Where is the mafia in Italy? Measuring the presence of the mafia across Italian provinces

Global Crime

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 41-69

  Calderoni, Francesco ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE   (Italy)

Author keywords

Data; Index; Italian provinces; Italy; Mafia; Mafias; Measurement; Organised crime

Indexed keywords

EID: 79951586496     PISSN: 17440572     EISSN: 17440580     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2011.548962     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. For the purpose of this study, 'mafias' refer not only to the Sicilian Mafia but also to other criminal groups that share some significant features with the latter (although they are not the same phenomenon). Traditionally, there are four main mafias in Italy: besides the Sicilian Mafia, there are the Camorra, the Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita. Some authors talk of a 'fifth' mafia, referring to criminal phenomena exhibiting some of the significant features of the four main groups. This denomination has been applied to the criminal groups in Sicily, Sardinia, Basilicata, and Veneto. See, for example, Giuseppe Bascietto, Stidda. La quinta mafia, i boss, gli affari, i rapporti con la politica (Palermo: Pitti, 2005).
2. Pantaleone Sergi, Gli anni dei basilischi: mafia, istituzioni e società in Basilicata (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003).
3. In general, the category 'mafias' is widely accepted in the Italian literature (where mafie is the plural form of the word). See, for example, Umberto Santino, Dalla mafia alle mafie: Scienze sociali e crimine organizzato (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2006).
4. Giovanni Fiandaca and Salvatore Costantino, eds., La mafia, Le mafie: Tra vecchi e nuovi paradigmi (Roma: Laterza, 1994).
5. The category 'mafias' is also accepted at the international level (usually including other phenomena
6. such as the Yakuza, the Triads, and the so-called Russian Mafia). See, for example, Federico Varese, 'How Mafias Migrate: The Case of the Ndrangheta in Northern Italy', Law & Society Review 40 (2006): 411-44.
7. Robin T. Naylor, 'Mafias, Myths, and Markets: On the Theory and Practice of Enterprise Crime', Transnational Organized Crime 3 (1997): 1-45. Moreover, it is customary to apply the term 'mafia' (in the singular) to criminal organisations other than the Sicilian Mafia.
8. In Italy, the allocation of other similar criminal groups to the category 'mafia' also occurs in criminal law. The last paragraph of Article 416 bis of the Italian Criminal Code (mafia-type association) explicitly states: 'the provisions above apply also to the camorra, the Ndrangheta and other associations, however known or called, even foreign, which use the intimidatory power of the group to achieve the goals typical of a mafia-type association'.
9. Several publications have exclusively focused on compiling bibliographies on the mafia. See, for example, Gioconda Chindemi and Mimma Corso, eds., Bibliografia Sulla Mafia Sicilia/biblioteche 3 (Palermo: Biblioteca centrale della Regione siciliana, 1987).
10. Aurora Dioguardi, Bibliografia Sulla Mafia, 1987-2000, Sicilia/biblioteche 53 (Palermo: Regione siciliana, Assessorato dei beni culturali e ambientali e della Pubblica istruzione, 2000).
11. Gian Roberto Lanfranchini and Bea Marin, eds., Per Conoscere La Mafia: Una Bibliografia (Milano: Strumenti editoriali, 1993).
12. Angela Bedotto, ed., Mafie: Panorama bibliografico [1945-1993] (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1994). As far as possible, this article will cite and refer to English publications (either original works or translations from Italian). However, most references will inevitably be to Italian works.
13. For the sake of brevity this article focuses only on contributions published in the past 5 years.
14. ISTAT. 'B. Indicatori di contesto chiave e variabili di rottura' (September 2010), http://www.istat.it/ambiente/contesto/infoterr/azioneB.html#tema (accessed January 17, 2011).
15. In Italy, regions are the highest level of local administration. As a consequence of progressive legislative reforms, regions have acquired significant powers and autonomy, including legislative competence on a wide variety of matters. There are 20 Italian regions, and their number did not change during the time period covered by this study.
16. ISTAT has adopted the operational definition of organised crime used by the ItalianMinistry of the Interior. The definition comprises mafia murders, bomb or fire attacks, arsons, serious robberies (e.g. bank or post offices). The source of the data is the operational database of the Italian law enforcement agencies. Until 2003 this database was known as 'modello 165', while since 2004 a new system ('SDI', acronym for Sistema di Indagine) has replaced the previous one.
17. Mafia penetration index.
18. Eurispes, 16 Rapporto Italia (Roma: Eurilink, 2004).
19. Eurispes, 16 Rapporto Italia (Roma: Eurilink, 2004), 425.
