Are bosses brokers? A network approach to leadership in organized crime

Although research has been conducted on leaders of various types of organizations, there are concerns that such research cannot be generalized to organized crime groups. Using data provided by the Criminal Intelligence Service of Alberta, the current study adopts a social network approach to analyzing leadership in organized crime in Alberta, Canada. More specifically, it looks at whether leadership status can be used to predict centrality. Understanding the network centrality of leaders can help shed light on what leaders do, how they behave, and who they talk to, which in turn allows law enforcement to more effectively plan and assess the appropriateness of intervention strategies against organized crime groups. While past studies have used centrality measures to predict leadership, I argue that centrality comes with the territory of being a leader. Results indicated that leadership status was a significant positive predictor of both degree centrality and betweenness centrality.