To racketeer among neighbors: spatial features of criminal collaboration in the American Mafia

Is your neighbor your friend? Scan methods for spatial social network hotspot detection

“…These areas, such as Little Italy and East Harlem (also referred to as Upper East Side), are known sites of historic Mafia activities (Maas, 1969). Dyker Heights is home to the Profaci family, a Mafia family that has the most densely clustered member distribution (Andris et al, 2021). Most local connections in this area are ties between members of this family, including a few high‐degree members.…”

“…The low network density values in East Harlem indicate that despite the spatial clustering of nodes and higher-than-average connections in the neighborhood, Mafia members live near each other, but are disconnected. This may be due to three Mafia families (Genovese, Gambino, and Lucchese) co-locating in the neighborhood (Andris et al, 2021), who connect with distant family members instead of nearby nodes.…”

“…Hotspots in social networks can also be detected by calculating the sum of degrees as a scan statistic (Wang & Phoa, 2016) but this is typically conducted without a geographic context. A more recent study on social connections characterizes SSN hotspots as the percentage of neighbors who are also connected within walking distance, thus solely focusing on the short‐range ties (Andris et al, 2021). However, this study did not test how results might change with window size and definition such as K‐nearest neighbors.…”

Geographical Network Analysis

“… 2010 ; Andris et al . 2021 ), economic agglomerations (Van Meeteren et al . 2016 ), urban subcultures (Boy & Uitermark 2017 , 2020 ) and social movements (Van Haperen et al .…”