Mitch Macdonald successfully defends his PhD thesis

Congratulations to Mitch Macdonald on the successful defence of his PhD thesis "Folk theory in organized crime”.

Abstract

A number of grand narratives characterize organized crime in popular culture. The most common of which is that criminal organizations “on paper” resemble the formal corporate hierarchy of large multinational corporations. Another is that criminal networks resemble intricate, messy webs of connections that consist of layers upon layers of different types of relationships. A third is the classic “rise and fall” narrative that describes the life-course trajectories of 1950s mobsters, many of whom came-of-age during the prohibition era. For each grand narrative, however, there is a counter-narrative. First, criminal organizations resemble informal criminal networks, not the formal corporate hierarchy of big business. Second, criminal networks, for the most part, consist of unidimensional relationships, and not different types of relations. Third, criminal trajectories in organized crime do not persist throughout the entire life-course, but only for a couple of decades.

The sharp contrast of the grand narratives in comparison to their counter-narratives leaves many questions. Is the formal hierarchy of the mafia independent of the informal criminal networks that emerge outside of it? Are criminal networks truly webs of different types of interdependent relationships, or more rudimentary in design, and what effect, if any, do those relations have on group behavior? Is there one uniform life-course persistent criminal trajectory in organized crime, or do different life-course narratives describe the criminal trajectories of different groups?

In this thesis, I test each of those three research questions. To do so, I use police records from historic criminal investigations into New York City’s mafia during the 1950s. The police files present unique insights into the formal hierarchy of the mafia and the informal criminal networks of hundreds of suspects; different types of criminal, social, and business relationships that represent different layers to their criminal networks; and the criminal histories of suspects provide insights into life-course narratives. Findings do not support the true-or-false dichotomy of grand narratives or the counter-narratives; rather, the grand narratives effectively characterize some cases, but do not generalize to every case. The main findings illustrate the differences in the structure of criminal organizations, differences in the depths of the relationships that connect criminal associates, and group differences in criminal trajectories.