Transcrime agenda at the XXVI ESC Annual Conference

In contemporary capitalist economies, worker exploitation remains a persistent risk, exacerbated by increasingly deregulated and flexible labour markets. These practices are frequently embedded within global supply chains, where complex subcontracting and outsourcing networks obscure accountability and facilitate abuse. While current studies often focus on extreme manifestations such as human trafficking and forced labour, this narrow lens tends to overlook the “grey area” of the labour exploitation continuum. This area comprises a plethora of illicit practices that may fall below the legal threshold of trafficking but nonetheless involve the systematic violation of workers’ rights. This study explores the criminal schemes facilitating labour exploitation in Italy, focusing on how corporate supply chains enable and conceal these practices. Drawing on judicial case studies across key economic sectors – including logistics and fashion – the paper identifies a typology of exploitative schemes, exploring the integration of traditional modi operandi with sophisticated financial architectures. Specifically, the research examines the convergence of labour rights violations with tax fraud, false invoicing and the illicit supply of labour. Furthermore, the research investigates the risk factors of the involved firms and the multidimensional harms inflicted on workers, ranging from physical risks to the deprivation of personal liberty and future prospects. Drawing on insights from the EU-funded VANGUARD project (Grant Number 101121282), the findings contribute to filling a critical knowledge gap regarding the corporate role in exploitative ecosystems. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for developing effective policies and enforcement strategies to detect high-risk firms and prevent labour exploitation in vulnerable sectors.

Waste trafficking is an increasingly relevant form of transnational environmental crime, yet the global patterns through which illegal waste moves between countries remain insufficiently understood. Existing studies have relied on binary representations of global waste trafficking networks, which capture whether countries are connected through illegal waste flows but overlook the magnitude of these exchanges. Building on this limitation, this study asks: How does the structure of the global waste trafficking network change when considering not only the presence of connections between countries, but also their frequency and the volume of waste exchanged? Drawing on data from the Basel Convention National Reports (2016–2024), we develop three network representations: a binary network, a frequency-weighted network, and a composite weighted network combining adjusted frequency and volume. To address reporting imbalances, we introduce an Adjustment Reporting Score (ARS), applied at the case level. The analysis shows that incorporating weights provides a more differentiated representation of the network, highlighting variations in the relative importance of routes and countries not visible in binary representations. This study contributes by advancing network analysis in environmental crime research and by showing how incorporating flow intensity can reveal structural patterns of waste trafficking that remain hidden.

The cigarette market presents a unique case for examining the effects of regulation and of the interaction of legal and illegal products on a variably legal market. This paper, primarily focused on Europe, examines the cigarette regulation and its complex balancing of health, tax, and law enforcement objectives. The paper also delves into the typologies, size, and actors of the illicit cigarette market, providing a detailed analysis of its interaction with the legal market. The study highlights the significant regional variations and the complexities involved in the illegal cigarette trade, influenced by economic, geographic, and policy factors. By offering insights into the micro-dynamics of illicit markets, this study emphasizes the complexity of the illegal cigarette market and the need for nuanced policy interventions that consider the interconnectedness of legal and illegal segments.

Research on incel radicalisation has largely prioritised individual-level psychological explanations to account for why only a minority of incels escalate towards offline mass violence (Mooney, 2025; Aiolfi et al., 2024). While these approaches provide important insights, they insufficiently account for the relational and structural dynamics of online communities in which radicalisation unfolds. This PhD project integrates longitudinal social network analysis with computational text analysis to examine how structural position and social exposure shape radicalisation trajectories within online incel forums. Drawing on scraped thread-based forum data, this project aims to construct periodic exposure networks in which directed, weighted ties represent repeated posting within others’ threads. Radicalisation will be operationalised as a multidimensional, non-linear process. Posts will be coded for the presence of dehumanisation, glorification of attackers, explicit violence endorsement, and incel-specific terminology. Following manual annotation and supervised machine learning classification, these features will be aggregated at the user-level. Additionally, posts will be analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Boyd et al., 2022) and the Grievance Dictionary (van der Vegt et al., 2021), with principal component analysis generating baseline affective dimensions. The project will seek to answer: (1) How do users’ structural positions within the forum network shape the temporal development of radicalisation at the individual level? (2) Does exposure to radicalised peers predict subsequent radicalisation, controlling for users’ structural position and activity levels? (3) Do baseline affective profiles condition the effect of social exposure on radicalisation trajectories? And 4) Are distinct radicalisation features differentially associated with structural position and social exposure over time? Longitudinal logistic, mixed-effects, and event-history models will be employed.

