Mafia recruitment requires insider training or psychopathic disposition plus no better options

Evidence

Those who choose to enter such a trade must therefore both enjoy special competitive advantages and suffer from the absence of preferable alternatives. The former consist of special skills originating either from the fact that certain families and neighborhoods provide free training, as it were, or from unusual individual dispositions. In short, if one is not an insider by birth or a clever psychopath, one is unlikely to choose to become a mafioso. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gambetta’s core thesis about protection markets and to economic labor-market theory on entry barriers — matches reader’s framework of mafia membership as a career choice within a private protection market.