Mafia territories cut across official administrative jurisdictions and clients must learn the correct family.

Evidence

Despite regular payments to a local mafia family, a building contractor was still subjected to violent threats. It turned out that he had wrongly assumed that mafia territories and local council jurisdictions coincided and was therefore paying the wrong family. The same error was committed, according to Judge Falcone, by Pino Aurelio in 1989. He was informed of his mistake in the usual allusive language: “If one wants to build, one needs an architect; if one is ill, he sees a doctor” (Falcone and Padovani 1991: 42). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 1000

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for Gambetta’s claim that mafia protection is a private market with its own geography — parallels Milgrom’s private judges and the territorial logic of medieval fairs. The allusive language (‘an architect’) mirrors Schelling-style tacit communication of boundaries.
• SHARE: For a law-and-economics friend working on private ordering: the wrong-family payment error is a clean real-world example of incomplete information about protection jurisdiction.