Types of organised crime in Italy. The multifaceted spectrum of Italian criminal associations and their different attitudes in the financial crisis and in the use of Internet technologies

•We differentiate four different types of organised crime in Italy.•The four types adapt to different social opportunity structures.•The four types react differently to the use of the Internet.•The four types react differently to the financial crisis.•These types of OC facilitate comparative research.

This paper discusses the opportunity to differentiate four different criminological types of organised crime in Italy by drawing on a subset of case studies and interviews to law enforcement officers and experts collected for two on-going research projects. We hypothesise that, since these types exploit different social opportunity structures for their criminal activities, they have different capacities of adaptation and react differently when confronted with different kinds of innovations and changes. We test these four types against two significant phenomena that have been deeply impacting Italian society, among others, recently: the commercialization of the Internet and the economic and financial crisis that has hit Europe since late 2008. We conclude that these types offer a valid help to guide our understanding of what organised crime is today in Italy, as well as to assess the capacity of the existing legal framework to properly face all them. These criminological types could also serve as lenses to filter the different experiences of organised crime in other European countries, thus facilitating comparative research.