Trust for risky dealings is placed with chosen criminal friends, not kin

Evidence

Whenever my landlord introduced me to one of his ‘good friends’, I knew that he was almost certainly a crook, probably from another ethnic group, a member of a criminal fraternity stretching back decades with a common background of gambling dens, police raids, gaols, diamond smuggling, drug rings, and all the rest. These were the men he turned to when he needed to trust someone, not his family or his fellow tribesmen. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2394

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin synthesis: familiar social ties (criminal friendship networks) underpinning trust bear on why sighted outsiders (the doctor’s wife) were trusted — chosen affinity over status obligation.
• DEFINE: The landlord anecdote is the field illustration of the distinction between volitional friendship-trust and ascribed kinship-trust.
• QUESTION: Contradicts the common-sense mapping that trust follows kinship; worth chasing why mutual criminality out-trusts blood.