Is there a difference between the groups who mostly do white collar crime like frauds and the groups who do the violent crime like drug and weapon trafficking and extortion,etc...
I know that the Russian groups from Agron and Balagula were largely involved in violent crime, even home invasions and robberies.
Practically the groups that do white collar crime are those groups that did violent crimes when they started. For example a group formed in Russia in 90's, back then it did extortion, drug busines, murder for hire even, nowdays they think smarter that extortion and drugs won't get them big money, they need something better. So they create these scams with credit cards or medicare fraud, a popular scam in Latvia is to make fake business deals and get the tax money recounted, with that making the country to pay a part of your paid taxes to be paid back to you.
Groups that still do violent crimes are groups that haven't developed much. Or their leadership is just oneside-minded, for example they run a drug trafficking business and their leaders just wants to be there. But that's rarely. Most of what I've seen, they try to develop forming more of these scams where the big money is, at least that's what happening here in Latvia.
But there are also both type groups, that have a smart top, where leaders practice out all this white collar crime. And the bottom members of the group do the dirty work such as extortion and so on.
An example of scams and big groups in North America - Semyon Mogilevich and Sergey Mikhailov's YBM Magnex International Inc. scam that Mogilevich is for indeed now on FBI's most wanted list.
Agron Evsei and Marat Balagula's groups were the very first one's formed in Brighton Beach, both of these guys were Russian Jews. What I've read is that when Vyacheslav Ivankov came to Brighton Beach both of these were scared shitless because of the influence and power Yaponchik held.
