Abstract
Extortion racketeering is a crime that blights the lives of everyone in societies where it takes hold. Whilst most European countries have some form of extortion racketeering, in most countries it is isolated to some ethnic communities. In Southern Italy and Sicily, extortion racketeering is still a feature of overall society. This paper attempts to look at the phenomenon from the angle of collectives, of resistance building through civic organisations such as Addiopizzo. For this investigation a computational model is presented to analyse the effect of team-reasoning on levels of resistance in systemic extortion rackets. An agent-based model is presented that implements the interaction of different kinds of decision-making of extortion victims with law enforcement deterrence. The results show that established extortion rackets are hard to undermine unless bottom-up civic engagement and law enforcement go hand in hand.
Highlights
Extortion is the demand for money using the threat of violence
The results focus on the levels of acquiescence to pay the pizzo over a range of reasoning and law enforcement contexts
This paper presented an agent-based model for the systematic exploration the undermining of established Mafia’s extortion racketeering
Summary
Extortion is the demand for money (or favours) using the threat of violence. An extortion racket is the continuous, regular and systematic extortion of several victims by a criminal or (more usually) a criminal organisation. Elsenbroich and Badham (2016) provides an ABM inspired by the game theoretic analysis of extortion rackets discussed in Smith and Varese (2001) This model shows the importance of implementing social aspects of extortion by comparing a decision-mechanism based only on an entrepreneur’s memory with a decision mechanism that takes into account what is happening in the neighbourhood of an entrepreneur. The model is implemented in NetLogo 5.0.1 (Wilensky (1999)) and is an extension of a basic model assessing the influence of neighbourhood effects on levels of resistance (Elsenbroich and Badham (2016)) This basic model demonstrates that extortion rackets can only become embedded in society if potential victims are able to observe (or otherwise learn about) implemented punishments. The bottom-up mechanisms are linked to the influence that civic organisations, such as Addiopizzo, might have on entrepreneur decision-making
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