The Mafia’s cartel structure emerged publicly after a costly internal war

Evidence

The number of members varies, although firms are never very large. … The evidence consistently indicates that the mafia, from the late 1950s until the mid-1980s, with intermittent variations, has been coordinated by a commissione, also called a cupola or provincia (TB: I, 21; AC: II, 486-487). The first time news of this cartel filtered out to the rest of the world was in 1965, during the inquiry which followed the so-called first mafia war, which bloodied the streets of Palermo in 1961-1963. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 286

Categorization

• XREF: The first mafia war as the trigger for cartel formation directly parallels the reader’s Schelling/credible-commitments angle: the commissione emerges to restrain destructive internal violence, like the private judges systems described by Milgrom.