Beyond mafia-type organised crime: criminal infiltration in the legal economy
This short note is retained as an archive of an early formulation of a research question that later became central to my doctoral work: whether criminal infiltration in the legal economy can be understood adequately when research focuses primarily on mafia-type organisations.
Research on criminal infiltration has often started from organised crime groups and then examined how those groups enter or influence legitimate businesses. That approach has produced important evidence, particularly in settings where mafia-type organisations have a long and visible relationship with the legal economy. It also creates a risk, however: the organisation can become the unit through which the phenomenon itself is defined.
The legal economy may also be used by criminal actors who do not operate through stable, hierarchical or conventionally recognised organisations. Individuals, temporary networks and actors connected through specific illicit conduct can acquire companies, enter ownership structures, use professional intermediaries or influence business decisions without fitting neatly within a mafia-centred model.
This suggests separating two questions. The first is whether a firm, asset or transaction is connected to criminal conduct or criminal actors. The second is what kind of actor, network or organisation lies behind that connection. Treating the second question as a prerequisite for the first can exclude relevant forms of criminal participation before they are examined.
An actor-based perspective therefore broadens the empirical field. It asks how the characteristics and conduct of criminal actors relate to the companies they control or use, and whether different forms of criminality are associated with different ownership patterns, sectors, financial characteristics or modes of market participation.
The purpose is not to minimise the role of organised crime. It is to avoid assuming that criminal influence in the legal economy is exhausted by its most structured and visible manifestations. A broader framework makes it possible to compare mafia-type infiltration with other forms of criminal participation and to identify which mechanisms are shared and which are specific to particular actors or conduct.
This line of reasoning subsequently developed into my doctoral thesis, The Criminal Component of the Legal Economy: A Study of Patterns Based on Actors, and continues in the current systematic review of criminal infiltration in the legal economy.