The evolution of the Australian ‘ndrangheta. An historical perspective

This paper explores the phenomenon of the ‘ndrangheta – a criminal organisation from Calabria, South of Italy and allegedly the most powerful among the Italian mafias – through its migrating routes. In particular, by focusing on the peculiar case of Australia, the paper aims to show the overlapping of migrating flows with criminal colonisation, which has proven to be a strategy of this particular mafia. The paper uses the very thin literature on the subject alongside official reports and newspaper articles on migration and crime, mainly from Italian sources, to trace an historical journey on the migration of people from Calabria to Australia in various moments of the last century. The aim is to present the evolution and growth of Calabrian clans in Australia. The topic is largely unexplored and is still underreported among Australian institutions and scholars, which is why the paper chooses an historical approach to describe the principal paths in this very new field of research

Inverse scale space decomposition

We investigate the inverse scale space flow as a decomposition method for decomposing data into generalised singular vectors. We show that the inverse scale space flow, based on convex and absolutely one-homogeneous regularisation functionals, can decompose data represented by the application of a forward operator to a linear combination of generalised singular vectors into its individual singular vectors. We verify that for this decomposition to hold true, two additional conditions on the singular vectors are sufficient: orthogonality in the data space and inclusion of partial sums of the subgradients of the singular vectors in the subdifferential of the regularisation functional at zero. We also address the converse question of when the inverse scale space flow returns a generalised singular vector given that the initial data is arbitrary (and therefore not necessarily in the range of the forward operator). We prove that the inverse scale space flow is guaranteed to return a singular vector if the data satisfies a novel dual singular vector condition. We conclude the paper with numerical results that validate the theoretical results and that demonstrate the importance of the additional conditions required to guarantee the decomposition result

What's in a Name? Shifting Identities of Traditional Organized Crime in Canada in the Transnational Fight against the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta

The Italian antimafia authorities have warned Canadian law enforcement about the risks and the growing concerns for the infiltration of clans of the Calabrian mafia, known as ‘ndrangheta, in Eastern Canada. The alarm linked to the rise of the ‘ndrangheta challenges the paradigms of traditional organized crime in Canada, because the ‘ndrangheta is presented as traditional but also innovative and more pervasive than other mafia-type groups. Through access to confidential investigations and interviews to key specialist law enforcement teams in Toronto and Montreal, this article investigates today's institutional perception of mafia – the ‘ndrangheta in particular – in Canada when compared to Italian conceptualizations. I will argue that the changes in narratives in Canada can be read in relation to changes in the Italian identity in the country, moving towards regionalization and specialist knowledge of ethnic differences