How are multiple social ties layered within large criminal organizations, and what does this reveal about collaboration and cohesion? Research on organized crime has long shown that criminal cooperation is embedded in kinship, friendship, and repeated interaction, yet multiplexity—the overlap of different tie types within the same dyads and actors—remains underexplored as an organizational feature in its own right. This paper examines the patterns and structural role of multiplex ties in the Sinaloa Cartel. The analysis draws on official transcripts from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera’s U.S. federal trial and reconstructs a multiplex network of 188 actors connected through kinship, friendship, compadre relations, meetings, and criminal collaboration. Building on prior work that examined how different ties predict collaboration, this study shifts the focus to multiplexity as a structural property. It combines descriptive multiplex measures, interlayer overlap, actor-level multiplex profiles, and analyses of core-periphery structure and cohesive subgroups. Dyadic permutation-based models also assess whether higher multiplexity is associated with a greater likelihood of criminal collaboration. Preliminary findings suggest that multiplexity is not widespread across the network but concentrated in specific segments, especially around structurally central actors. Friendship and meeting ties appear to form the most consequential multiplex bundles, while kinship often overlaps with shared organizational affiliation. These results indicate that multiplexity functions as an organizational mechanism that thickens trust, concentrates cohesion, and helps sustain coordination in a large illicit network. The paper contributes to organized crime research by moving beyond the question of which ties predict collaboration and instead showing how layered ties structure trust, differentiation, and resilience within a major drug trafficking organization.

Corruption is frequently examined through a narrow lens focused on illicit exchanges involving money, favours, or other tangible benefits. This study adopts a broader perspective, treating corruption as an umbrella concept that also encompasses structural conditions capable of generating risk without necessarily involving illegal acts. Two such conditions are examined: conflict of interest and undue influence. Conflict of interest is operationalised as overlaps between politically exposed persons (PEPs) and corporate ownership, while undue influence is captured through foreign ownership originating from selected jurisdictions of interest. By shifting attention from detected offences to underlying structural configurations, the study assesses how patterns of political and foreign ownership may signal corruption risk. The analysis relies on a quantitative, indicator-based approach using firm-level ownership data for 2023. Information is drawn primarily from Orbis, complemented by LexisNexis data to identify PEPs and ownership structures. Firms are flagged as potentially exposed to conflict of interest when linked to at least one PEP, and to undue influence when ownership originates from predefined foreign jurisdictions. Indicators are aggregated across EU Member States and disaggregated by NUTS regions and NACE sectors, allowing spatial and sectoral mapping of structural vulnerabilities. Preliminary findings suggest that PEP-linked ownership is relatively uncommon but concentrated in specific sectors and territories. Higher exposure appears in regulated and politically sensitive sectors, including gambling, energy, and finance, particularly in economically central regions. These patterns suggest clustering rather than random distribution. Overall, the study demonstrates how conflict of interest and undue influence can be measured as structural risk conditions, offering scalable indicators for monitoring corruption vulnerabilities and informing EU Rule of Law policy.

This study advances an environmental criminology perspective on the security of places of worship by moving beyond the dominant focus on extremism and hate crime. Religious sites are considered as everyday activity nodes where routine opportunity structures shape exposure to non-ideological offences. Drawing on situational crime prevention and Routine Activity Theory, the analysis examines how patterns of guardianship, accessibility, and spatial organisation influence victimisation risks. Empirically, the study combines a media-based dataset of about 1000 incidents affecting places of worship in Italy (2020–2025) with qualitative insights from religious leaders, practitioners, and public authorities involved in the EU-funded PARTESS-COM project. Findings indicate that most incidents are opportunistic and low-skill, with theft and vandalism predominating. These events cluster around recurring situational vulnerabilities, including limited supervision, ambiguous access control, and weak territorial definition. The study highlights the potential of situational and community-based prevention measures as scalable, cost-effective strategies.

