Mafia territorial licensing governed even professions like medicine by 1913.

Evidence

As this rather old case (Hess 1973) suggests, territorial licensing can affect markets of all sorts: “In 1913 a doctor A from Palermo settled in Caltanisetta and there set up a practice. However, several months passed without a single patient X calling on his services. He thereupon went to Palermo and asked a friend B, a senior civil servant, to help him. The civil servant listened to his story and then got on to butcher C, whom he knew. The [Butcher] wrote on a piece of paper: il dottor… è mio amico [the doctor is my friend], signed the sentence and sent the doctor to another butcher D in Caltanisetta to hand over his message. This the doctor did and from that moment his difficulties were over” (p. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 998

Categorization

• CANDY: A doctor needing a butcher’s signed note to get patients is a vivid, quotable anecdote showing mafia control extended far beyond crime.
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone studying informal trust networks — the butcher’s written voucher as a proto-reputation credential predating modern certification.