Cosa Nostra ran a New York club of concrete contractors with loaded bids

Evidence

Once again, the New York investigation provides a parallel. Federal prosecutors in United States v. Salerno (1985) asserted that “the Cosa Nostra families established a club of concrete contractors who decided which contractor would submit the lowest bid on each project; other carrel members prepared their complementary bids accordingly. The ‘lowest bid’ was far higher than the price that fair competition would have produced” (OCTF 1988: 11, n. 17). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 573

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the private protection/arbitration model generalizes beyond Sicily to the US, strengthening the reader’s Gambetta-Milgrom comparison across cases.