Well, I don't buy the "principled" part either, not at scale.

But it is organized, and there's not that much fundamental difference between corporations and criminal enterprises, not in the ways they are run. The details boil down to different trade-offs taken wrt. risk vs. reward related to staying on the good side of the law. A lot of the violence (particularly the "principled"-looking one) seems to stem from the fact that a criminal org needs to built its own layer of coordination and enforcement, since by definition it cannot rely on public services of law enforcement and the legal system.