Mafiosi ran their own parallel investigation to clear their names

Evidence

In April 1989, inexplicably, one of the men knocked on the door of the police station and confessed to the judge’s murder; hard evidence was subsequently found to confirm his story. According to the police, the mafia ran a “parallel inquiry” to identify the culprits and then forced them to confess, for “the bosses wanted to be cleared” of that particular murder-and perhaps they also wanted to be rid of aspiring rivals (Repubblica, October 24, 1990). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 425

Categorization

• XREF: A private enforcer supplying its own ‘detective’ service to exculpate clients—the detectives-and-enforcers combination that Gambetta’s theory predicts and that reads like a scene from the opening of The Godfather inverted.