Palermo shopkeepers broke silence only when unfamiliar racketeers made absurd demands.

Evidence

During the 1980s the situation of the mafia in Palermo became more uncertain. In 1986-87 the police received an unprecedented number of reports from shopkeepers complaining about the pressure to pay protection money to which they were being subjected. From October 1986 to April 1987 there were sixty-six such complaints, coming mostly from the center of the city and involving restaurants, automobile dealerships, hotels, discos, travel agencies, and all types of shops. The police could not understand why traditionally reticent merchants were suddenly coming forward. The fact was that they had been paying protection all along, but now the demands were coming from unfamiliar sources and were too outrageously high to be credible (the lowest reported demand was for 30 million lire, the highest for half a billion). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 673

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s Gambetta frame: shocks to the protection market (unknown extortionists undercutting established suppliers) reveal that merchants rationally accepted routine extortion from stable Mafia protectors but resisted rent-taking outsiders.