Strong union radicalism blocked organized crime infiltration on the West Coast docks.

Evidence

Similarly, in the United States organized crime managed to infiltrate the waterfront unions only on the East Coast, where there were no traces of political radicalism. When racketeers tried to penetrate the West Coast unions, they were thrown out by the Red Guards of Harry Bridges (Kimeldorf 1988: 122ff.). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 867

Categorization

• XREF: Direct comparison for the reader’s Gambetta/Schelling mapping: militant united unions act as pre-existing collective enforcement that crowds out private-protection rackets — the same mechanism as the Protestant-militant Ionian-Calabria cases. This is the protective counterfactual to state-failure→mafia.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘when labor strength forecloses protection rackets’ — contrasting Sicily and US docks to isolate what conditions actually produce organized crime.