Paolo Campana

Eavesdropping on the Mob: the functional diversification of Mafia activities across territories

How do Mafias operate across territories? The paper is an in-depth study of the operations of a Neapolitan Camorra group. It relies on a unique data set of contacts manually extracted from the transcripts of phone conversations wiretapped by the police. The data show that the clan is indeed involved in the production and supply of extra-legal protection, but only in its territory of origin. The expansion abroad followed the lines of a functional diversification: branches were created to carry out specific activities but no large-scale international alliances were forged. The strategies underpinning the group’s operations differ greatly across territories. Overall, the clan is still highly dependent on the territory of origin. Finally, the paper argues against the concept of ‘transnational organized crime’ and proposes a new taxonomy that better accounts for the ways in which Mafia groups choose to operate outside their territories of origin.

Cooperation in criminal organizations: Kinship and violence as credible commitments

The paper argues that kinship ties and sharing information on violent acts can be interpreted as forms of ‘hostage-taking’ likely to increase cooperation among co-offenders. The paper tests this hypothesis among members of two criminal groups, a Camorra clan based just outside Naples, and a Russian Mafia group that moved to Rome in the mid-1990s. The data consist of the transcripts of phone intercepts conducted on both groups by the Italian police over several months. After turning the data into a series of network matrices, we use Multivariate Quadratic Assignment Procedure to test the hypothesis. We conclude that the likelihood of cooperation is higher among members who have shared information about violent acts. Violence has a stronger effect than kinship in predicting tie formation and thus cooperation. When non-kinship-based mechanisms fostering cooperation exist, criminal groups are likely to resort to them.

Assessing the movement of criminal groups: some analytical remarks

The article offers a commentary on the push and pull framework outlined by Morselli, Turcotte and Tenti in the current issue of this journal. It argues that, when assessing the mobility of criminal groups, two key aspects deserve better recognition: first, the nature of the movement, namely whether the common fund and the ‘headquarters’ (including the boss) have been shifted from the old to the new locale; second, whether the group provides some kind of goods and services or is purely predatory. It maintains that both push and pull factors may vary according to those characteristics. Finally, the article empirically examines the movement of a Camorra crime group from Campania (Italy) to Scotland and the Netherlands, and reconstructs the underlying push and pull factors.

Explaining criminal networks: Strategies and potential pitfalls:

This article offers some remarks on a few critical issues related to explanation in criminal network research. It first discusses two distinct perspectives on networks, namely a substantive approach that views networks as a distinct form of organisation, and an instrumental one that interprets networks as a collection of nodes and attributes. The latter stands at the basis of Social Network Analysis. This work contends that the instrumental approach is better suited to test hypotheses, as it does not assume any structure a priori, but derives it from the data. Moreover, social network techniques can be applied to investigate criminal networks while rejecting the notion of networks as a distinct form of organisation. Next, the article discusses some potential pitfalls associated with the instrumental approach and cautions against an over-reliance on structural measures alone when interpreting real-world networks. It then stresses the need to complement these measures with additional qualitative evidence. Finally, the article discusses the use of Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression models as a viable strategy to test hypotheses based on criminal network data.

When rationality fails: Making sense of the ‘slippery slope’ to corporate fraud

Management fraud is often explained through wealth-maximization paradigms. This article invokes a different approach, namely a behavioural one, and argues that fraud may happen as a consequence of failures in the decision-making process. Relying on extensive evidence in the case of Parmalat, it maintains that this fraud was not brought about by the desire of the CEO, chairman and founder to maximize his economic goals, but was rather a consequence of his failure to produce an objective description of reality. This was induced by a number of behavioural mechanisms such as self-deception, managerial hubris, emotions and the ‘endowment effect’. This article also contributes to a broader debate on the rationality of economic actors and its limits, and sheds light on the seeds of potential crises contained within genuine Schumpeterian entrepreneurs.

Beyond 9/11: Terrorism and Media in a Mid-term Period View (1998–2005)

By drawing upon the first results of an analysis carried out on the 1998–2005 period, this work tries to reconstruct the trends in terrorist attacks and their media coverage in seven international daily newspapers. Also the dynamics of media over/under-representation are investigated, as well as the existence of differentiated coverage related to the geopolitical distance/proximity of the country object of attack. Special attention is paid to an empirical analysis of the Iraqi case. The work opens with a short methodological discussion on the issue of terrorism measurement, from its operational definition to the choice of the database on which to carry out the analyses.

