Mafia control persisted in Palermo’s fish market for over three decades

Evidence

This had been the scenario since at least the mid-1950s. Even before the antimafia commission went to Palermo, there had been two administrative inquiries, one in 1956, commissioned on behalf of the regional government, followed by the second ten years later. By and large both found the same situation, and the same four mandatari in charge (CPM-RMI: 99). In the first report we read that “the reasons nobody wants to become a mandatario are not economic in nature, but are rooted in the peculiar conditions of our province, in which competition is suffocated along with, sometimes, freedom of action itself” (CPMRMI: 99). More bluntly, as one of the authors of the report declared to the commission, “it is clear beyond doubt that the fish market in Palermo is in the hands of the mafia” (CPM-RMI: 99). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 536

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences Gambetta’s private-protection market thesis: the mafia suffocates competition not through economic means but by restricting freedom of entry — the same mechanism Milgrom describes for controlled entry at Champagne Fairs.
• ADDENDUM: Entry control substituting for competitive screening parallels the controlled-entry-at-fairs mechanism from the Milgrom law-merchant material, which already lives in this knowledge base.