Giulia Berlusconi

University of Surrey · Department of Sociology

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...

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...

Social network analysis (SNA) has proven its value in refining criminological concepts and theories to aid the understanding of social processes behind crime problems and to assist law enforcement agencies in enforcing crime. Social network methods and techniques have a great value for crime prevention as well. SNA can be adopted to study crime epi...

Illicit drugs are trafficked across manifold borders before ultimately reaching consumers. Consequently, interdiction of cross-border drug trafficking forms a critical component of the European Union’s initiative to reduce drug supplies. However, there is contradictory evidence about its effectiveness, which is due, in part, to a paucity of informa...

Illegal enterprise and social embeddedness theories have highlighted the importance of market forces and social factors, respectively, for analyzing organized crime and organized criminal activities. This paper empirically demonstrates the joint explanatory power of these respective theories in the case of the transnational trafficking of cocaine....

Drug cryptomarkets are a significant development in the recent history of illicit drug markets. Dealers and buyers can now finalize transactions with people they have never met, who could be located anywhere across the globe. What factors shape the geography of international drug trafficking via these cryptomarkets? In our current study, we test th...

This paper investigates the impact of the targeting of key players by law enforcement on the structure, communication strategies, and activities of a drug trafficking network. Data are extracted from judicial court documents. The unique nature of the investigation – which saw a key player being arrested mid-investigation but police monitoring conti...

There is a relative dearth of literature on both the effects of cross-border interdic-tions and the impact of different types of interventions on international drug trafficking. This study identifies the main trafficking routes for cocaine and heroin, along with comparing the disruptive effects induced by targeted and non-coordinated interventions....

This study analyses large-scale online data to examine the characteristics of a national commercial sex network of off-street female sex workers and their male clients to identify implications for public health policy and practice. We collected sexual contact information from the largest online community dedicated to reviewing sex workers' services...

The low level of terrorist activity in Poland has not stopped it legislating in the wake of the recent terror attacks in Europe. This chapter begins with an outline of the historical development of counter-terrorism law and policy in Poland prior to 9/11, before providing a synopsis of post-9/11 domestic and European Union legislation. The final se...

In the burgeoning criminological literature on security, risk and preventive justice which has followed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, ‘contagion’ or the deleterious effect of counterterrorist policies on the ordinary criminal law has been the subject of some discussion, mostly in the context of the threat which such ‘exceptional’ policies po...

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...

This study utilizes recent advances in statistical models for social networks to identify the factors shaping heroin trafficking in relation to European countries. First, it estimates the size of the heroin flows among a network of 61 countries, before subsequently using a latent space approach to model the presence of trafficking and the amount of...

Scholars analyzed transnational drug flows as a network of economic relationships among countries, and compared the properties of different drug trade networks, including heroin and cocaine (Chandra and Joba 2015; Boivin 2011). Yet, these studies are mainly descriptive in nature and do not consider the size of drug flows. This paper expands on this...

The infiltration of organised crime in the legitimate economy has emerged as a transnational phenomenon. This book constitutes an unprecedented study of the involvement of criminal groups in the legitimate economy and their infiltration in legal businesses, and is the first to bridge the research gap between money laundering and organised crime. It...

Economic activities are distributed along a continuum whose extremes are criminal activities and completely legal ones. Between these two extremes lie several other possible ways in which organised criminals engage in activities that are formally legal yet organised and managed illegally. Attention has been recently paid to legal businesses and the...

This chapter discusses the methodological challenges in defining, operationalising and measuring organised crime infiltration in legal businesses. It first reviews existing definitions and measures of organised crime; it then focuses on infiltration, outlining the differences with respect to the concepts of organised crime investments and money lau...

Several scholars recently investigated international drug trafficking using social network analysis (Boivin 2014b; Chandra and Joba 2015). These studies do not quantify the volume of drug flows among countries thus analyzing networks with binary links. This study estimates the size of the heroin flows from and to European countries. Then, it exploi...

This research is an exploratory study on the infiltration of organised crime groups (OCGs) in legal businesses. Infiltration occurs in every case in which a natural person belonging to a criminal organisation or acting on its behalf, or an already infiltrated legal person, invests financial and/or human resources to participate in the decision-maki...

The Balkan route, connecting Afghanistan with Western and Central Europe, is one of the world’s most important opiate-trafficking routes. In the past, the EMCDDA and the UNODC invested heavily in the analysis of the supply of opiates to Europe. However, given the opiate trade’s illicit nature, information on these drug flows is scarce and there is...

The phenomenon of maritime piracy dates back to the beginning of seafaring. Since the 1980s, maritime piracy has re-emerged as an international problem because of a significant rise in the recorded attacks. The security of maritime routes is a matter of concern for national governments, ship owners and trade companies whose vessels face the risk of...

Law enforcement agencies rely on data collected from wire taps to construct the organisational chart of criminal enterprises. Recently, a number of academics have also begun to utilise social network analysis to describe relations among criminals and understand the internal organisation of criminal groups. However, before drawing conclusions about...

From the 1980s the international community has shown a growing concern about sea piracy, as a consequence of a significant rise of the recorded attacks. The security of maritime routes is indeed a matter of concern for states, as well as for trade companies whose vessels face the risk of being attacked and either robbed of the entire cargo or hijac...