The gabelloti land intermediaries cannot be identified with the mafia

Evidence

How can one reconcile the fact that the mafia supposedly provides private protection to all classes on the one hand with the gabelloti as a rural class on the other—a class, moreover, whose aim was ostensibly to achieve a higher social status as farmers and landowners? How can these two radically different entities be the same? The answer is, simply, that they cannot. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Matters for the reader’s analytic integration: if the gabelloti are NOT the original mafiosi, then the demand for private protection arose not from one rural class but from a broader state-failure/decentralized-property situation — which bears on whether Gambetta’s or Milgrom’s model better fits the Sicilian case.