Francesco Calderoni

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore | UNICATT · Transcrime

Law enforcement agencies have frequently shown skepticism toward the results of the application of social network analysis to organized crime. Indeed, most studies to date have analyzed data (e.g. telephone intercepts) whose content was already well-known to the practitioners. Shifting the focus to data on mafia meetings, this chapter explores whet...

The problem of link prediction has recently received increasing attention from scholars in network science. In social network analysis, one of its aims is to recover missing links, namely connections among actors which are likely to exist but have not been reported because data are incomplete or subject to various types of uncertainty. In the field...

This study complements existing literature on the mobility of criminal groups (mainly based on country case studies) with the first systematic assessment of the worldwide activities of the four main types of Italian mafias (Cosa Nostra, Camorra, ’Ndrangheta and Apulian mafias) from 2000 to 2012. Drawing from publicly available reports, a specific m...

Organised crime is a field vulnerable to mythical numbers, i.e. exaggerated estimates lacking empirical support, but acquiring acceptance through repetition. The figures on mafia proceeds in Italy are a striking example of this problem. This study proposes an estimation of mafia proceeds in Italy from nine criminal activities (sexual exploitation o...

This article presents the Mafia Index (MI), an index measuring the presence of mafias at the provincial level. In the abundant literature on Italian mafias, relatively few studies have attempted to measure the presence of mafias across the country. A review of previous attempts points out the limitations and methodological shortcomings of existing...

The concept of organized crime has dynamically evolved, with researchers contending that it is a social construct or an umbrella concept encompassing different empirical manifestations. Scholars have often suggested classifying organized crime groups into those involved in “racketeering” or “governing” and those engaged in “transit crime” or “tradi...

The concept of organized crime has dynamically evolved, with researchers contending that it is a social construct or an umbrella concept encompassing different empirical manifestations. Scholars have often suggested classifying organized crime groups into those involved in “racketeering” or “governing” and those engaged in “transit crime” or “tradi...

Bid-rigging harms economies and societies. While existing research has primarily focused on quantifying the economic damages resulting from bid-rigging cartels, there is a relative dearth of studies exploring how firms interact and the specific techniques they use to rig tenders. Our paper examines the bidding behaviours associated with bid-rigging...

Objectives Previous research underscores the influence of prior violent co-offending on subsequent violent behavior, linking it to a social contagion mechanism akin to the internalization of violence. However, these studies are limited by disregarding the entirety of a criminal career and overlooking diverse co-offending dynamics beyond co-offender...

This chapter explains Article 1 of the Smuggling of Migrants Protocol. Article 1 uses verbatim the same language as Article 1 of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol and reference is made to the commentary on that Article. Jointly with Article 37 of UNOTC, the provision ensures the coordination between the Convention and its Protocols. Overall, it p...

This chapter cites how Article 4 of United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) highlighted sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and non-intervention in domestic affairs as fundamental principles of international criminal law. The provision aims to ensure the principles’ consistency within the measures involved in...

This chapter explains how Article 9 covers a variety of measures complementing the criminalization provisions of Article 8. It clarifies that the provision has no specific origin in previous international treaties and the early drafts of the Convention did not include specific provisions on corruption. However, the provision lacks any binding requi...

This chapter examines Article 1 of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol. The text of Article 1(1) clarifies the relation between the Protocol and the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Indeed, a State must be a Party to the Convention to become a Party to any Protocol. Meanwhile, the main aim of paragraph 2 is to introd...

This chapter highlights Article 1, which covers the purpose of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) in an effort to promote cooperation to prevent and combat transnational organized crime more effectively. While the UNTOC lacks a preamble that can support devising the correct interpretation of the text, the Ge...

This article defines the scope of the Firearms Protocol, which was considered one of the most hotly debated issues during the negotiations. It establishes the scope of the Protocol in relation to the prevention of the illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, their parts and components, and ammunition. It also mentions how the Protocol...

This article provides a background on how the protocol on firearms supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and interpreted together with the Convention. It ensures the coordination between the Convention and its Protocols. It also talks about the application of the Convention provisions to the Firearms Protoc...

This chapter notes the scope of application of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) according to Article 3. It provides a wide framework for international cooperation against a variety of criminal acts. The wording of the provisions specifies that the treaty applies to the Convention's four established offence...

This chapter elaborates on Article 11 exploring the notion of prosecution, adjudication, and sanctions in the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). It looks into the provision’s flexible obligations that are largely inspired by corresponding provisions of the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Dru...

This chapter explores several measures to prevent money laundering indicated in Article 7 of United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). The Article’s main obligations is the establishment of a comprehensive regulatory and supervisory regime for financial institutions and other bodies. Additionally, Article 7 comprises...

This chapter focuses on Article 6 addressing the criminalization of money laundering. It primarily complements the preventive measures established in Article 7 of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). The provision's general obligation aims to criminalize the laundering of the proceeds of crime and to include...

This chapter looks into Article 5 taking the role as one of the core articles of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) that promoted some level of harmonization and cooperation. It aims to criminalize participation in an organized criminal group as defined in Article 2(a). The compromise solution between common...