In recent years, the increasing volume of foreign investors, as well as concerns related to multi-property ownership, conflict of interests and collusion between football clubs and sponsors, or with footballers’ agents, have called for a better understanding of who is behind football clubs. Despite these alerts, the empirical knowledge on the ownership of European football clubs remains weak. Few – merely descriptive – studies exist, mainly focused on English and Dutch football. This paper investigates 265 clubs enrolled in the top four Italian calcio leagues (Serie A, B, C and D) in order to (i) trace beneficial owners or ultimate beneficiaries of Italian clubs, (ii) identify indicators of opacity and anomalies in ownership structures, (iii) examine whether ownership opacity is correlated with cases of bankruptcies, point deductions, league exclusions, and criminal events. The study sheds light on the degree of foreign exposure of Italian football, especially in terms of owners from high-risk jurisdictions in the lower divisions. The results also show that the likelihood of point deductions or exclusion from the league is higher for those clubs involving investment funds or corporate vehicles that do not allow for the identification of beneficial owners, as well as for those with higher turnover in ownership and management. The paper eventually suggests policy recommendations on how to increase the transparency in football and how to better monitor movements of fraudulent investors from one club (or country) to another.

This study examines violence as a mechanism of informal governance in mafia-controlled drug markets in Italy between 2004 and 2024. Drug markets operate under conditions of secrecy, high uncertainty, and the absence of enforceable contracts, making them especially dependent on extra-legal forms of regulation. Drawing on an original dataset of mafia-related homicides, the paper reconceptualises violence not as a set of discrete categories but as configurations of co-occurring governance logics. In particular, it focuses on the intersection between market enforcement, organisational control, and two symbolic dimensions: demonstrative signalling and honour-code dynamics. These dimensions are especially salient in drug markets, where violence must simultaneously regulate transactions, deter opportunism, and communicate credible threats in environments characterised by fluid competition and low trust. Methodologically, the study employs Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) combined with clustering techniques to identify recurrent patterns in how different forms of violence co-occur. The findings show that drug-related homicides rarely serve a single function; rather, they combine enforcement, communication, and internal discipline in distinct configurations that vary across contexts and organisations. By uncovering these patterns, the study advances our understanding of how mafias stabilise and govern drug markets through the strategic and multidimensional use of violence.

The establishment of cooperative relationships with political actors is crucial for organised criminal groups that seek to expand their influence beyond the underworld. While the study of the mafia-politics relationship in Southern Italy has attracted significant attention, limited research has examined why territorial clustering persists even within regions traditionally associated with the presence of criminal organisations, and how these links affect local communities. This study focuses on organised crime infiltration in local politics in Southern Italian municipalities. First, it examines whether social and political dynamics of local communities are associated with infiltration in local politics. Second, it analyses the effects of infiltration on local communities once it becomes publicly known—namely, when the city council is dissolved by national authorities. The findings suggest that, net of stable territorial differences in institutional contexts, the likelihood of infiltration is associated with characteristics indicative of low social cohesion, disadvantaged socioeconomic conditions, but also greater homogeneity among residents, lending support to the hypothesis that organised crime can benefit from forms of locally embedded social capital. Finally, the analysis of the social effects of intervention by national authorities suggests potentially negative consequences for local communities, with outmigration increasing in the year following the dissolution of the city council. Overall, the results highlight an association between the social structure of local communities and organised crime infiltration, suggesting that replacing corrupt members of the political establishment alone is unlikely to be sufficient to promote legality in the long run.