20. In Italy, provinces are mid-level administrative units. They have particular importance from a criminological point of view because law enforcement agencies are frequently organised on a provincial basis. Until 1992 there were 95 provinces. In 1992, seven provinces were created (Verbano- Cusio-Ossola, Biella, Lecco, Lodi, Rimini, Prato, Crotone, Vibo Valentia), bringing the total to 103 provinces. In 2001, four new provinces were created in Sardinia (Olbia-Tempio, Ogliastra, Medio Campidano, and Carbonia-Iglesias) and implemented in 2004. In 2004, three new provinces were created (Monza e della Brianza, Fermo, and Barletta-Andria-Trani) and were implemented in 2009. This study is based on crime statistics. These refer, for the 1983-1995 period, to the pre-1992 set of 95 provinces for which data are available since 1996 (due to a lag in adaptation of the data collection procedures). For the 1996-onward period, the study refers to the set of 103 provinces, once again owing to lags in adaptation of the data collection procedures.
21. Unemployment rate, trust in the institutions, crime rates for offences committed by mafia-type associations (extortion, smuggling of goods, drug production, drug possession, and drug dealing, criminal association, mafia-type association, exploitation of prostitution, handling stolen goods), city councils dissolved for mafia infiltration, intimidatory acts against local administrators and, only for IPM 2005, mafia murders.
22. Unemployment rate, crimes attributable to mafia associations per 10,000 inhabitants (sum of extortion, drug production, possession, and dealing, mafia-type association, exploitation and facilitation of prostitution, handling stolen goods, bomb, and fire attacks), mafia murders per 10,000 inhabitants, city councils dissolved for mafia infiltration (absolute values), number of episodes of terrorism or political violence (absolute values), and number of phone interceptions in the provinces (absolute values). Eurispes, 20 Rapporto Italia (Roma: Eurilink, 2008), 470.
23. Bomb or fire attacks, mass murders, handling stolen goods, robberies, extortions, usury, kidnap for ransom, mafia-type association, money-laundering, smuggling of goods, drug production and trafficking, exploitation and facilitation of prostitution, mafia murders. Eurispes, 22 Rapporto Italia (Roma: Eurilink, 2010), 597.
24. Censis. Il condizionamento delle mafie sull'economia, sulla società e sulle istituzioni del Mezzogiorno (Roma: Censis, 2009), http://www.censis.it/censis/attachment/protected_download/624?view_id=35.
25. Mafia 'clans' identified in reports by the Ministry of Interior and by the Anti-camorra Observatory of the Campania region, the number of city councils dissolved for mafia infiltration, and the number of assets confiscated from organised crime. The study does not clearly state the time span of the data.
26. Censis, Il condizionamento delle mafie sull'economia, 10.
27. Bomb or fire attacks, mafia murders, extortion, usury, mafia-type associations, money-laundering, arson, smuggling of goods, association for drug production and trafficking, association for drug dealing.
28. Censis, Il condizionamento delle mafie sull'economia, 13.
29. The study does not explain the reasons for the difference in the comparison years.
30. Vittorio Daniele and Ugo Marani, 'Organized Crime, the Quality of Local Institutions and FDI in Italy: A Panel Data Analysis', European Journal of Political Economy (in press, corrected proof), http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V97-4YXP15D-1/2/a7dfd9bede7fcf282752a05acdb7d5ce
31. Vittorio Daniele and Ugo Marani, 'Organized Crime, the Quality of Local Institutions and FDI in Italy: A Panel Data Analysis', European Journal of Political Economy (in press, corrected proof), 19.
32. Vittorio Daniele and Ugo Marani, 'Organized Crime, the Quality of Local Institutions and FDI in Italy: A Panel Data Analysis', European Journal of Political Economy (in press, corrected proof), 16.
33. Antonella Mennella, 'Reti sociali, criminalità organizzata e mercati locali del lavoro' (University of Sassari, 2009), www.aiel.it/bacheca/SASSARI/papers/mennella.pdf. Criminal association, mafia-type association, slaughter, bomb and fire attacks, mafia murders, extortions, arsons, handling stolen goods, usury, drug crimes, exploitation and facilitation of prostitution.
34. Andrea Mario Lavezzi, 'Economic Structure and Vulnerability to Organised Crime: Evidence from Sicily', Global Crime 9 (2008): 198-220.
35. The dummy should help explain the greater relevance of specific economic sectors in areas with a presence of organised crime.
36. Raul Caruso, Spesa pubblica e criminalità organizzata in Italia: evidenza empirica su dati panel nel periodo 1997-2003 (University Library of Munich, Germany, January 2008), http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/6861.html
37. Mario Centorrino and Ferdinando Ofria, 'Criminalità organizzata e produttività del lavoro nel Mezzogiorno: un'applicazione del modello "Kaldor-Verdoorn"', Rivista economica del Mezzogiorno 1 (2008): 163-87.