This chapter considers Article 8, which looks into the criminalization of active and passive bribery that allows States Parties to criminalize additional corrupt practices. The aforementioned corrupt practices include the corruption of foreign public officials and officials of international organizations. Corruption was included in the United Natio...

This chapter discusses how Article 2 defines several terms indicated in different articles across the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). Most definitions are taken from previous treaties, particularly from the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances....

The Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime represents a major step forward in the internationally co-operative fight against transnational organized crime. This book offers a comprehensive, article by article legal commentary on the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its two Protocols on Trafficking in Persons and Smu...

The Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime represents a major step forward in the internationally co-operative fight against transnational organized crime. This book offers a comprehensive, article by article legal commentary on the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its two Protocols on Trafficking in Persons and Smu...

The Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime represents a major step forward in the internationally co-operative fight against transnational organized crime. This book offers a comprehensive, article by article legal commentary on the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its two Protocols on Trafficking in Persons and Smu...

The growing research on co-offending over the life course is based on relatively small, general offending samples, followed for a short period, and from a limited set of countries. This study expands current knowledge by examining the relation of co-offending with age, criminal experience, crime type, and crime seriousness in a large sample of Ital...

Objectives: We test the effects of four policy scenarios on recruitment into organized crime. The policy scenarios target (i) organized crime leaders and (ii) facilitators for imprisonment, (iii) provide educational and welfare support to children and their mothers while separating them from organized-crime fathers, and (iv) increase educational an...

Background Studies from multiple contexts conceptualize organized crime as comprising different types of criminal organizations and activities. Notwithstanding growing scientific interest and increasing number of policies aiming at preventing and punishing organized crime, little is known about the specific processes that lead to recruitment into o...

Objectives What drives the consumption of illicit cigarettes? While criminology has rarely addressed the divers of the illicit cigarette markets from a theoretical and empirical perspective, studies from other disciplines point to two classes of causes. Some studies stress the impact of cigarette prices and taxes on the market for illicit cigarette...

Despite growing evidence about heterogeneous pathways leading individuals into organized crime, there is limited knowledge about the differences in the criminal career between individuals who entered criminal organizations in their youth and those who joined at an older age. This study assesses the differences between early and late recruits in the...

Criminal organizations exploit their presence on territories and local communities to recruit new workforce in order to carry out their criminal activities and business. The ability to attract individuals is crucial for maintaining power and control over the territories in which these groups are settled. This study proposes the formalization, devel...

This chapter provides the first analyses of the criminal career of the Italian mafias members. The analysis is based on the unique Proton Mafia Member dataset, provided by the Italian Ministry of Justice, with information on all individuals who received a final conviction for mafia offences since the 1980s. The PMM includes information on more than...

This chapter presents a systematic review of the social, psychological, and economic factors relating to involvement and recruitment into organized crime groups (OCGs), including mafias, drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), gangs, and other criminal organizations. This review has three objectives: (i) identifying the most commonly reported factor...

Link prediction exercises may prove particularly challenging with noisy and incomplete networks, such as criminal networks. Also, the link prediction effectiveness may vary across different relations within a social group. We address these issues by assessing the performance of different link prediction algorithms on a mafia organization. The analy...

This paper provides a narrative synthesis of the results of a systematic review of the social, psychological and economic factors leading to recruitment into organised crime. This is based on the analysis of evidence emerging from 47 qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method studies published in or before 2017. While the selected studies varied ma...

Criminal organizations exploit their presence on territories and local communities to recruit new workforce in order to carry out their criminal activities and business. The ability to attract individuals is crucial for maintaining power and control over the territories in which these groups are settled. This study proposes the formalization, devel...

While indicators assessing the quality of life often comprise measures of crime or fear of crime, these components usually refer to property or violent crimes. More complex crimes, which may significantly impact on the social, economic, and political conditions of local communities, are often overlooked, mostly due to problems in adequately measuri...

This volume provides insights on how recruitment patterns develop for two related types of criminal networks: organized crime and terrorism. It specifically explores the social, situational, psychological, and economic drivers of recruitment. Although organized crime networks and terrorism networks can differ in underlying goals and motivations, th...

Criminal leaders enhance their social capital by strategically brokering information among associates. To balance security and efficiency, leaders may favor meetings instead of telephones, potentially affecting analyses relying solely on wiretap data. Yet, few studies explored criminal leaders’ use of meetings in the management of criminal groups....

PROTON D5.1 presents two agent-based models (ABMs), one on recruitment in organised crime network and the other on radicalisation and terrorist recruitment. The report presents each model in sequence, addressing the design of the models including their theoretical framework, state of the art, and model overview. It then outlines the calibration, va...

This deliverable presents the reports of T5.3 as part of WP5. It focuses on presenting the policy recommendations based on the results of the PROTON-S simulations. Since the consortium agreed on the development of separate models for the recruitment into organised crime and terrorist networks, the report is divided in two sections.