Criminal networks operate under constant threat of disruption from law enforcement, making resilience a key concept for understanding their persistence and adaptive capacity. While prior research on case studies has largely relied on descriptive network measures, less attention has been devoted to the generative mechanisms underlying structural change over time. This study addresses this gap by examining the evolution of a Camorra clan involved in drug trafficking, employing Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) and Temporal ERGMs (TERGMs) to capture both network structure and dynamics across multiple periods surrounding a major police intervention. ERGMs are used to assess how individual attributes and functional roles shape tie formation within each period, whereas TERGMs model the persistence, dissolution, and emergence of ties between periods. This combined approach enables a systematic analysis of both stability and transformation in the organization’s relational structure. The results indicate that the network is primarily organized around functional roles, particularly drug-related activities, while managerial cohesion appears weaker and less stable. Prior to the intervention, the network exhibits relative structural stability. Following the intervention, however, the organization undergoes a marked transformation, characterized by the dissolution of pre-existing ties and the rapid formation of new connections, especially among operative actors. Overall, the findings suggest that resilience in criminal networks does not necessarily depend on structural continuity, but may instead emerge through processes of collapse and reconfiguration centered on core operational functions.

This study investigates the interdependence between criminal actors and relational hyperevents, and different types of events in an Italian mafia network. Relational hyperevents, time-stamped/time-ordered interactions involving any number of actors, offer a detailed view of network dynamics. We distinguish between communication (meetings and phone calls) and co-offending (commission of a crime). We argue that communication and co-offending are mutually constitutive: communication reflects the social organisation of crime, while co-offending represents its outcome.To examine this interdependence, we examine three multiplex relational mechanisms: triadic closure, interaction repetition, and interaction accumulation, alongside their uniplex counterparts. We expect communication events to temporally precede co-offending events. We also test the effect of age, leadership, group membership, and kinship.We use court records from Italian mafia investigation Infinito. Infinito documents the ‘Ndrangheta’s drug-trafficking and territorial expansion in Lombardy, comprising 346 actors and 1,131 events. We apply Relational Hyperevent Models (RHEM), which conceptualise polyadic interactions as hyperedges in a hypergraph. Using the eventnet software package, we generate statistics operationalising relational mechanisms and generate non-events. We then estimate parameters using Cox proportional hazards model, identifying what mechanisms make future events more or less likely. Descriptive results indicate that the network is held together primarily by higher-order in-person meeting events, with phone calls being more diffuse and co-offending being highly fragmented and clustered, frequently occurring as single-actor crimes. Ignoring the relational hyperevent nature of the data would thus lead to substantial information loss. Our RHEM analysis indicate that while communication tends to precede co-offending in certain mechanisms, there are also significant tendencies in the reverse direction. Overall, interaction repetition and accumulation have expected effects, while triadic closure displays only some statistically significant effects, contradicting existing network research. Additionally, age- and leadership-based activity and homophily are significant for both event types together with effects of kinship and group affiliation.

This paper presents an ongoing PhD research project on juvenile delinquency among different generations of immigrant youth, with a specific focus on the interplay between individual, social, and cultural factors. While existing criminological literature has largely examined socio-economic disadvantage, family environment, and peer influence, cultural dimensions remain comparatively underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analysing the role of ethnic and religious identity, acculturation stress, acculturation dissonance, and perceived discrimination in shaping pathways to delinquent behaviour across generations of immigrant youth.The project adopts a generational perspective to explore whether the factors associated with juvenile delinquency remain stable or vary between first-, second-, and later-generation immigrant youth. Its theoretical framework combines General Strain Theory, Segmented Assimilation Theory, Social Control Theory, and Social Learning Theory in order to capture the multiple mechanisms through which vulnerability and resilience may develop. In doing so, the study aims to connect established criminological explanations with migration-related and cultural processes. Methodologically, the research employs a school-base self-report delinquency survey. This presentation will focus in particular on the quantitative component of the project. It will outline the rationale, structure, and main dimensions of a school-based survey designed to measure self-reported delinquency alongside individual characteristics, family and school bonds, peer dynamics, and culturally specific experiences. The paper will also discuss the relevance of examining these issues in Italy, a context that remains relatively underexplored in the international literature. By presenting the conceptual and methodological foundations of the project, this paper seeks to contribute to current debates on immigration and delinquency by offering a culturally informed and intergenerational perspective.

