Even mafiosi paid tribute to bosses and territorial capos for protection

Evidence

Like any other firm, the refiners—despite the fact that some of them, like Mannoia, were themselves mafiosi—paid protection money. The boss was paid partly for acting as a guarantor, partly just because he was the boss. Stefano Bontade gave Mannoia and his colleagues fifty kilos to refine and paid only 3 million lire per kilo (the going rate was 5 million). “He told us he was holding some money back to distribute within the family,” Mannoia explained (FMM: 163). They even had to pay the capodecina of the Chiavelli district near Palermo a million lire per kilo for the privilege of working inside his territory (FMM: 168). The Grados were wholesale drug dealers in Milan, but they too had to pay a cut to a bigger mafioso, and they complained just as a legal dealer might (OSPA: VI, 1215). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 645

Categorization

• XREF: This is the clearest evidence yet for Gambetta’s core thesis and the reader’s own framing: protection is sold even inside the organization, and ‘territory’ maps onto protection-market turf. The capodecina levying per-kilo tribute for the privilege of working his district is a protection tax on productivity, not crime per se.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘holding money back to distribute within the family’ rationale is a redistribution/tribute mechanism — a peer to how formal states tax and redistribute, relevant to the private-protection-market-as-state-substitute theme.