Human and social capital strategies for Mafia network disruption

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an interdisciplinary science that focuses on discovering the patterns of individuals interactions. In particular, practitioners have used SNA to describe and analyze criminal networks to highlight subgroups, key actors, strengths and weaknesses in order to generate disruption interventions and crime prevention systems. In this paper, the effectiveness of a total of seven disruption strategies for two real Mafia networks is investigated adopting SNA tools. Three interventions targeting actors with a high level of social capital and three interventions targeting those with a high human capital are put to the test and compared between each other and with random node removal. Human and social capital approaches were also applied on the Barabási-Albert models which are the one which better represent criminal networks. Simulations showed that actor removal based on social capital proved to be the most effective strategy, by leading to the total disruption of the criminal network in the least number of steps. The removal of a specific figure of a Mafia family such as the Caporegime seemed also promising in the network disruption.