Four middlemen controlled the entire Palermo fish market with one holding 55 percent
Evidence
That is an extremely small number of intermediaries for any market, let alone the largest fish market in a maritime country. The commission noted “the absence of any initiative, not only on the part of direct producers [fishermen] but also cooperatives of producers as well as wholesale dealers” and cook it as evidence of a “gravely abnormal situation” (CPM-RMI: 96). The four middlemen together constituted an oligopoly, or rather, if we take into account the distribution of trade among them in 1964 (see Table 3), a duopoly: as much as 55 percent of the total value of trade was controlled by just one of the mandatari alone; another accounted for 32 percent, and, well behind, the other two had 8.5 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively (CPM-RMI: 95-96). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 534
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: A textbook example of Gambetta’s private-protection market structure — a concentrated oligopoly as an observable signature of mafia control, and evidence for the reader’s model of third-party enforcement replacing open competition.