38. Francesco Calderoni and Stefano Caneppele, eds., La geografia criminale degli appalti: le infiltrazioni della criminalità organizzata negli appalti pubblici nel Sud Italia (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2009).
39. Rates of mafia murder 1996-2004; rates of mafia-type associations 1995-2004; rates of city councils dissolved for mafia infiltration 1991-2007; rates of assets confiscated from organised crime 1998-2007; rates of offences connected with public procurement (corresponding to the offences envisaged by Article 640 bis, 316 bis, 316 ter, 353 of the Italian Criminal Code and Article 53 bis of Legislative Decree 22/1997). All rates are per 100,000 inhabitants, except city councils (rate per 100 councils in the province).
40. In some cases, to reduce the impact of outlier values for some indicators, provinces with outlier values were assigned the same rate as the province with the second higher rate.
41. For example, the OCI for Sicily in 2006 is 48.3 whereas for Umbria (a small central region) it is 304.3.
42. Because the OCI measures the regional trend compared to 1995 (1995=100), its use for a statistical analysis across Italian regions appears unclear and potentially misleading. Indeed, the OCI measures whether the presence of organised crime has increased compared to 1995 in a given region and does not allow to compare to regional trends.
43. For example, in the ranking of the IPM 2004 Crotone was the last province of Calabria. In 2005, the IPM 2005 Eurispes included mafia murders in the index. Crotone ranked first in IPM 2005.
44. Vittorio Daniele, 'Organized Crime and Regional Development. A Review of the Italian Case', Trends in Organized Crime 12 (October 2009): 211-34.
45. Adam Asmundo and Maurizio Lisciandra, 'Un tentativo di stima del costo delle estorsioni sulle imprese a livello regionale: il caso Sicilia', in I Costi Dell'illegalità: Mafia Ed Estorsioni In Sicilia, ed. Antonio La Spina (Bologna: Il mulino, 2008): 113-36.
46. and Stefano Caneppele and Francesco Calderoni, 'Extortion Rackets in Europe: An Exploratory Comparative Study', in Cross-Border Crime: Inroads on Integrity, ed. Petrus C. van Duyne et al., Colloquium on Cross-Border Crime 11 (Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2010): 309-36.
47. In another study, Daniele examines the problems of measuring extortion and mafia in Italy. Daniele, 'Organized crime and regional development. A review of the Italian case', 227.
48. In any case, the letter of the law as an estimate of the seriousness of a crime is an extreme simplification which does not consider that criminal law has elements allowing parameterisation of the penalty to the actual seriousness of a crime (e.g. aggravating or attenuating circumstances, discretionary powers of the court). Therefore, the statutory penalty is merely a starting point and the final applicable penalty may significantly differ from it.
49. For example, a 1-3 seriousness scale where the researchers would assess the seriousness of each offences according to various factors (possibly including the penalties provided by the law). 38. Data are available on the ISTAT website 'Justice in Figures', giustiziaincifre.istat.it (accessed January 17, 2011).
50. Lavezzi, 'Economic Structure and Vulnerability to Organised Crime', 206.
51. Umberto Santino, 'Mafia and Mafia-Type Organizations in Italy', in Organized Crime: World Perspectives, ed. Jay S. Albanese, Dilip K. Das, and Arvind Verma (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 87.
52. Santino, Dalla Mafia Alle Mafie.
53. Fabio Armao, Il Sistema Mafia: Dall'economia-Mondo Al Dominio Locale (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).
54. Letizia Paoli and Cyrille Fijnaut, 'Introduction to Part I: The History of the Concept', in Organised Crime In Europe: Concepts, Patterns and Control Policies in the European Union and Beyond, ed. Cyrille Fijnaut and Letizia Paoli (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 21-46.
55. and Vincenzo Scalia, 'From the Octopus to the Spider's Web: The Transformations of the Sicilian Mafia Under Postfordism', Trends in Organized Crime (September 2010), http://www.springerlink.com/content/29g434039045q121/
56. Santino, 'Mafia and Mafia-Type Organizations in Italy', 87.
57. In Italy, there are no victimisation surveys or other periodic surveys measuring the presence or the perception of mafias (such as, the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index or Global Corruption Barometer, World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators). Such surveys would provide important information with which to complement existing data (see Caneppele and Calderoni, 'Extortion Rackets in Europe: An Exploratory Comparative Study').
58. Although these sources have problems (sampling, memories of the respondents, costs), they have been used for the analysis of organised crime (see Jan van Dijk, 'Mafia Markers: Assessing Organized Crime and Its Impact Upon Societies', Trends in Organized Crime 10, 2007: 39-56).
