Mafia cartels internalize customers as tradeable property under threat of violence

Evidence

Further evidence of this “development of connections” in Sicily is provided by Constantino Garaffa of the Palermo Association of Small Shopkeepers. He found that mafia families invest in wholesale stores and “then encourage shopkeepers to buy from those stores.” To buyers this practice is often presented as a safeguard against the risk of cheating: “Buy from A (or sell to A) and you will be safe. Just let A know I sent you.” But when the practice works, it is irrelevant whether customers buy from A or B since neither A nor B will steal the other’s customers; instead they will agree “not to accept or seek business from customers who [are] currently served by another member” of the cartel (Reuter 1987: 28). What happens if the agreement is breached is easy to guess. Vincenzo Sinagra testified that the brother of a man “who had taken the liberty of selling construction supplies to somebody else’s customer was violently beaten (VS: I, 138). Customers effectively become part of the supplier’s assets; they are thus internalized and can be traded like any other form of property. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 526

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences Bonasera opening scene and the reader’s private-protection market model: customers become property rights enforced by third parties.
• SHARE: The Sinagra testimony of a beating for selling to another’s customer is a concrete legal-database case worth sending to anyone studying extralegal property enforcement.