Identifying Mafia Bosses from Meeting Attendance

The law enforcement has frequently showed skepticism toward the results of the application of social network analysis to organized crime. Indeed, most studies so far analyzed data (e.g. phone intercepts) whose content was already well-known to the practitioners. Shifting the focus to mafia meetings data, this chapter explores whether network analysis can identify the bosses in a large mafia network. The analysis relies on data from a large investigation on the presence of the ‘Ndrangheta, a mafia from the Southern Italian region of Calabria. Operation Infinito identified several mafia families and tracked a number of mafia meetings. Results show that betweenness centrality is the most significant predictor of leadership in the mafia. A logistic regression model, using network measures as predictors, is able to successfully predict the charge (boss or other) of 92% of the individuals in the network. If supported by further studies, network analysis of meetings may provide law enforcement agencies with useful information to identify the bosses of criminal organizations.