Illegal cartels must monopolize supply for their coordination to have purpose.

Evidence

Both the Carabinieri and the customs police maintain that the mafia did not have a monopoly on this trade in Italy (CPM: 1492). Had there been extensive competition from independent smugglers, however, the cartel would have lost its purpose. According to Francesco Marino Mannoia: “The monopolization of tobacco smuggling in Naples by the Cosa Nostra caused a lot of bad feeling in the local underworld, because those smugglers who used to go to Albania to collect small quantities of cigarettes, two or three thousand boxes at a time, were cut out; they were in fact forbidden to continue, because cigarettes had to be supplied exclusively through the channels run by the Cosa Nostra” (FMM: 353). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 623

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Gambetta’s own protection-market thesis: cartel regulation only pays when the protected producers control the market — same logic as licit cartels requiring barriers to entry.
• QUESTION: Why did the police deny the monopoly? Is this institutional blindness, or evidence the mafia’s control was contested enough to be partial?