Criminal infiltration into the legal economy is a central concern in organised crime research. By gaining control over otherwise legal enterprises, criminal actors can access public procurement contracts, European and national subsidisation schemes, and facilitates the laundering of illicit proceeds through lawful economic channels. This creates a situation where public administrations, who are often in need of soliciting private sector services, run the risk of empowering local crime syndicates and, are therefore, a critical site of prevention. In the Italian legal framework, public administrations are assigned a specific role in anti-money laundering. Yet little is known about whether, and to what extent, such obligations are actually implemented at the local level. We beg the question, by submitting a structured questionnaire to a representative sample of Italian municipalities through requests filed under accesso civico generalizzato (a citizen transparency guarantee). The questionnaire gathers information on the existence of anti-money laundering-related procedures, internal reporting arrangements, organisational safeguards, staff training, and other measures aimed at detecting suspicious transactions and mitigating the risk of criminal infiltration. The responses are examined through qualitative and comparative analysis in order to identify patterns of implementation, variation, and institutional weakness across municipalities. In doing so, this research, conducted within the framework of ISF project DATACROS III, contributes to the literature on organised crime prevention, public-sector integrity, and anti-money laundering governance by shifting attention from formal legal obligations to their concrete administrative uptake.

Organised crime infiltration risk (OCIR) into legitimate businesses exists as a pressing concern globally. Across Europe, in particular, the growing influence of foreign criminal networks with transnational links has intensified concerns about cross-border illicit flows, rising violence, and the erosion of public safety and governance. Despite increased policy attention, systematic cross-national assessments of the conditions that render countries vulnerable to infiltration remain limited. Within the context of the project EXTRA, funded by the European Commission, this paper examines OCIR on a global scale by assessing infiltration risk as a function of multiple country-level vulnerabilities (economic and financial, regulatory, and socio-political in nature). Adopting a quantitative comparative design, the study analyses a large sample of countries using cross-national indicators primarily sourced from third-party data providers. Multivariate statistical modelling is employed to estimate the relative contribution of these vulnerabilities to variations in OCIR across countries. The analysis is expected to identify distinct vulnerability profiles associated with higher levels of infiltration risk and to reveal significant cross-country variation. By advancing a systematic measurement framework, the study contributes to comparative criminology and provides an empirical basis for prioritising prevention strategies, allocating resources, and monitoring trends over time.

Juvenile crime has recently emerged in the Italian public debate as a growing and alarming issue. This perception has been largely driven by an increase in reported cases involving minors, particularly violent offenses, and by growing references to the presence of juvenile gangs. This paper aims to critically assess this narrative. First, the study analyzes the historical evolution of official statistics to determine whether current trends can legitimately be interpreted as a juvenile crime “emergency”. Second, it presents the results of an in-depth analysis of a sample of case files from two cohorts of juvenile offenders across two periods: 2015–2016 and 2022–2023. By examining socio-demographic characteristics and contextual factors, the study identifies both persistent and evolving patterns in the profiles of minors involved in criminal behavior. The findings provide insights into recent developments in juvenile delinquency in Italy and contribute to a broader discussion of the phenomenon at both national and international levels.

Chinese financial crime in Italy is often discussed through local case studies or broad references to transnational illicit flows. Much less attention has been paid to its territorial distribution across Italy and to whether the observed emergence of cases across provinces is associated with local demographic, economic, and commercial conditions. This paper addresses that gap through an original dataset of about 350 Chinese financial crime cases identified in Italy between 2010 and 2025, reconstructed through news scraping, LexisNexis, NewsAPI, and manual case consolidation. The paper combines a social embeddedness perspective with a territorial opportunity approach. Provincial case counts are interpreted not as a direct measure of criminal prevalence, but as an indicator of the observed territorial emergence of the phenomenon. Each case is coded for territorial footprint, financial scale, and mechanism profile, including false invoicing, shell companies, customs and VAT fraud, under- and over-invoicing, money transfer, underground banking, and cross-border financial arrangements. Case-level data are matched with provincial information on Chinese resident populations and socio-economic indicators from ISTAT, and on Chinese business presence from ORBIS. The paper addresses two questions. First, do provinces with stronger Chinese resident presence and specific socio-economic characteristics show higher observed intensity of Chinese financial crime cases? Second, is the gradual expansion of detectable Chinese financial crime into provinces initially absent or weakly represented associated with growth in Chinese-registered firms relative to the total provincial business base? The paper therefore assesses whether the observed spread of Chinese financial crime follows the broader demographic and economic expansion of Chinese presence across Italy, or whether no clear association emerges.

