Predicting Organized Crime Leaders

In the last decade, the use of social network analysis in the study of organized crime has seen significant developments. Since the beginning of the 2000s, academic interest in this specific field has strongly increased and contributed to opening new research directions in the study of criminal organizations (e.g. Natarajan 2006; Morselli, Giguère, and Petit 2007; Malm, Bichler, and Van De Walle 2009; Bouchard and Nguyen 2010; Bright, Hughes, and Chalmers 2012; Varese 2012; Calderoni 2012; Mancuso 2013). Among the most important contribu-tions of these studies is the demonstrated importance of brokers within criminal organizations. Brokers are individuals that are capable of linking people, information and other resources. Brokering skills are extremely important for individuals to be successful in a number illegal markets and activities (Burt 1992; Morselli 2005; Morselli 2009a; Morselli et al. 2013). In criminal networks, brokers are frequently identified through betweenness centrality, a measure capturing how often an individual is positioned between two other nodes (Morselli 2009a, 39). These subjects are often in the position to better exploit opportunities for a suc-cessful criminal career (e.g., Morselli 2005).