Believing the mafia is a centralized corporation serves police and public convenience, not accuracy.

Evidence

A rigid belief in the mafia as a corporate entity, organized and centralized, carries, as Hess (1973) puts it, “dangerous” connotations. It eases pressure on the police, lightening the task of “identifying” perpetrators and excusing failures of detection. It also drastically redistributes the blame for a socially disagreeable state by dividing the world neatly into mafia members—a dreadful lot—and the rest of us, nice human beings by default. This is a serious misapprehension, for even if the mafia had an organized core, it would still differ from other criminal groups precisely by virtue of its social ramifications (Franchetti 1974: 100), and the number and variety of customers it serves. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 878

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Gambetta framework — this is a core statement of the mafia-as-fragmented-protection-market thesis, consistent with how the Don Corleone network functions as dispersed patron-client ties rather than corporate hierarchy.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the corporate-myth of organized crime’ — why both police and public prefer to believe the mafia is a centralized conspiracy rather than an embedded social market.