Mafia mediation is applied even to academic credentialing in southern Italy

Evidence

Lobbying teachers to help students pass exams is not uncommon in southern Italy, and mafiosi are no exception. If anything, they are likely to make a particularly convincing case. A man determined to get his son a law degree against all odds was advised to transfer him from the university at Catania to Palermo, where Giuseppe Calderone could pull some strings. There this unpromising scholar finally managed to graduate, though Calderone had to work so hard in the process that, as he later said, “I was the one who should have got the degree” (AC: I, 233). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates how private protection extends into credential markets — a cousin of the diamond grading certificates in the extralegal contracting essay, where trust substitutes for objective verification.