Profile of Multiple Affiliation Members in Organised Crime: Results of a Spanish Sample

Membership inside organized crime groups has been traditionally studied as a permanent status, where loyalty and stability is well valued by the organization and abandonment is severely punished. However, recent studies on current groups of organized crime underline that the majority of the current groups have more flexible structures, with a less strict division of roles and a less stable permanence (Morselli, 2009; Natarajan, 2000; Williams, 2001; Bruisma and Bernasco, 2004). The research presented has as the objective to analyze the permanence and fidelity of the members to the groups of criminals through the study of the overlap or multiple affiliations of subjects from a sample of 2,384 involved in criminal organizations investigated in Spain during the years 1999 to 2010. This is, to find out whether, in the analyzed sample of members and partners of the organizations, there are subjects who appear or have been investigated in several criminal groups at the same time. This identification is accompanied by the study of the profile of individuals that appear in various organizations: its function and activity in the group, the position it occupies and its socio-demographic characteristics. To this end, information was gathered from a sample that includes members involved in the organization and sporadic collaborators. The information on those members comes from the revision of 72 police operations on activities of organized crime that took place in Spain between 1999 to 2010. Results show evidences of three profiles of multiple affiliation members: a professional profile, an occasional profile having non permanent contacts wit the organization and a profile characterized by it ilegal status in the country.