Cooperation with mafiosi is sustained by mutual economic interests beyond coercion

Evidence

Within the network, solidarity in case of arrest or death ‘in the field’ acts as insurance against the risks attached to illegal activities (Schneider and Schneider 1976: 189). Outside it, a wide range of economic bonds are formed: they can involve the corruption of civil servants, the exchange of favours for electoral support, or the handling of labour disputes for the benefit of landowners and entrepreneurs. But they may also be remote and aseptically insulated from the violent core of mafia activity: when private citizens, for instances, are offered extremely high interest rates to invest their money in informal banking systems without needing to know, like most investors, whether that money will be spent in financing philanthropic enterprises or drug trafficking. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2222

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘aseptically insulated’ investor who participates without knowing parallels the blindness theme: cooperation thrives precisely because investors need not observe what their capital funds — relevant to Saramago’s white blindness as collapse of observability.
• SHARE: The 1863 Neapolitan coachman’s dead-horse complaint is a vivid anecdote for someone interested in the camorra’s informal dispute-resolution and pre-WWI economic history.