The mafia persists only where the state fails to supply genuine protection.

Evidence

But the mafia’s demise is neither inexorable nor spontaneous. Only the utmost determination on the part of the authorities can carry it to completion; otherwise the process will begin all over again. Whether it does, however, depends on processes over which the social scientist has no more control than any other citizen. It depends, for instance, on whether the protection which the mafia supplies in daily litigations will one day be satisfactorily discharged by the courts, whose inefficiency at present is simply appalling—that is, it depends on whether the state will at last choose to deliver genuine protection. Above all, it depends on whether the scope for illegal protection is reduced by intelligent intervention—for instance, liberalizing the drug market, abolishing state control over the price of cigarettes, making the procedure for assigning public contracts simpler and more transparent, improving antitrust legislation and applying it to wholesale markets, redesigning the voting process to minimize opportunities for selling votes. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 677

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the Gambetta model of private protection as a substitute for state capacity — the exact framework the reader is mapping onto The Godfather. Also connects to the reader’s Milgrom analysis of private judges as institutional substitutes.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The state-created market’ — how state regulation (price controls, contract opacity, drug prohibition) manufactures the very protection demand the mafia fills.