Family bosses could not prohibit drug dealing once profits outstripped their authority

Evidence

When asked whether the boss could prevent an activity from being carried out by his family, Contorno replied that in principle he could, but that Bontade, for instance, had been unable to enforce any prohibition on drug dealing because the profits were so high that everybody wanted to participate, and there was nothing he could do to stop so many people (TC-GdS, April 12, 1986): “The majority became involved because there was so much money. It was better than construction, better than anything. If we invested a hundred million, we could make three hundred right a way, and so everybody jumped into the drug traffic” (TC-GdS, April 21-23, 1986). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 640

Categorization

• XREF: Directly tests the protection-market model’s boundary condition: what happens when the governed activity’s profitability exceeds the enforcer’s capacity to police his own jurisdiction — a stress the reader should track against Gambetta’s supply-limited premise.
• SEED: Angle: ‘when prohibition fails from above’ — profits as a ceiling on sovereign enforcement authority, a concrete instance of enforcement capacity lagging behind market opportunity.