Violence brokers and super-spreaders: how organised crime transformed the structure of Chicago violence during Prohibition

ABSTRACT

The rise of organised crime changed Chicago violence structurally by creating networks of rivalries and conflicts wherein violence ricocheted. This study examines the organised crime violence network during Prohibition by analysing ‘violence brokers’ – individuals who committed multiple violence acts that linked separate violent events into a connected violence network. We analyse the two-mode violence network from the Capone Database, a relational database on early 1900s Chicago organised crime. Across 276 violent incidents attributed to organised crime were 334 suspected perpetrators of violence. We find that 20% of suspects were violence brokers, and nine brokers were violence super-spreaders linking the majority of suspects. We also find that violence brokers were in the thick of violence not just as suspects, but also as victims – violence brokers in this network experienced more victimisation than non-brokers. Unknowingly or knowingly, these violence brokers wove together a network, attack-by-attack, that transformed violence in Chicago.

KEYWORDS:

• Brokers
• Chicago
• key players
• organised crime
• Prohibition
• violence networks

Acknowledgments

We thank Taylor Domingos for assistance in preparing this manuscript. We thank the editors of this special issue for the opportunity to contribute to Carlo’s memory. To Carlo, we miss you and we continue to be inspired by you, your work, your students, and your legacy.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Burt, Brokerage and Closure.

2. Burt, Brokerage and Closure, 7; Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action.”

3. Joseph and Smith, “The Ties that Bribe”; Stovel and Shaw, “Brokerage.”

4. Nakamura, Tita, and Krackhardt, “Violence in the “Balance”“; Papachristos, “Murder by Structure.”

5. Hughes, “Group Cohesiveness, Gang Member Prestige”; McCuish, Bouchard, and Corrado, “The Search for Suitable Homicide Co-Offenders”; Obert, The Six-Shooter State.

6. Freeman, “Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification”; Wasserman and Faust, Social Network Analysis.

7. Papachristos and Smith, “The Embedded and Multiplex Nature of Al Capone.”

8. Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks; Smith, Syndicate Women.

9. Stovel and Shaw, “Brokerage.”

10. Burt, Brokerage and Closure, 7.

11. See note 1 above.

12. Burt, Brokerage and Closure; Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action”; Stovel and Shaw, “Brokerage.”

13. Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks, 16.

14. Morselli, “Structuring Mr. Nice.”

15. Morselli and Tremblay, “Criminal Achievement.”

16. Morselli, “Hells Angels in Springtime.”

17. Morselli and Roy, “Brokerage Qualifications in Ringing Operations.”

18. Roberto, Braga, and Papachristos, “Closer to Guns.”

19. Descormiers and Morselli, “Alliances, Conflicts, and Contradictions”; Papachristos, “Murder by Structure”; Papachristos, Hureau, and Braga, “The Corner and the Crew.”

20. Lewis and Papachristos, “Rules of the Game.”

21. Airola and Bouchard, “The Social Network Consequences of a Gang Murder Blowout”; Obert, The Six-Shooter State.

22. Bouchard and Hashimi, “When is a ‘War’ a ‘Wave?’”.

23. Ouellet, Bouchard, and Charette, “One Gang Dies, Another Gains?”

24. Descormiers and Morselli, “Alliances, Conflicts, and Contradictions”; Papachristos, “Murder by Structure”; Randle and Bichler, “Uncovering the Social Pecking Order.”

25. McCuish, Bouchard, and Corrado, “The Search for Suitable Homicide Co-Offenders.”

26. Hughes, “Group Cohesiveness, Gang Member Prestige.”

27. Obert, The Six-Shooter State.

28. Albanese, Organized Crime in America; Andreas and Wallman, “Illicit Markets and Violence”; Catino, Mafia Organizations; Collins, “Patrimonial Alliances and Failures”; von Lampe, Organized Crime.

29. Catino, Mafia Organizations.

30. Smith, “Exogenous Shocks.”

31. Joseph and Smith, “The Ties That Bribe”; Smith, Syndicate Women; Smith, “Exogenous Shocks.”

32. Joseph and Smith, “The Ties That Bribe”; Smith and Papachristos, “Trust Thy Crooked Neighbor.”

33. Asbridge and Weerasinghe, “Homicide in Chicago”; Monkkonen, “Homicide in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago”; Vargas et al., “Capitalizing on Crisis.”

