Even lone purse snatchers submit to territorial licensing when a mafia franchise organizes them

Evidence

There are exceptions, however. The minimal probability of purse snatchers’ clashing over the same bag coupled with their speed and mobility would seem to rule out collusion. But in fact in Palermo purse snatchers and pickpockets are protected; they share territories and compete over them. This circumstance, common knowledge in the city, was documented in 1988 by Werner Raith in a revealing interview with one of these deft youngsters. “Licenses” to steal apply to a limited area and are issued by the capo zona, either himself a mafioso or licensed by a mafioso to run the muggers’ market. According to the interview: “Just one step on a colleague’s turf and you can expect retaliation within a couple of hours even if you are just a scassapagghiari [petty thief] … Depending on the seriousness of the offense, they can slash the tires of your car during the night, in which case the best thing is to disappear for a couple of days. But they can also do it in broad daylight in front of everybody, which means that you had better get out of circulation for a few weeks. Or else they’ll beat you up.” — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Purse-snatcher licensing parallels the Milgrom private-judge model: the capo zona substitutes for state enforcement by codifying and policing territory; connects to Gambetta’s broader private-protection thesis.
• SHARE: Worth sending to a friend into urban crime or organized-crime economics: the detail that muggers themselves fear their capo more than the police, and that a killing night-slashing escalates to daylight assault is a graded sanctioning scheme.
• DEFINE: Introduces the capo zona licensing mechanism and the graded retaliation scale (tire slashing to beating), which models escalation as a commitment device.