The Wounds of Progress : Corporate Greed, Corruption, and Mafia in Crotone

This paper explores the interplay between corporate greed, corruption, and organized crime in Crotone, a provincial town in Calabria characterized by marginalization and subpar quality of life, specifically. By integrating critical criminology, mafia and corruption studies, we analyze the impact inflicted upon the local population by energy corporations, which have increasingly overshadowed the harms by traditional 'ndrangheta clans. Through a qualitative methodology encompassing document analysis of judicial files, narrative analysis of local interviews, media scrutiny, and observational insights from fieldwork in Crotone, we unpack how the dynamics of corporate exploitation, corruption, and organized crime coalesce to amplify environmental, health-related, economic and political harms. These are the result of complex mechanisms where state capture strategies at local level are pursued both by corporate entities and mafia-led entrepreneurs leading to a cycle of exploitation by a patchwork of actors. Our findings illustrate an isomorphic process wherein the 'ndrangheta adapts to corporate practices, and in so doing the traditional roles of the clans are kept marginal from the most lucrative earnings, while political actors are subservient to dominant coalitions for consent and short-term gains.