised crime (SOC) groups in Australia are increasingly adopting a model of criminal outsourcing using a specialist intermediary known as a ‘criminal broker’. The broker connects the commissioning SOC principal with a second party to deliberately engineer structural distance between the person who commits the crime and the principals of the SOC group. Drawing on brokerage theory and financial market analysis research into violent intermediation, this paper argues that the criminal broker is not a passive facilitator but an active mediator — a network specialist who transforms, translates and controls the criminal transactions they engineer. The broker occupies a triadic structural position between the SOC principal and executor. It also argues that existing offences of conspiracy, accessorial liability and aiding and abetting are insufficiently equipped to capture this offending, primarily because those provisions assume either bilateral agreement or proximate facilitation, where as the broker’s defining technique is the management of structural distance that defeats both. Further, new offences for the crime of ‘brokering’ must be defined around its function rather than the underlying crime type. The paper concludes with a framework for a standalone criminal brokering offence.