Abbott’s work on organized crime analyzes Al Capone’s gang, the Chicago Outfit, during the Prohibition Era using the Al Capone social network database produced by Papachristos and Smith. With Papachristos, Abbott has studied the power structure within the Outfit by means of a network analysis technique called blockmodeling. Abbott and Papachristo’s work shows that the Outfit was less hierarchical than sometimes claimed, and that a group of specialists was essential to the operation of the group.