The Legal Embeddedness of Criminal Organizations: The Case of Barcelona’s Narcopisos

How can criminal organizations grow and thrive in legal environments purposively designed to eradicate them? We explore this question ethnographically by drawing on three years of fieldwork documenting the narcopisos phenomenon in Barcelona, Spain. “Narcopiso” refers to the occupation of vacant apartments by members of criminal organizations to sell and facilitate the consumption of cocaine, crack cocaine, and heroin. We discovered that the development of the narcopisos and the criminal organizations behind them were closely tied to the instrumentalization of laws and policies in the areas of drugs, housing, and harm reduction. We introduced the concept of legal embeddedness as a novel analytical tool to analyze how organizational members identify the affordance of existing laws and policies, purposively building on them to adapt and further develop their criminal activities to achieve organizational goals.