Most Freemasons are waaaay too inept to be good at organized crime, at least in the states. There was a blatant period at the turn of the 20th century where Masonry was so sublimely popular in pop culture, it was expected to be what you did, like putting your son in the boy scouts (admittedly an organization formed by people who comprehended Masonry to some level the same way the Klan was founded by Masons, which is a fucking point of some obvious frustration to those guys but never brought up as much as supposed connections to occult organizations or the knights templar in the states. Says a lot about religious paranoia in the US). The whole thing got diluted so heavily, you go to most Masonic halls, or Demolay chapters for the kids, and to be honest it reeks of 'hobby night' and 'camping trips'. The connection to esoterica or real connective social consciousness is fucked, to be perfectly honest. You'd have a better chance of moving up in society by having a cousin on the police force (though admittedly most Masons these days tend to be cops; fraternity, paragonness, hand in hand shit right there).
Also gotta remember as a result of that, it was so EASY to set up bootleg versions of Freemasonry; Mason's claiming Propaganda 2 wasn't a real lodge, and in fact... Why would the Freemasons, often denounced by popes and seen fit to be denied funerals and services by their clergy, help the Vatican in any way? Or the Mafia, who have descent from the Knights Hospitaler who were the very order who exterminated the Templars for the Vatican way back when in the Jacques Demolay-era? But back to that diluted period of the states, it was so easy to simply set up a "Masonic Lodge" that was clandestine and any sort of business could be practiced; this was a particular issue for minorities in America because Prince Hall, the African-American Masonic organization would often find itself discounted as members of Freemasonry for years due to their reluctance to integrate, despite being more active and supportive in their community than your typical Masonic lodges of the time (and arguably needing to be so with a lot much more priority). Yet on the flipside, Asian-American Masonic lodges in California would often be formed as meeting places for the Tongs and the Triads hoping to put down control in their local ghettos.
(Interestingly, Mafiosi never used Masonic Lodges in America; they simply operated out of private spaces with recreational service, or under much more formally religious-associated organizations such as the Knights of Columbus. Almost a echo of their former identity as the 'hit-men' of the papacy)
So to make a cheap parallel to illustrate a point, the FBI/CIA knew that to discredit organizations like the Panthers, making counterfeit replicas of their practice like the SLA that tainted the idea of revolution against the system with portraiture of ineptitude, erotic romance; such a figure got turned into the character of a pulp novel you buy in supermarkets and dehumanize into a novelty to jerk off to real quick. Even Scientology, itself a questionable organization, would get distilled into the Processeans and they themselves somehow find a ton of their work 'magically' popping up in the thought process of Manson. If you sell yourself to the public in any way, you invariably run the risk of distortion by those who simply reorganize what you say to serve their own individual needs.
Likewise, Masonry itself was bound to fall victim to dilution over generations, undermining from outside forces as well as the considerable fragmentation that comes from trying to unite disparate social elements under the guise of brotherhood. You can basically connect LaVeyan Satanism, various ethnic mobs, children's hospitals, and volunteer xenophobic militias in America all to Freemasonry. And the tricky thing is, whether or not you believe Freemasonry is able to, as a collective consciously generate these concepts and put them into the world, or if you think people can go into it, grab what they can, and remake Freemasonry into their own image.
But granted, my perspective is a stateside one, and I imagine that the European relationship to Masonry, given its much more historic legacy, is a lot more difficult.