Predicting and mitigating gun violence remains a critical challenge for European public safety. The drivers underlying illicit trafficking and the criminal use of firearms are inherently dynamic, varying significantly across both time and space. This study introduces an innovative methodological framework designed to estimate European geographic zones with a higher likelihood of firearm-related incidents. To achieve this, the study developed a composite risk indicator composed of distinct dimensions, which together provide a multifaceted assessment of risk. This disaggregated structure enables users to monitor specific contributing factors more closely and gain a more nuanced understanding of the local context. The proposed approach allows obtaining an updated intelligence picture of the phenomenon, enhancing the identification of new traffic trends and the definition of refined risk profiles. It is also instrumental in informing decision-making, serving as a powerful tool to proactively address firearms trafficking. Ultimately, this research bridges the gap between theoretical modelling and operational strategy, guiding responses to a growing transnational challenge.

The infiltration of legitimate firms by organized crime reflects a dynamic process of criminal embeddedness within the legal economy. Existing research has largely focused on the hybrid nature of criminal firms, emphasizing their position in the grey area between legality and illegality, while paying limited attention to their structural heterogeneity and organizational dynamics. This study examines whether criminal firms cluster into distinct opportunity configurations and whether their ownership and internal structures exhibit recurrent patterns over time. Building on a unique dataset of Italian firms directly and indirectly connected to organized crime, along with ownership and financial information, the study employs unsupervised machine learning techniques to uncover latent organizational configurations. By moving beyond case-based approaches, the study contributes to a more systematic understanding of how organized crime operates through firms and adapts within the legal economy.

Interactions between political and economic actors often take place within a “grey area” between legality and illegality. Practices such as personal connections (PCs) and revolving doors (RDs) create relational channels through which private stakeholders may gain access to public decision-making processes without necessarily breaching formal legal provisions. Nevertheless, these practices increase the risk of corrupt behaviour and the exploitation of public resources for private interests. While PCs and RDs are widely discussed from a theoretical perspective in studies of political corruption, empirical research remains limited. As part of the Horizon Europe RESPOND project, this paper addresses this gap by developing a novel empirical framework to map the territorial embeddedness of the relationship between political actors and private economic interests. In particular, using spatial statistical models, the study examines the territorial distribution of more than 200,000 firms connected to local political administrators (LPAs) in Italy, as well as the contextual conditions associated with higher concentrations of these ties. It also investigates whether firms linked to LPAs differ structurally—in terms of size and performance—from firms without political connections.

Research on Chinese prostitution in Europe has often oscillated between trafficking narratives and enclave explanations. In Italy, however, Chinese-run massage parlours appear increasingly embedded in retail and real estate markets, raising a different question: whether their persistence depends not only on co-ethnic networks, but also on enabling actors. Situated within the Next-IJ focus on using open and journalistic sources to detect hidden illicit economies, this paper examines Chinese-linked massage parlours in Milan as hybrid business fronts combining a commercial appearance with suspected indoor sexual services. The study employs a mixed observational design combining open-source intelligence, journalism-derived leads, advertising data collection, Google Maps and Street View verification, business register data, and real estate ownership information. A census of over 100 addresses was compiled from sex-advertising platforms, massage directories, Google Maps, Telegram channels, and other open sources, then linked to registered firms in relevant personal-services sectors. The analysis compares suspicious venues with Chinese-branded tuina businesses lacking open-source indicators of sexual services. It addresses three questions: whether suspected venues display indicators consistent with sexual services, including tinted windows, unusual opening hours, and the absence of a credible website; whether they show a higher prevalence of non-Chinese individuals in governance roles; and whether the premises they use reveal dependence on non-Chinese real estate owners. Preliminary findings suggest that the Milan case is better understood as an embedded market than as a closed ethnic enclave. Suspected venues appear to rely on commercial camouflage and infrastructural relations extending beyond the Chinese community, especially through dependence on the real estate market. The paper contributes to debates on organised crime, sex markets, and hidden urban economies, while showing how open, journalistic, and administrative sources can support the detection of illicit business fronts. It is presented within the framework of the Next-IJ project, co-funded by the European Union.