While extortion may be something that mostly occurs in the developing world and something that happens to other people, extortion is a multi-million and perhaps billion-dollar business that has significant consequences for everybody that it touches. Like other illegal activities, little is known about the organizational devices that are used to coordinate and control the business of extortion. Similarly, we do not know how businesses assess and respond to extortion demands. The current study is the first one, to our knowledge, that examines how accounting participates in the extortion activities of street gangs and the extortion responses of their business targets. Although we are limited by the available data and thus tentative in some of our conclusions, the current study foregrounds the salience of accounting within extortion processes. Our study helps to understand the domain of extortion but it also connects to three important themes within the accounting literature. First, the analysis showed that the type and degree of accounting participation in the extortion business was contingent on the existing amalgam of organizational processes, including the existing forms of accounting. Throughout the analysis we used the phrase “mapping onto versus mapping into” to draw attention to the differing permeabilities of existing organizational processes to accounting. The analysis highlighted how the centrality of the delito process and the reliance on single-entry accounting lists circumscribed the ability of accounting to act as a moving visibility machine. Accounting did not change via internal elaboration nor via drift: however, it was used as a type of organizational memory and a repository of meaning. This finding offers a caveat to the assumption that accounting, through the act of making things visible, will change the domains in which it operates as well as change itself. Accounting was clearly implicated in organizational functioning but the pre-existing amalgam of organizational processes “impinged on” the potential of accounting to become something that it was not. Therefore, while accounting may have the potential to make things visible and to change the organization and itself, it is important to consider the openness of organizational processes to accounting, including whether and how organizational processes are closed to accounting. This caveat does not undermine Hopwood's view of accounting in action but rather reiterates his point that we need to analyze and understand the complexities of accounting in action and the ways that accounting reflects and (sometimes) constitutes the domains of which it is a part. Second, the analysis illustrated that accounting is performed (or not performed) via the figure of the street gangster and the business person. Both of these figures are constructed and re-produced by internal organizational processes and societal stereotypes regarding how such figures should speak and act in extortion situations. Furthermore, embedded within these figures is what Vollmer refers to as an implied existential relationship to accounting—a relationship that impacts on how street gangsters and business targets use, and are expected to use, accounting. As the analysis showed, the relationship to accounting was somewhat stable, but external shocks such as the receipt of an extortion demand or incarceration created the conditions of possibility for a changed existential relationship to accounting and a changed social figure. Third, the analysis suggests that vernacular accounting may be sufficient in certain settings. While double-entry, written forms of accounting are conceptually and technically superior, single-entry and sometimes verbal accounts can be appropriate in certain circumstances. Single-entry accounts can be kept in one's head, a characteristic that prevents police from using written accounting records to unravel the criminal network, and something that makes sense when one is incarcerated. Furthermore, in the absence of external pressures, existing organizational processes may not demand that accounting is anything more than a mnemonic device. In such settings, vernacular accounts are both sufficient and perhaps superior to double-entry accounting. Our observation regarding vernacular accounting does not deny that double-entry accounting usually allows organizations to do more with accounting. Rather it reminds us that accounting is embedded within organizational processes and that, in the absence of external pressures such as the need to file tax returns and/or borrow money, vernacular accounts may be enough. What the current study cannot answer is whether a greater openness to accounting would allow street gangs to grow and prosper. Venkatesh and Levitt (2000) imply that the transition of street gangs into successful criminal enterprises may require both a shift in vision and the enlistment of ‘modern’ business techniques. Whether the use of double-entry accounting and other modern business techniques would allow both the street gang, and accounting, to become something more than they currently are, remains to be determined.