Drug trade middlemen defected by confusing accounts and fleeing across borders.

Evidence

But exclusivity remained a goal rather than an enduring achievement. Treachery was rife, and “lemons” were ubiquitous. Most problematic were deals involving the source, always difficult to trace. Cheating affected both payment and quality. In 1983 a Turkish middleman, after supplying vast quantities of morphine to La Mattina (who for a while owed him 10 million) "deliberately confused the accounts concerning his transactions with buyers and suppliers am disappeared, taking refuge in Bulgaria, owing the Sicilians 2 million’ (OSPA: IX, 1867). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 649

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Akerlof’s lemons problem in an extra-legal market: quality and payment cheats are hard to verify because the source is untraceable.
• QUESTION: Why did the Sicilians let a $2 million debt to a middleman go rather than enforce it? Does their enforcement machinery fail precisely at the untraceable-source end of the chain?