Estimating proceeds of crime and mafia revenues in Italy

This special issue of Global Crime is devoted to estimation of the proceeds of crime and mafia revenues in Italy. The articles in this special issue have been inspired by a study conducted by Transcrime for the Italian Ministry of Interior, which analysed the investments in the legal economy of the Italian mafias.11. Transcrime, Progetto PON Sicurezza 2007–2013. View all notes The study estimated the revenues from nine criminal activities: sexual exploitation of women, illicit firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, counterfeiting, the illicit cigarette trade, illicit gambling, illicit waste disposal, loan sharking and extortion racketeering. For this special issue, each estimation was revised and updated. Five of the following articles (Mancuso on sexual exploitation, Giommoni on drugs, Calderoni on illicit cigarettes, Lisciandra on extortion racketeering and Scaglione on loan sharking) focus on criminal activities for which the literature provided some previous attempts of estimation. The article by Calderoni, Favarin, Garofalo and Sarno presents exploratory estimations for counterfeiting, illicit waste trafficking, illegal gaming machines and illicit firearm trade. These estimations are exploratory because of the lack of previous experiences in the literature. The last article by Calderoni explores a possible methodology to attribute a share of the criminal revenues to the Italian mafias.