Organized crime is monopolistic market collusion, not coordinated crime

Evidence

As Thomas Schelling remarks, when a gang of burglars “are busy about their burglary, not staking claims and fighting off other burglars,” then they are simply committing “organized burglary.” But “when a gang of burglars begins to police its territory against the invasion of other gangs of burglars, and make interloping burglars join up and share their loot or get out of town…we should… begin to identify the burglary gang as organized crime” (1984: 182-183). In other words, a group of criminals who join forces to carry out a specific crime is similar to a firm in which everybody simply plays his or her part in an organized fashion; organized crime, by contrast, is equivalent to any collusive (or monopolistic) market, but here the commodity happens to be illegal. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 609

Categorization

• XREF: Key to the reader’s project: Schelling’s definition makes organized crime a territory-governance function rather than a production function—exactly the protection-market logic that Gambetta builds on and that the Corleone family exemplifies.
• DEFINE: Clean conceptual boundary between a crime ‘firm’ (joint production) and organized crime (monopolistic territory governance)—useful to hold onto as a standing distinction.