Social Network Analysis of Sicilian Mafia Interconnections

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the study of Sicilian Mafia organizations through Social Network Analysis. We analyse datasets reflecting two different Mafia Families, based on examinations of digital trails and judicial documents, respectively. The first dataset includes the phone calls logs among suspected individuals. The second one is based on police traces of meeting that have taken place among different types of criminals. Our breakthrough is twofold. First in the method followed to generate these new datasets. Second, in the method used to carry out a quantitative phenomena investigation that are hard to evaluate. Our networks are weighted ones, with each weight catching the frequency of interactions between criminals. Therefore, our analysis focuses on weight and shortest paths distributions in both networks. We identify new types of unusual interactions in the Mafia networks, leading to substantial differences between Mafia networks and other types of criminal or terrorist networks.