Sicily’s mafia is fragmented across 105 firms, not one monopoly.

Evidence

If certain readers remain skeptical of the significance of Bontade’s outburst, there is further evidence of something more sophisticated than a pattern of occasional relationships and contingent coalitions. In Sicily, according to a 1987 Carabinieri report (CPM-RCC) there are 105 protection firms or families, mostly in the western part of the island, eighteen in Palermo alone, a number that has not changed substantially over the last one hundred years (see Table 1). The number of mafia firms or units seems high and the territorial jurisdiction of each small by comparison with New York, where there have been only five families in the last fifty years. The possibility that the mafia in Sicily would ever become a single centralized protection monopoly covering the entire region (let alone other parts of the world) is negated by this simple evidence alone. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the cartel/oligopoly model — Gambetta’s mafia is structurally a cartel of competing protection firms, which is exactly what Milgrom’s champagne-fair private judges and Schelling’s commitment literature predict: fragmented, not monopolized.
• SEED: Article angle: why protection markets fragment into many small firms (a cartel of 105) rather than consolidating into one monopoly the way legitimate industries do.