A deposed boss kept paying protection secretly to hide his loss of power.

Evidence

In one particularly poignant case Don Mariano secretly paid protection money out of his own pocket so the customer would not realize that he was no longer in charge (VM: 40). This situation continued until early 1983, when a man returned from abroad to find that a tenant to whom he had leased a piece of land before migrating was now refusing to comply with the original agreement and relinquish it. The man went to Don Mariano for protection. As the land (and the leaseholder) did not belong to the territory of Vicari but was under the jurisdiction of nearby Caccamo, Don Mariano, in order to contact the Caccamo firm and settle the dispute, had to reveal that he was, to all intents and purposes, still in business. Four days later he disappeared. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Don Mariano’s secret cross-territory deal is a vivid instance of Gambetta’s firm/jurisdiction model plus Schelling’s credible commitment — a boss maintaining reputation by self-financing his own deposed status.
• SEED: The deposed boss still ‘paying protection’ to preserve customers’ illusion of his authority is a strong anecdote for an essay on how reputation scaffolding persists after power falls.