59. The only existing survey is the Italian Business Crime Survey conducted by the Italian Ministry of Interior and Transcrime in 2008 (see Giulia Mugellini, 'Measuring Crime Against Business in the EU: The Problem of Comparability' (PhD thesis, Milan, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2010), 89).
60. This survey has also covered offences related to organised crime (e.g. corruption, extortion), but results are available only at regional level and have not yet been officially published (see Giulia Mugellini, 'The Victimization of Businesses in Italy: Key Results' (paper presented at the annual meeting of the ASC Annual Meeting, St. Louis Adam's Mark, St. Louis, Missouri, November 12, 2008).
61. Content validity refers to how 'the measure covers the full range of the concept's meaning'. Ronet Bachman and Russell K. Schutt, The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 95.
62. Mafia-type associations (reported by the police), assets confiscated from organised crime, mafia murders, city councils dissolved for infiltration by organised crime, mafia-type associations (indicted by the prosecution), and attempted mafia murders.
63. Criterion validity refers to how 'the scores obtained on one measure can be compared to those obtained with a more direct or already validated measure of the phenomenon (the criterion)'. Bachman and Schutt, The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice, 95.
64. Criminal association correlated to 16 other variables; extortion and city councils dissolved for organised crime infiltration to 13; mafia-type association (police reported), mafia murders, assets confiscated to organised crime, mafia-type association (indicted), attempted mafia murders, damage followed by arson, bomb or fire attacks, arsons and offences related to public procurement to 12; and kidnapping for ransom to 11.
65. Most of the indexes and studies reviewed in Section 2.1 used one or more of the selected variables to measure the presence of mafias in Italy. Other publications have focused on one specific indicator among those selected. See Giorgio Chinnici and Umberto Santino, La Violenza Programmata: Omicidi e Guerre DiMafia a Palermo Dagli Anni '60 ad Oggi (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1989).
66. Giorgio Chinnici, 'L'omicidio a Palermo', in Rapporto Sulla Criminalità in Italia, ed. Marzio Barbagli (Bologna: Il mulino, Ricerche e studi dell'Istituto Cattaneo, 2003), 235-58.
67. and Nello Trocchia, 'Appendice: Alcuni dati sui patrimoni mafiosi', Federalismo Criminale: Viaggio Nei Comuni Sciolti Per Mafia (Roma: Nutrimenti, 2009).
68. Caneppele and Calderoni, 'Extortion Rackets in Europe: An Exploratory Comparative Study'.
69. Rates for mafia-type associations, for murders, and for confiscated assets are per 100,000 inhabitants in the province; rates for city councils dissolved for mafia infiltration are per 100 city councils in the province.
70. Pearson's r was 0.895 and statistically significant at 0.01 level.
71. Pearson's r was 0.918 and statistically significant at 0.01 level.
72. Pearson's r was 0.903 for the MI(rate) and MIen(rate) and 0.941 for the MI(rank) andMIen(rank). Both correlations were statistically significant at 0.01 level.
73. Pearson's r was 0.788 for the rate procedure and 0.856 rank procedure. Both correlations were statistically significant at 0.01 level.
74. van Dijk, 'Mafia Markers: Assessing Organized Crime and its Impact upon Societies', 42.
75. Rocco Sciarrone, Mafie vecchie, mafie nuove: radicamento ed espansione (Roma: Donzelli Editore, 1998), 155.
76. Roberto Saviano, Gomorra: viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra (Mondadori, 2006).
77. Tom Behan, The Camorra (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
78. Felia Allum, Camorristi, Politicians, and Businessmen: The Transformation of Organized Crime in Post-War Naples, Italian perspectives 11 (Leeds, UK: Northern Universities Press, 2006).
79. Varese, 'How Mafias Migrate,' 422.
80. Enzo Ciconte, Ndrangheta (Soveria Mannelli, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2008), 22-23.
81. Diego Gambetta, Diego, The Sicilian Mafia: the business of private protection (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 81-85.
82. Letizia Paoli, 'Italian Organised Crime: Mafia Associations and Criminal Enterprises', Global Crime 6 (2004): 19.
83. Monica Massari, La sacra corona unità: potere e segreto (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 1998).
84. Both the mayor and the prefect of Milan have minimised the threat of the presence of the mafia in the North: 'I soldi son desideri' (Annozero. Rai Due, Maggio 25, 2010. http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-6ee35904-a87f-4a5c-bd9b-2416251964c6.html?p=0).
85. 'La Moratti ad Annozero: la mafia a Milano non esiste' (la Repubblica, Luglio 19, 2010. http://tv.repubblica.it/edizione/milano/la-moratti-ad-annozero-la-mafia-a-milano-non-esiste/50700?video).
86. and Andrea Galli, 'Il prefetto: a Milano la mafia non esiste - Milano' (Annozero. Rai Due, Maggio 25, 2010. http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-6ee35904-a87f-4a5c-bd9b-2416251964c6.html?p=0).