October 15, 2020

In memory of Carlo…

Carlo … where to start?

Well right from the start, since he was there as a mentor when I started.

I was in the Pierre Tremblay cult of devotees, and Carlo knew all too well how membership to this club can go. It’s like the best roller-coaster you can find at Disney; you want in, there is nothing else like it, but it gets scary and you need to balance it out and chill, after you exit.

Carlo was there to make things light when we needed it most. Taking things too seriously? Taking yourself too seriously? He would listen to you, he would shake his head, tilt it to the side, and start smiling… and it was all we needed. The whole weight of the situation would be gone.

He would listen. Carlo was the young mentor who was there for me to balance things out. He knew I was getting top notch scholarly and intellectual mentorship – he had been there first – but he also knew that its easy to get lost in this.

Carlo encouraged me, encouraged all of us to find our own identity. To stay true to who we were. His mentorship was not dogmatic. It was personalized; it invited you to find your own truth, your own path. It encouraged reading, it encouraged creativity, it encouraged us to find purpose. To make our writing clearer and more alive, for instance, he often told us to write with someone in mind, someone that needs to be convinced, someone who would disagree.

Don’t write with your friends in mind, they already agree. Write with an enemy in mind, someone who would challenge your ideas.

His own scholarship was creative, innovative and inspiring. His love for biographies of criminals and case studies infuse a proper dose of life and soul to his articles. He was proud that mainstream criminologists had paid attention to his work. But he was most proud of his students, current or past. He kept in touch with everyone, EVERYONE! There was always time, with Carlo. He always took the time.

Carlo was of course an international criminology superstar. As a PhD student, I recall going with him to the 2005 European Society of Criminology conference, in Krakow, and seeing the assistant professor that he still was at the time being greeted as a hero by scholars there. They were eager to tell him how they replicated his work and integrated network methods to their own research projects, gaining insights on drug trafficking or organized crime that they could never have dreamed of.

He didn’t invent social network analysis. He was not the very first criminologist to be interested in it (but close). But he brought it to the masses. He made it understandable, he made it relevant. Why do some people get ahead in crime? Because they manage their social networks better than others. Because they were mentored early in their career. It was about time we paid serious attention to this.

And now a lot of us are simply applying the Carlo principles in our own research. We are trying to make him proud. Proud that networked criminologists took a little piece of the land, and not only refused to recede it, but were trying to grow it.

RIP my friend.

Martin