ABSTRACT

The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were ‘known criminal associates’ and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities.

Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network’s proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units.

The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks.

摘要

美国黑手党是一个从事贩毒、暴力和其他非法活动的犯罪分子网络。在这里，我们分析了在美国联邦麻醉品局编制的 1960 年调查档案中发现的 680 名黑手党成员的历史空间社交网络 (SSN)。该档案包括“已知犯罪同伙”成员之间的联系，并且成员位于美国 15 个主要城市的已知家庭地址。

在确定网络对安全（分散）或效率（易于协调）的倾向的总体叙述下，我们提出了与犯罪组织、权力和协调策略相关的四个研究问题。我们发现黑手党网络分布为近邻和远距离关系的组合，在黑手党家族单位之间具有显着的空间聚类。

这里使用的方法不同于以前分别分析个体点模式位置和个体社交网络的方法。这里使用的研究技术有助于 GIScience 中的非平面网络分析方法的主体，并且可以推广到其他类型的空间嵌入社交网络。