USURIOUS ACTIVITY, PATRIMONIALISATION AND RECYCLING OF PROFITS: DISTORTING EFFECTS IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONTEXT IN THE MEDIUM AND LONG TERM

Abstract

This paper examines the money-laundering and reinvestment channels through which usury proceeds are absorbed into the legal economy, and the distorting effects that usurious activity generates on the economic and social context over the medium and long term. The analysis draws on an original corpus of twelve judgments issued by the Benevento Court between 2012 and 2024: seven criminal proceedings concerning informal usury combined with money laundering or unlawful reinvestment, and five criminal proceedings plus one civil case concerning banking usury. Each judgment was examined through qualitative content analysis across five analytical dimensions: offender profile, victims, interest rates applied, patrimonialisation, and laundering or reinvestment channels. The findings show that laundering strategies range from layering proceeds through check-exchange systems and interlocking shell companies to the direct integration of illicit capital into real estate, corporate vehicles, and online gambling. Short-term effects center on the asset expropriation of vulnerable victims. Medium-term effects distort the local credit market through adverse selection against legitimate borrowers. Long-term effects manifest as a durable infiltration of licit economic sectors by capital of criminal origin, an effect that becomes especially acute where usury is instrumental to territorial control by organized crime. The persistently low number of complaints recorded by the Prefettura di Benevento points to a substantial dark figure that judicial data alone cannot capture. The paper situates these findings within the economic-sociological literature on embeddedness, credit rationing, and organized-crime infiltration of the legal economy, and draws out implications for prevention policy under Italian anti-usury legislation.