Mafia uses fictive kinship to solve trust but kinship bonds are scarce

Evidence

A typical solution to the problem of trust is to turn underlings or potential successors into relatives, either by arranging a marriage or appointing a godparent. But the number of bonds one can create in this fashion is clearly limited. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s Goffman-style analysis in their own work (kinship vs contract as trust mechanisms); also cross-references Gambetta’s entire private-protection market model and the limited-scope argument for why clans cannot scale.
• FICTION: The scarcity of usable kinship bonds as a constraint on criminal trust networks could drive a fiction premise about a boss forced to manufacture new godparent ties as his blood relatives run out.