Mafia cartels formed per province only after the late 1950s

Evidence

The story begins toward the end of the 1950s. Before this time mafia families were not connected by a collective structure. As Judge Cesare Terranova put it, they “were a mosaic of small republics with topographical borders marked by tradition” (CPM: 4-xvii, 656), or, as an economist might say, a territorial oligopoly more akin to a constellation of independent firms than a federation of units bound by explicit rules. The equilibrium held, when it did, because of “natural” mechanisms, dependent on both protection and the dynamics of the protected markets, and also because of casual bargaining between pairs or among clusters of firms. Perhaps this universe was not as lacking in collective consciousness as Hess (1973) maintains, though not by much. Since the end of the 1950s, however, a series of attempts has been made to establish a more systematic organization among firms—not as a single cartel embracing all Sicilian families, as so many observers simplistically believe, but a number of cartels, at least one per province. The first to attempt this coordination was the province of Palermo, which had the highest concentration of families (approximately forty-six; see Table 2). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 283

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEFINE: Defines the cartel as a per-province coordination attempt, correcting the common assumption of one all-Sicilian cartel.
• XREF: The natural-mechanism equilibrium versus explicit-rules coordination maps onto Ostrom’s distinction between self-governance and formal institution — a useful cross-domain parallel.

Related

• Sicilian cartels organized per province, not as one unified mafia-wide cartel (similarity 0.93)
• Pre-1959 mafia families operated as independent territorial monopolies without federation (similarity 0.88)
• Sicily’s 105 mafia families preclude a region-wide centralized monopoly (similarity 0.87)
• Mafia families existed even in provinces considered untouched by 1990 (similarity 0.86)
• Sicily’s mafia is fragmented across 105 firms, not one monopoly. (similarity 0.85)
• The Mafia’s cartel structure emerged publicly after a costly internal war (similarity 0.83)
• Cartelized protection is one possible equilibrium, not an inevitable end state (similarity 0.82)
• Apparent mafia fragmentation may actually be centralization plus new entrants. (similarity 0.81)
• Around fifteen bosses each represented three families on the commissione. (similarity 0.80)
• The mafia has remained confined to western Sicily for over a century (similarity 0.80)
• Mafia emerged in prosperous divided-property districts, not poor ones (similarity 0.80)
• Mafia families before WWII were largely independent and non-systematically linked (similarity 0.80)
• Mafia centralization would represent weakness rather than inherent industry logic. (similarity 0.79)
• Mafia governance vocabulary was shared across Sicilian provinces and stable over time. (similarity 0.79)
• Cartel organization is not an automatic equilibrium of protection markets (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century mafia activity concentrated in prosperous, divided-property areas #qualifies (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 214