Criminals, partners, or enablers? Making sense of lawyers’ involvement into economic crimes by mafia members in Italy

• In Event: EUROC 10 Economic Crimes

Abstract

Criminological theory states that mafia groups require a high degree of human and social capital to expand into non-traditional areas (Catino, 2018; Sciarrone, 2021). If they cannot find these resources internally, mafia members turn to external actors who operate within the so-called "grey area" as a transmission chain between the legal and illegal worlds. These actors are often professionals, and namely lawyers. There are several studies on the involvement of lawyers in economic crime, particularly in money laundering (Benson, 2020; Levi, 2022), but very few studies have so far investigated how lawyers facilitate criminal infiltration by mafia members in Northern Italy, and specifically (a) what resources they provide to mafia members and how they contribute to the accumulation of human and social capital by mafia members (b) what exchanges and agreements they make with mafia members, and (c) how and to what extent they participate in the criminal decision-making. These issues will be addressed through a script-network analysis of a dataset comprising cases of criminal infiltration by mafia groups into legitimate businesses in Northern Italy involving lawyers. The results are relevant both for understanding the participation and facilitation of economic crime by professionals and for evidence-informed policy making.

Author

• Matteo Anastasio, Transcrime – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore