Its facinating look at the different ndrinas related with others.

You know if the Bonavota, Accorinti and Mancuso ndrina are related?

And you know which Ndrinas are related to the Pesce-Bellocco?

Have the Muto ndrina related to other Clans?

It's almost impossible to determin the current family ties between 'ndrine.


The network of interfamily marriages in ’Ndrangheta


Abstract
A common claim is that mafia families arrange marriages strategically to seal alliances, cement partnerships and enhance cohesion. However, this claim is mainly based on anecdotal evidence and limited case studies. In this paper, by relying on an original database of biographical and relational information on over 4,600 members, we carry out the first large-scale exploratory analysis of the network of interfamily marriages in ’Ndrangheta. Our analysis shows that this alliance network is polycentric, made up of cohesive subgroups centered around well-connected, powerful families, that occupy different positions in the network. The presence of patterns suggests that marriages in ’Ndrangheta are possibly the result of family strategies to explore and exploit their power and business. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of marriages as an organizational instrument.

Introduction
14th century, Florence, Italy. Cosimo de’ Medici used marriages to increase the power of his family. These strategic unions involved also members of hostile families, like the Strozzi, the Pazzi, and the Pitti, to exploit structural holes (Padgett and Ansell, 1993, Padgett, 2010).

19th century, Germany and Europe. The Rothschild family owned one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. To maintain control of their banks and keep their business secret, Rothschilds married other Rothschilds: fifteen out of twenty-one marriages between 1824 and 1877 were celebrated between direct descendants (Ferguson, 1998, Ferguson, 2000, Kuper, 2001).

21st century, Reggio Calabria, Italy. In 2014, members of ’Ndrangheta clan Coluccio forced their daughter Giulia Immacolata, a thirteen-year-old girl, to break up with her boyfriend and engage with Cosimo Commisso, nephew of Vincenzo Macrì, the boss of another prominent ’Ndrangheta family. This union would have cemented the relation between the two mafia families, thus increasing their power inside the organization and allowing the Coluccio family to enter the drug business (Tribunale di Reggio Calabria, 2015 1115).

Throughout the centuries, marriages have been an organizational instrument widely used by the elites, who have strategically relied on kinship for preserving power, reinforcing alliances, and preventing unwanted people from interfering in the family business.

The same concept applies to mafia families. For them, marriage is a particularly valuable and effective organizational instrument because it fosters trust, a resource crucial for their functioning and survival. Indeed, contrary to legal organizations, illegal ones cannot rely on conventional rules, mechanisms, and institutions to regulate transactions and disputes because they operate in a hostile environment and illicit markets (Gambetta, 1993, Paoli, 2002).

Specifically, mafia families use marriage strategically, both to explore and exploit their own power and business (March, 1991). On the one hand, they use exogamic marriages, i.e. unions between members of different mafia families, to expand their territory of influence, enter new businesses, seal alliances and smooth out conflicts with rival families (Ciconte, 1996). In this respect, unions are so important that the network of marriages reflects the structure of the organization and the actual network of alliances (Siebert, 1996). On the other hand, families rely on endogamic marriages, i.e. unions between members of the same family, to prevent intrafamily conflicts and business fragmentation by fostering cohesion (Schneider and Schneider, 1976).

Although suggestive, these claims are mostly based on anecdotal evidence or very limited case-studies. To better support them, this study complements the literature on the strategic use of marriages in mafia organizations by conducting a large-scale exploratory analysis of the network of interfamily marriages in ’Ndrangheta. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic analysis of matrimonial ties in a mafia organization.

We chose ’Ndrangheta because it is a blood-based organization: ’Ndrangheta families are actual families, a characteristic that makes this organization particularly well suited for our most-likely case research design (Yin, 2017). Moreover, ’Ndrangheta is also an empirically relevant case for its global organizational and economic ‘success’.

Our analysis relies on an original database that includes relational information on over 4600 ’Ndrangheta members since the second half of the XIX century. The database is based on information extracted from over 40,000 pages of judicial documents issued by the Courts of Reggio Calabria and Catanzaro, and the family trees of some of the most powerful ’Ndrangheta families.

We use exploratory social network analysis to visualize and describe the features of the interfamily marriage network (alliance network) and the position of the different families in it. In particular, after having identified the network components, we study the largest one. We detect communities and cohesive subgroups, and identify the most important families in terms of centralities, prestige and aggregate constraint resulting from the absence of structural holes to be exploited. The analysis of the interfamily marriage network shows the existence of matrimonial patterns and significant variance across families, a result that possibly hints at a strategic use of marriage by ’Ndrangheta families.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the role of marriage in mafia organizations according to the existing literature and points out the lack of systematic studies. An illustration of the main relevant organizational features of ’Ndrangheta follows. Section 3 presents the data and the analytical strategy. In Section 4, we illustrate the main results. In Section 5, we discuss them. Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets
The strategic use of marriage in mafias
Throughout history, elites have relied on marriages as an organizational instrument to seal alliances for increasing business and power, and fostering intrafamily cohesion (e.g. Padgett and Ansell, 1993, Ferguson, 1998).

Mafia families have also used marriages strategically. For instance, in the Seventies, the alliance between Ursini and Scali, two ’Ndrangheta families from Marina di Gioiosa, in the ongoing war over smuggling, was sealed through a marriage (Gratteri and Nicaso, 2018). In fact,

Data and methods
Social Network Analysis (SNA) has already proved useful to advance our understanding of criminal organizations and their illicit activities (Morselli, 2010, Calderoni et al., 2017, DellaPosta, 2017, Giommoni et al., 2017, Morselli and Boivin, 2017, Campana, 2018, Campana, 2020, Bouchard, 2020, Gollini et al., 2020, Tumminello et al., 2021). This study applies SNA to the analysis of a different organizational aspect of criminal organizations: interfamily marriages. Our aim is to carry out an

Results
Regarding the position of ’Ndrangheta families in the interfamily marriages network, Table 2 shows summary statistics of the distributions of node centrality indices (degree, strength, eigenvector, closeness and betweenness) in the network of interfamily marriages.

On average, every family is linked to two other families (the mean degree centrality is 2.47), and some are connected by multiple marriages (the mean strength is greater and equal to 2.73). The distributions of degree centrality and

Discussion
The academic literature has pointed out the relevance of marriage to Italian mafias, which use it strategically to seal alliances and business partnerships and to foster internal cohesion. Centralization measures of the network and cohesive group analysis have highlighted the existence of clusters of families that tend to celebrate weddings among each other rather then with ‘outsiders’. As marriages are strategically used to seal alliances and business partnerships, these data suggest the

Conclusions
Scholars have argued that in mafia organizations marriage is not based on love, but it is the result of family strategies aimed at exploring and exploiting power and business. Marriage is a particularly effective organizational instrument for its ability to generate trust even in adverse conditions and enhance organizational control of agents. This is the case of mafias that, like other criminal organizations, operate in hostile environments and illicit markets, where they cannot rely on

Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge: Paola Ciaccio and the DIA (Antimafia Investigative Direction) of Milan, Enzo Ciconte, Paolo Storari and the DNA (Antimafia National Direction) for their time and invaluable insights; Elisa Superchi for her research assistance; Alberta Andreotti and Delia Baldassarri for comments on earlier drafts. The authors are also thankful to two anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper. The usual caveats apply.