Even trusted partners face exclusion when honor status is uncertain.

Evidence

Nor did Mannoia shrink from the odd swindle: “With [the importer] Nunzio La Mattina, who was rather unhappy about the payments from Stefano Bontade, we agreed to work small quantities of drugs behind [Bontade’s] back … Whenever some morphine arrived, La Mattina was supposed to tell Bontade that there was less than expected and pass the difference on to us” (p. 182). Suspecting these sores of goings-on the supplier of the heroin posted a trusted underling to watch over the refiners at work. But, Mannoia says, he “was not able to keep an eye on us continuously because the refining process is particularly difficult to withstand and so he quite frequently left to go and rest in the house adjacent to the lab. In this way … I, Giuseppe La Mattina, and my brother-in-law Cosimo Vernengo slowly piled up processed heroin in the empty acid tanks” (FMM: 363). They did not inform their partner Pietro Pilo of the swindle “because you can be killed for something like this, and Pilo, although a reliable person, was not a man of honor, so we could not be 100 percent certain of him” (FMM: 363). Oddly, Cosimo Vernengo, and possibly Giuseppe La Mattina, were not members either. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 651

Categorization

• XREF: Maps directly onto Gambetta’s model of reputation-based screening and the Milgrom-la-Champagne insight that group membership substitutes for direct credit checks — membership is the under-confident indicator here.
• SHARE: The refining process being so physically punishing that the watchdog has to leave to rest — a beautiful physical-monitoring failure detail.