The Criminal Careers of Italian Mafia Members

This chapter provides the first analyses of the criminal career of the Italian mafias members. The analysis is based on the unique Proton Mafia Member dataset, provided by the Italian Ministry of Justice, with information on all individuals who received a final conviction for mafia offences since the 1980s. The PMM includes information on more than 11 thousand individuals and 182 thousand offences. The study explores the career of mafia members following a three-level approach, analyzing the macro, meso, and micro dimensions of the criminal careers of the mafiosi. At the macro level, Italian mafias’ member show different types of criminal trajectories, with a significant portion of the sample exhibiting a late onset and late persistence pattern. At the meso level, the four main types of mafias (the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, and the Apulian mafias) report very similar traits although some distinctive patterns emerge. At the micro level, there are differences in the criminal career between early- and lately- recruited member, with the former showing higher frequency of violent, volume crime and the latter a more complex, white collar profile. A further exploration of the PMM data shows an escalation in both the number and the seriousness of crimes before joining the mafias, which subsequently stabilize afterwards.