A mafioso’s reputation alone can dominate a legal market without any crime

Evidence

This point is illustrated by an episode reported in the newspaper Repubblica. In order to improve his market share, a Catania coffee wholesaler employed as a marketing agent a man who had been sentenced to six years in jail at the Palermo maxi-trial and was identified by Antonino Calderone as a mafioso (AC: I, 16-20, 41-46). This unusual employee zealously visited bars and restaurants throughout the city and soon produced miraculous results: as many as 280 businesses out of 426 began selling that particular brand of coffee. Questioned by police, the coffee wholesaler replied: “So what? Isn’t there a law encouraging the reintegration into society of ex-convicts? Carletto is behaving himself.” No less outraged, Carletto complained: “Commissario, what do you want? When I was not working you were always pressuring me. Now that I have a job, you won’t leave me alone.” The bar owners explained why they had been so readily persuaded by Carletto’s sales technique: “The coffee [he sells] is the best… and robberies have decreased, life is quieter.” The commissioner could only give vent to his frustration: “It’s all legal” (Repubblica, November 4, 1990). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 145

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Demonstrates how private protection value gets bundled into entirely legal commerce — relevant to the reader’s analytical integration of protection markets, though not directly one of the three articles.
• SEED: A clean anecdote for an essay on how criminally-derived reputation capital gets converted into market dominance in legal industries — the ‘miraculous’ sales-conversion story.
• SHARE: The coffee wholesaler anecdote is a perfect one to send to someone studying mafia economic sociology or informal enforcement mechanics.