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In this paper, we provide an estimate of the impact of money laundering on residential house market prices. The housing market is commonly exploited by criminal organizations to clean illegal profits. The increase in demand due to money laundering contrasts the negative externality of crime on house prices, which has been investigated by a large literature. We build a new dataset on residential house prices at the provincial level in Italy over the period 2005–2012, obtaining a sample of 672 observations. We then estimate a hedonic equilibrium price model, controlling for proxies both for illegal profits derived from "entrepreneurial" crimes (drug dealing, receiving stolen goods, prostitution) and for violent crimes (extortions), together with traditional market drivers. Adding to the evidence from the traditional literature, which remarks the negative impact of crime on house prices, our findings suggest that money laundering from "entrepreneurial" crimes creates an upward distortion in the housing market prices. The impact is stronger where retail markets for illicit trades are richer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on ethnographic research, outlines the relationships between the formal economy and the illicit drugs economy in three Italian cities. The authors argue that the economy of illicit drugs is extremely flexible, as it is capable of adapting to the legal economy in diverse contexts. They examine the way in which the heroin business intermingles with legal business in Naples, where the features of a so-called hidden economy prevail. They also analyse how the economy of illict drugs has entered areas, like Verona, characterized by the presence of healthy, competitive, mid-range industries. Here, the absence of traditional organized crime is compensated for by efficient licit firms. Finally, they describe how the heroin economy has found ways of penetrating the context of Turin, which is typified by the prevalence of monopolistic firms. The connections unravelled in the present paper, albeit in a tentative manner, are worth considering as pointers to new theoretical and empirical knowledge about heroin use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a time‐interaction point process where the occurrence of an event can increase (self‐excitement) or reduce (self‐correction) the probability of future events. Self‐excitement and self‐correction are allowed to be triggered by the same event, at different timescales; other effects such as those of covariates, unobserved heterogeneity, and temporal dependence are also allowed in the model. We focus on capture‐recapture data, as our work is motivated by an original example about the estimation of the total number of drug dealers in Italy. To do so, we derive a conditional likelihood formulation where only subjects with at least one capture are involved in the inference process. The result is a novel and flexible continuous‐time population size estimator. A simulation study and the analysis of our motivating example illustrate the validity of our approach in several scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple layers of dealers connect international drug traffickers to users. The fundamental activity of these dealers is buying from higher-level dealers and re-selling in smaller quantities at the next lower market level. Each instance of this can be viewed as completing a drug dealing "cycle". This paper introduces an approach for combining isolated accounts of such cycles into a coherent model of the structure, span, and profitability of the various layers of the domestic supply chain for illegal drugs. The approach is illustrated by synthesizing data from interviews with 116 incarcerated dealers to elucidate the structure and operation of distribution networks for cocaine and heroin in Italy and Slovenia. Inmates' descriptions of cycles in the Italian cocaine market suggest fairly orderly networks, with reasonably well-defined market levels. The Italian heroin market appears to have more "level-jumpers" who skip a market level by making a larger number of sales per cycle, with each sale being of a considerably smaller weight. Slovenian data are sparser, but broadly consistent. Incorporating prices allows calculation of how much of the revenue from retail sales is retained by dealers at each market level. In the Italian cocaine market, both retail sellers and the international supply chain outside of Italy each appear to receive about 30-40% of what users spend, with the remaining 30% going to higher-level dealers operating in Italy (roughly 10% to those at the multi-kilo level and 20% to lower level wholesale dealers). Factoring in cycle frequencies permits rough estimation of the number of organizations at each market level per billion euros in retail sales, and of annual net revenues for organizations at each level. These analyses provide an approach to gaining insight into the structure and operation of the supply chain for illegal drugs. They also illustrate the value of two new graphical tools for describing illicit drug supply chains and hint at possible biases in how respondents describe their drug dealing activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A growing body of literature aims to improve understanding of the operations of drug trafficking markets through conducting interviews with dealers and traffickers. Insight into how these individuals conduct business can provide evidence to inform the efforts by policy makers, law enforcement and practitioners to disrupt illicit markets. This paper aims to make a contribution to this evidence base by extending the number of European countries in which interviews have been conducted with incarcerated drug dealers and traffickers.Methods: It draws on interviews with 135 men convicted of offences related to the distribution or sale of heroin or cocaine and imprisoned in Italy, Slovenia and Germany. The research was conducted as part of the Reframing Addictions Project (ALICE-RAP) funded by the European Commission. The sample was diverse. It included a range of nationalities and some individuals who were members of organised crime groups. The majority of the interviewees were dealers who sold at the retail and street level, but there were some who were importers and wholesalers.Findings: Most dealers in each of the three countries reported having more than one regular supplier, and were able to respond to periods of over and under supply without losing customers. Supply arrangements varied in