Mercati, attività e impiego di capitale umano del clan dei Casalesi

Criminal networks build their strength on trusted relationships between members who determine the production of services such as protection (Skaperdas 2001) or privileged access to strategic resources, social (Sciarrone 2009) and economic (Arlacchi 1983). These activities are often conducted through the intermediation of subjects who offer their competencies and services in an “opaque” or irregular way. Such relationships are strategic for the purposes of criminal organizations and cannot be considered as simple networks of interpersonal relations between agents that operate in the “shadow” or in a criminal context (Ozgul-Erdem 2015). These are relationships that have peculiar characteristics that can not be underestimated or ignored when effective measures or policies of prevention and contraction need to be implemented. All this is closely related to peculiar resistance and adaptation capabilities, the “resilience”, that is the elasticity and adaptability of bodies, passions, systems, and even territories (Ferrara-Villani 2015). Criminal organisations are, in fact, considered to be their topological feature, an extreme and very interesting case for failure resilient networks, such as the so-called “cascading failures”. The paper analyses how criminal organisations belonging to the Casalesi clan use the violence in a “gentle” way for the creation of criminal networks to pursue illicit purposes through the direct or indirect management of economic activities aimed at maximizing their profits. In fact, while in other territories the internal contrast of the camorra clans is quite strong and durable causing many dead, in the Casalesi reign it seems dominating a quiet and the clan is often perceived as job-maker. The true strength of these organizations seems to be the strategic use of highly qualified human capital and the penetration in the economy and politics. This strategy weakens traditional contrast policies based on the repression of mafia phenomena. The paper aims to deepen the potential, operational advantages and limits of social network analysis and complex network analysis to identifying more effective and efficient public policies for combating the mafia phenomenon. In particular, it will try to verify if and to what extent the contrast strategies using human capital (i.e. the level of mutual trust and the precious wealth of knowledge, skills and technical skills of consultants and service providers, but often also only services to criminal organizations) could be used in conjunction with those based on social capital to reduce or neutralise the capacity for resistance and adaptation of criminal organisations. The study of these factors is crucial to the development of a valid index of resilience of criminal networks, but above all to designing new and more effective and efficient crime policies.