Mafia-controlled market shares remained essentially frozen across three decades

Evidence

Nearly twenty years later, in 1987, the situation was substantially unchanged. And, as a series of articles by Sandra Rizza in L’Ora in 1989 confirmed, no new developments were in sight. Dealers B, C, and D taken together retained almost exactly the same share of the market as in 1964 (see Table 4). Dealer D, however, who had been the smallest mandatario, and who also had a criminal record, had doubled his business at the expense of dealer B. The share of dealer A, meanwhile, had been split among three new middlemen—E, F, and G. Exactly how new they were, however, is open to question: two of them were former employees of A, and the third was a relative. How dealers H and I had managed to join this select club is not clear. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 538

Categorization

• XREF: The persistence of fixed market shares despite nominal regulatory effort evidences Gambetta’s core claim that mafia entry control is a durable cartel-enforcement equilibrium, and that alleged new entrants are really A’s own clients — reinforcing the reputation-substitution reading.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did H and I actually join? Gambetta’s own unwillingness to explain their entry suggests a gap in the entry-control model — a hole where the mechanics of mafia coordination over ‘new blood’ remain unexplored.