Estimating the command hierarchy of a drug trafficking group based on criminals’ telecommunication network

It remains a puzzle whether status hierarchies, commonly found in legitimate economic organizations, also exist within organized crime groups. Wiretap data from criminal communications serves as a crucial source for tracing individual statuses within these organizations. We have transformed the telecommunications of a drug trafficking group into both static and temporal networks for analysis. Using these networks, we applied an optimization method to estimate each criminal’s position in the hierarchy. This method matches the weight and direction of each observed network tie to expected rankings, assuming higher-ranked criminals are more likely to initiate calls to subordinates rather than vice versa. The estimated hierarchy for the criminal group (n = 8) resembles a pyramid-like structure, typically three to four levels high, with fewer individuals at the top and more at the bottom. Although verification is challenging due to limited evidence, our estimates largely align with the crime details outlined in court verdicts.