Mafia governance vocabulary was shared across Sicilian provinces and stable over time.

Evidence

The correspondence of the terminology with that used ten years later by Buscetta, Contorno, Marsala, and Calderone in describing the structure of “la nostra cosa” is striking. While the sometimes stylized narration of Buscetta’s testimony might be suspect, it is difficult to dismiss such a natural-sounding conversation or explain it away as just some subcultural code. These mafiosi are talking between and for themselves only. Furthermore, the Sicilian speaker comes from and mainly refers to Agrigento, whereas the pentiti are from either Palermo or Catania: it would appear that the cartels in the various provinces share at least the basic vocabulary of organizational arrangements. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 299

Categorization

• XREF: Independent-sources triangulation — two separate informant streams (wiretap vs. pentiti testimony) converge on the same organizational terminology, an evidence standard relevant to evaluating private-institution research.