This article reports on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands. Using interviews and media accounts, explanations are found for Russian immigrants' choice of the Netherlands as a place to conduct organized crime operations, why criminal proceeds are invested inside the Netherlands, and why there is a prevailing view of consensual organized crime activity as being nonserious. The negative public identity of Russian immigrants and how they have chosen to manipulate their criminal image, rather than contest it, are examined. It has become part of a social process in which a new Russian ethnic identity is constructed.
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