Criminal organizations exploit their presence on territories and local communities to recruit new workforce in order to carry out their criminal activities and business. The ability to attract individuals is crucial for maintaining power and control over the territories in which these groups are settled. This study proposes the formalization, devel...

Through a novel data set comprising the criminal records of 11,138 convicted mafia offenders, we compute criminal career parameters and trajectories through group-based trajectory modeling. Mafia offenders report prolific and persistent careers (16.1 crimes over 16.5 years on average), with five distinct trajectories (low frequency, high frequency,...

International and Transnational Crime and Justice - edited by Mangai Natarajan June 2019

Brokerage is crucial for dark networks. In analyzing communications among criminals, which naturally induce bipartite networks, previous studies have focused on the classic Freeman's betweenness, conceived for one-mode matrices and possibly biasing the results. We explore different betweenness centrality including three inspired by the dual project...

This report presents the study of the criminal careers of Italian mafia members and mafia leaders, with a specific focus on recruitment. The analysis applies for the first time the criminal careers framework (firstly developed by Blumstein in 1986) to the population of individuals convicted for mafia offenses between 1982 and March 2017 provided by...

This report presents a systematic review of the social, psychological, and economic factors relating to criminalisation and recruitment to organised crime groups (OCGs). It encompasses different types of OCGs, namely mafias, drug trafficking organisations (DTOs), gangs, and a residual category including other criminal organisations. This chapter i...

Despite the heterogeneity of the illicit trade in cigarettes within countries, available studies mainly take national markets as their unit of analysis. The innovative contribution of this work is the focus on the phenomenon at the subnational level. Price and non-price factors are examined as determinants of the consumption of illicit cigarettes i...

This comprehensive volume analyzes dual markets for regulated substances and services, and aims to provide a framework for their effective regulation. A “dual market” refers to the existence of both a legal and an illegal market for a regulated product or service (for example, prescription drugs). These regulations exist in various countries for a...

Mafia homicides are usually committed for retaliation, economic profit, or rivalry among groups. The variety of possible reasons suggests the inefficacy of a preventive approach. However, like most violent crimes, mafia homicides concentrate in space due to place-specific social and environmental features. Starting from the existing literature, thi...

Criminal organizations tend to be clustered to reduce risks of detection and information leaks. Yet, the literature exploring the relevance of subgroups for their internal structure is so far very limited. The paper applies methods of community analysis to explore the structure of a criminal network representing the individuals’ co-participation in...

This report focuses on the Eastern Balkan hub for illicit cigarettes. Bulgaria is the most relevant country in the hub because it has significant inflows and outflows of illicit tobacco products. The sorrounding countries (Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey) are included because they enables and facilitate these flows. The report takes t...

This report focuses on the Eastern Balkan hub for illicit cigarettes. Bulgaria is the most relevant country in the hub because it has significant inflows and outflows of illicit tobacco products. The sorrounding countries (Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey) are included because they enables and facilitate these flows. The report takes t...

Key hubs are crucial sets of countries on the regional, continental or global map of the illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP). The analysis of key hubs instead of single countries enables a more comprehensive understanding of the factors determining transnational illicit flows and a more effective identification of the strategies needed to fig...

This report is part of the project The Factbook on the Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products (ITTP). Tobacco consumption is undoubtedly a danger for human health, and governments should carefully regulate the tobacco market. Illicit tobacco avoids state regulation and taxation and may jeopardise tobacco control policies. The Factbook will contribute t...

Organised crime is a field vulnerable to mythical numbers, i.e. exaggerated estimates lacking empirical support, but acquiring acceptance through repetition. The figures on mafia proceeds in Italy are a striking example of this problem. This study proposes an estimation of mafia proceeds in Italy from nine criminal activities (sexual exploitation o...

This study provides a methodology with which to estimate the volumes and revenues of the illicit cigarette market at the subnational level. It applies the methodology to Italy for a 4-year period (2009-2012), enabling assessment of the prevalence of the illicit trade across years and regions. Notwithstanding the alleged importance of mafias, the re...

This article focuses on four different criminal markets: counterfeiting, illegal firearms trafficking, gambling and waste management. Despite recurrent allegations that these markets have a high mafia presence, there is a lack of reliable estimates of their sizes and the revenues that they generate. Figures in reports and media vary significantly,...

This is the authors' post-print version of Calderoni, Francesco, and Carlo Piccardi. 2014. “Uncovering the Structure of Criminal Organizations by Community Analysis: The Infinito Network.” In 2014 Tenth International Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), 301–8. Marrakech: IEEE Computer Society Press. doi:10.1109/...

This study calls for a new direction to be taken in the analysis of, and the fight against, the illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) in the European Union (EU). It suggests that the focus should be trained more closely on the reduction of criminal opportunities than on crime control policies. This requires a change of mindset: from the convicti...

This book estimates the proceeds of crime and mafia revenues for different criminal markets such as sexual exploitation, drugs, illicit cigarettes, loan sharking, extortion racketeering, counterfeiting, illicit firearms, illegal gambling and illicit waste management. It is the first time that scholars have adopted detailed methodologies to ensure t...