Out of Africa: The organization of migrant smuggling across the Mediterranean:

How are human smuggling operations organized? This paper presents an empirical in-depth study of the structure and activities of a smuggling ring operating between the Horn of Africa and Northern Europe via Libya. It relies on a unique set of novel data sets manually extracted from an extensive police investigation launched after the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, in which 366 migrants lost their lives. The evidence includes wiretapped conversations on both sides of the Mediterranean. Using a number of network analysis techniques, this paper reconstructs the structure of the ring and investigates the determinants of coordination among its actors. This paper is the first work to offer a formal network modelling of human smuggling operations. It shows that, rather than being internalized within a single organization, activities are segmented and carried out by localized and rudimentary hierarchies with a small number of high-centrality actors operating at various stages along the smuggling route. Coordination is more likely to occur vertically than horizontally, indicating that higher-level smugglers are largely independent and autonomous. There are also indications of competition among them. Finally, even in rings involved in the supply of a truly transnational commodity, the local dimension still plays a crucial role. The implications for criminal justice responses to human smuggling are discussed.

Unravelling child trafficking routes

The structure of criminal phenomena is often obscure for researchers. A study based on thousands of self-reported cases reveals the paths underpinning illegal adoptions in China, and some leads on how to tackle them.

The Market for Human Smuggling into Europe: A Macro Perspective

This work was supported by a grant from the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme, University of Cambridge, which I gratefully acknowledge (Co-PI with Prof Loraine Gelsthorpe).

Il coltello e il mercato. La Camorra prima e dopo l'Unità d'Italia, by Marcella Marmo

In the same period in which Italy was emerging as a unitary state (1860–1861), the Camorra was already a well-established illegal brotherhood – to the point that, when a popular revolt broke out in Naples on 26–28 June 1860, and the then Prefect of Police Liborio Romano decided to establish a new Police Guard, he openly and officially co-opted the most prominent Camorristi and their associates into the newly formed force. During the interregnum preceding the formation of the new unitary state, and among much uncertainty, one of the few certainties was the Camorra itself. In her latest work, Il coltello e il mercato (The knife and the market), Marcella Marmo looks back at that period in Italian history and reconstructs some features of this illegal brotherhood as it appeared at that time. Il coltello e il mercato is a well-researched book; it includes a number of historical documents and lengthy references to firsthand sources that scholars with an interest in the subject will surely find of great interest. At times, it lacks a clear fil rouge (guiding thread) connecting all the eight chapters, which in turn makes the reasoning hard to follow; perhaps this is a consequence of the fact that some chapters were written as stand-alone articles and first published in journals. Nonetheless, Marmo’s latest work makes for an interesting read. What did the Camorra look like at the time of Italian unification? Some clues emerge from two extraordinary documents unearthed by Marcella Marmo and her colleague Giulio Marchetti during their fieldwork in the Central Archive of the Italian State and are included in the book in their original form (Chapter 1). They are two reports written in Naples in 1860–1861 at the request of the central government, at that time based in Turin. The report on ‘the Camorristi brotherhood active in the Neapolitan provinces’ offers a reconstruction of the internal hierarchy within the Camorra. According to the document, mobsters were divided into three classes, with the bona fide Camorristi at the top. At that time, the Camorra in Naples was organised around 12 centres, one in each neighbourhood. Each ‘centre’, or ‘society’, consisted of all the Camorristi active in a given neighbourhood; the head of each society, called capo società, was elected by the top-ranking mobsters. Outside Naples, only one society for each province was present. According to the same document, the wannabe boss of a given society had to prove his ability in ‘handling the knife’ and ‘running the Camorra’ (meaning managing the racketeering activities): only the candidate who possessed the highest levels of such skills would be appointed as the head of the society. If confirmed by other sources, this is a far cry from the way Camorra groups are run today; merit has now been replaced by kinship, and the most prominent positions within a given clan are allocated by inheritance. For instance, the next in line for the top position is usually the son of the current boss, no matter how good he may be in