Network Structure and Resilience of Mafia Syndicates

TL;DR

This study uses social network analysis to examine the structure, evolution, and resilience of Mafia organizations, revealing insights into their plasticity and vulnerabilities to targeted interventions.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of Mafia networks using digital and judicial data, highlighting the limitations of traditional investigation methods and proposing strategic intervention points.

Findings

Criminal networks are highly resilient to attacks.

Contact networks are more vulnerable and informative.

High-ranking criminals often do not appear in reconstructed networks.

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of the study of Sicilian Mafia organization by using Social Network Analysis. The study investigates the network structure of a Mafia organization, describing its evolution and highlighting its plasticity to interventions targeting membership and its resilience to disruption caused by police operations. We analyze two different datasets about Mafia gangs built by examining different digital trails and judicial documents spanning a period of ten years: the former dataset includes the phone contacts among suspected individuals, the latter is constituted by the relationships among individuals actively involved in various criminal offenses. Our report illustrates the limits of traditional investigation methods like tapping: criminals high up in the organization hierarchy do not occupy the most central positions in the criminal network, and oftentimes do not appear in the reconstructed criminal network at all. However, we also suggest possible strategies of intervention, as we show that although criminal networks (i.e., the network encoding mobsters and crime relationships) are extremely resilient to different kind of attacks, contact networks (i.e., the network reporting suspects and reciprocated phone calls) are much more vulnerable and their analysis can yield extremely valuable insights.