Acquittals destabilized mafia hierarchy and set up a later war

Evidence

A noteworthy case of this type followed the acquittals at the “trial of the 114”, which took place in Catanzaro in 1971, involving several top-ranking mafiosi, including Stefano Bontade, Giuseppe Calderone, and Luciano Liggio. “When the trial ended,” Calderone reports “there was a lot of difficulty in reconstructing the organization chart in the Palermo province” (AC: I, 51). One of the consequences was a split between Bontade and Gaetano Badalamenti on one side and Liggio and Toto Riina on the other, the same two coalitions which ten years later would clash in the “mafia war.” — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 832

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core interest: state legal failure (acquittals) is not a clean substitute for mafia enforcement — the trials themselves disrupted internal hierarchy, seeding factional conflict.