34. Owens, “The American Temperance Movement”; Owens, “Are Underground Markets?”

35. Vargas et al., “Capitalizing on Crisis.”

36. Asbridge and Weerasinghe, “Homicide in Chicago.”

37. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt; Landesco, “Prohibition and Crime.”

38. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt.

39. Weaver, “Firearm Deaths.”

40. Adler, “Shoot to Kill.”

41. Landesco, “Prohibition and Crime.”

42. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Beer, Beer, Beer,” 2; Chicago Daily Tribune, “Machine Gun Rakes Street,” 1.

43. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Capt. Martin To Fight For Post,” 18.

44. Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago.

45. Ibid.

46. Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks, 18.

47. Bienen and Rottinghaus, “Learning from the Past.”

48. See Smith, Syndicate Women, for a full account of the Capone Database.

49. The Prohibition era Chicago organised crime network was a single component of 937 nodes and 3,250 criminal undirected edges. See Joseph and Smith, “The Ties that Bribe”; Smith, Syndicate Women; Smith, “Exogenous Shocks.” The remaining 25.4% of suspects in the violence network were involved in violent events that targeted people in the organised crime network, even though these nodes were not connected to organised crime.

50. Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks.

51. Freeman, “Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification.”

52. Calderoni, Brunetto, and Piccardi, “Communities in Criminal Networks”; Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks; Morselli, “Assessing Vulnerable and Strategic Positions in a Criminal Network”; Morselli and Roy, “Brokerage Qualifications in Ringing Operations.”

53. Freeman, “Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification”; Wasserman and Faust,

Social Network Analysis.

54. We conducted all of our analyses in R using the statnet, igraph, and keyplayer packages. See An and Liu, “keyplayer”; Csardi and Nepusz, “igraph”; Handcock et al., “statnet.”

55. This result is similar to Bichler and colleagues’ finding of only 45% of violence cases involving only one suspect, and violence co-offending was the norm. See Bichler et al., “The Impact of Civil Gang Injunctions.”

56. McCuish, Bouchard, and Corrado, “The Search for Suitable Homicide Co-Offenders”; Obert, The Six-Shooter State; Papachristos, Wildeman, and Roberto, “Tragic, but not Random.”

57. Décary-Hétu and Dupont, “The Social Network of Hackers.”

58. See note 30 above.

59. Borgatti, “Identifying Sets of Key Players.”

60. An and Liu, “keyplayer,” 263.

61. See note 30 above.

62. The key player set had a maximum betweenness centrality of 18,715.45 undirected paths. The percentage of 90.4 adjusts for the size of the key player set and its maximum possible paths: 213 nodes – 9 key players + 1 super node, which adjusted contains 20,706 paths.

63. An and Liu, “keyplayer,” recommend running the simulation multiple times because the results might differ a little when nodes in the observed network have similar structural positions. Of our 100 simulations for a key player set of 9, 14 did not converge. The remaining 41 simulations had slightly smaller group centrality than the maximum and less concurrence on the key player group membership.

64. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Gang’s Guns Kill Big Tim,” 1; New York Times, “Machine Gun Kills,” 27.

65. Chicago Daily Tribune, “3 Slain Scalisi, Anselmi,” 1; New York Times, “3 Capone Henchmen are Shot to Death,” 17.

66. See note 50 above.

67. Collins, “Who Killed Big Jim Colosimo?”; Sawyers, “Way We Were.”

68. Joseph and Smith, “The Ties that Bribe.”

69. Murchie, “Capone’s Decade of Death,” D1.

70. Chicago Daily Tribune, “If He Behaves,” 1.

71. Herrick, “Capone’s Story,” 1.

72. See above 38.

73. Gould and Fernandez, “Structures of Mediation.”

74. Abt, Bleeding Out.

75. Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks, 18.

76. See note 13 above.

77. Morselli, “Structuring Mr. Nice,” 218.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1302778. This project was supported by Award No. 2013-IJ-CX-0013, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Chris M. Smith

Chris M. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She researches crime and inequality, criminal relationships, and criminal organizations to examine how relationships unequally embed individuals in illicit markets and violence. She is the author of Syndicate Women: Gender and Networks in Chicago Organized Crime.

Andrew V. Papachristos

Andrew V. Papachristos is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. His research is aimed at understanding how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we feel, think, and do.