To racketeer among neighbors: spatial features of criminal collaboration in the American Mafia

ABSTRACT

The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were ‘known criminal associates’ and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities.

Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network’s proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units.

The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Organized crime
• spatial social networks
• Italian-American Mafia
• midcentury U.S. history
• GIS

Note(s)

A few notable members were removed from our network due to lack of U.S. addresses: Settimo Accardo (degree k=39) was a fugitive from the government after violating narcotic laws, Salvatore Lucania (k=79) was exiled to Italy, and Francesco Coppola (k=34) was deported to Italy.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. This project was a product of the Graduate Seminar in Geographic Information Science class (Fall 2018) administered by the Department of Geography.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data and codes availability statement

Replication data and code for this study can be found at 10.6084/m9.figshare.11371884.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clio Andris

Clio Andris is an assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she directs the Friendly Cities Lab. 

Daniel DellaPosta

Daniel DellaPosta is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on social networks in political, economic, and organizational contexts.

Brittany N. Freelin

Brittany N. Freelin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on communities and crime and the ways in which youth are affected by exclusionary school discipline.

Xi Zhu

Xi Zhu has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University. 

Bradley Hinger

Bradley Hinger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University. 

Hanzhou Chen

Hanzhou Chen has recently completed a master's degree at the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University.