terms of frequency and quantities bought. Dealers engaged in repeated transactions and their relationships with customers were based on trust and reputation. Dealers aimed to sell to regular customers and to provide drugs of good quality. While dealers sought to maximise their profits by cutting drugs with cutting agents, the quality of drugs that they sold could affect their reputation and thus their profits and position in the market. Lastly, while there are some significant differences in the approach between those involved in organised crime groups and those who are not, and between street dealers and those operating at higher levels of the market, there were striking similarities in terms of the day-to-day operational concerns and modes of relationship management.Conclusions: Interviewees' arrangements for securing supplies of drugs provide support to the notion that drug markets are resilient and flexible. Our findings correspond with other empirical research in relation to the centrality of trust in the practical operation of supply and sale of drugs. The research highlights some differences, but important similarities between dealers who were part of organised crime groups and those who were not; dealers all faced some common challenges and adopted some common responses to these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the development and organization of the illegal drugs market in Italy. The first three sections of the paper reconstruct the evolution of drug use since the 1960s and discuss the key characteristics of illegal drug users, providing some estimates on their real number. The last three sections focus on the illegal drugs supply, identifying trends and constraints affecting the drug trade in Italy and the rest of Europe and assessing the involvement of southern Italian mafia associations in drug trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a methodology for estimating the hidden criminal population working in markets of drug trafficking, prostitution exploitation and smuggling in Italy during the period 2006-2014. These estimates represent the first step of a wide procedure that has the final objective of measuring the economic flows of illegal transactions in national accounts. We exploit administrative registers coming from the Ministry of Justice, and consider these registers as lists of potential criminals. Unique codes for denounced criminals are not available, limiting so far its exploitation at micro level. This drawback has been overcome in this work by proposing an adjustment of the Zelterman estimator that accounts for the potential linkage errors caused by the lack of exact unique identifiers in the dataset. We obtain yearly estimates of the population size of criminals including also the unknown population, for the crimes of drug trafficking, prostitution exploitation and smuggling during the period 2006-2014.4 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 multiple correspondence analysis identifies the most important associations among mafias, activities, and countries. The results show that the mafias concentrate in a few countries; drug trafficking is the most frequent activity, whereas money laundering appears less important than expected; a stable mafia presence is reported in a few developed countries (mainly Germany, Canada, Australia, and the United States). The mafias show significant differences: the ’Ndrangheta tends to establish structured groups abroad, whereas the other mafias mainly participate in illicit trades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdependent relations and cooperation between criminal groups are found to be recurrent when studying illegal market activities specifically and organized crime generally. However, there is little systematic research into the level and characterization of how criminal groups co-offend with one another. Based on a case-study approach, this article examines structural co-offending patterns between differently ethnic-based criminal groups involved in an illegal drug distribution network targeted during a law-enforcement operation in Italy. Data was extracted from electronic and surveillance transcripts obtained from court documents, and analyzed using social network analysis (SNA) techniques. The results provide an insight into the structure and organizational features of group co-offending networks. They also offer an investigation into ethnicity within between-group criminal activity in Italy's illegal drug trade. Implications for crime control strategies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 of women, illicit firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, counterfeiting, the illicit cigarette trade, illicit gambling, illicit waste disposal, loan sharking, and extortion racketeering) by region and type of mafia (Cosa Nostra, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, Apulian mafias, and other mafias). The results estimate yearly mafia proceeds at approximately €10.7 bn (0.7% of the Italian GDP), discussing the impact on the regional and national economies and the differences among the types of mafias as to their geographical sources of revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses Italian and foreign organized crime involved in the drug market from two perspectives. The first, called “criminal succession”, assumes that the great presence of foreign criminal groups into this illegal market would represent a menace to the traditional hegemony exercised by Mafia-type associations in Italy. From a different perspective, defined as “functional specialisation”, the involvement of foreign criminal groups in the drug market could also be seen in terms of criminal “labour force” tending to follow the same mechanisms occurring in the general market at large, where immigrants fill low-paying jobs not requested by the local population. Through the analysis of data provided by the Italian Central Antidrug Bureau and recent court records the article tests these two perspectives. In particular, the in-depth analysis of three case studies from northern, central and southern Italy – i.e. Milan, Florence and Naples – has allowed us to identify the main changes that occurred in the drug market since the early 1990s. In effect, in Milan and Florence, we register the emergence of foreign criminal actors in the high- and medium-level positions of the local drug trade, while in Naples, where Camorra clans hold very strong positions, it leaves small areas of autonomy to foreign criminal groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]