Organized crime: Why did the mafia develop when and where it did?

As interesting as this material is, it is also a sign of one of the greatest methodological problems in researching organized crime: much of the available information is secondhand, some of it is contradictory, some of the time projections have to be made from sketchy evidence, and the need for participants to control information and enforce “codes of silence” is not helpful to researchers or to law enforcement (nor, obviously, is it intended to be).

A point we made last week: the market for private protection emerges in a context of lack of trust. So one of the explanations for the rise of the mafia has to be found in reasons for a lack of trust. If we can identify those reasons around the middle of the 19th century in Sicily, there may be ground for drawing parallels to other environments.

One possible thesis – the failure of public administration to establish grounds for trust (“public trust”) creates conditions for the framework of trust to migrate to the private realm (“private trust), in the form of local and kinship networks.

This may explain the need for protection. But it does not explain why the need was answered in the unusual manner in which it was. Gambetta offers other examples (78) of regions where “the absence of a credible central authority” undermined the development of trust, but which either developed different responses or did not develop responses. So if it is easy to explain the demand, how do we explain the supply?

One factor: The availability of a labor force. This has to made of people 1) willing and able to practice violence, who are not necessarily available in every environment, 2) trained in the use of violence, which also “derives from a limited number of environments” (78), and 3) willing and able to subordinate the use of violence to the direction of an organization.

Second factor: these violent people must not be “already called for,” that is, they must be out of work. This is where the decline of the feudal system plays a role, since it put a lot of “tough guys” who had previously been in roles such as the military or private enforcement for large landowners out of work. See the long quotation from Leopoldo Franchetti on p. 79 of Gambetta.

Gambetta's argument in short: the destruction of the feudal system had two effects. One of these was the production of a lot of smaller landowners in the place of a few big ones – that is, an expanding class of people demanding protection. Another of these was, because of the instability of political power, a long period of conflict over who had the ability to exercise property rights. There was a large enough client base that providers of protection did not have to be subordinate to one or a few clients: they became autonomous suppliers (80). This explains why the mafia developed most in places that 1) were politically unstable, and 2) experienced the most economic development, creating a large number of transactions to be “protected” (see Gambetta's explanation, 83).

This leads to an interesting finding: although there is a popular perception that the mafia is connected to a culture of poverty and “backwardness” in the southern part of Italy, the evidence suggests something else entirely. The mafia did not develop most in the poorest or most rural areas, but in the most prosperous areas with rapidly developing markets (86-87). This economic approach makes more sense than an approach based on stereotypes about Sicily: why would a protection industry develop if there was nothing to protect?

Gambetta: “mafiosi [...] have regulated the town's wholesale markets by overseeing transactions, setting prices, running auctions, guaranteeing quality, enforcing promises, imposing obligations, apparently even protecting laborers from exploitation and abuse” (87).

It is easy to imagine ways in which the expansion of private ownership of farmland, on the one hand, and the development of urban commercial markets, on the other, created conditions that expanded the market for protection, especially when the state was not in a position to provide law enforcement and protection.

Another dimension here: the rise of the mafia is connected to expanding democratization. Here Gambetta (97-98) is talking about a particular type of democratization: he means that the field of political conflict shifted from one involving a small group of large private landowners who used protection from their employees as an instrument in their conflicts with one another to one involving a much larger assortment of groups from different parts of the rising middle class who used protection from independent operators as an instrument in their conflicts with one another. The key element here is that the providers were relatively autonomous operators.

So let's say that everything Gambetta has told us so far is true, that means we know two things: 1) the mafia is an industry providing private protection, and 2) it operates in a way that is autonomous from its clients. What we do not know about is the characteristics of the organization, or even whether there is an organization. There is considerable disagreement on this point, in particular whether the phenomenon under discussion is “a tight-knit secret sect versus a vague conglomerate of loosely related agents” (102). The evidence is not solid one way or the other, but a middle-range solution is possible, since it is clear that private protection groups exist and there is evidence that at least some of them are in contact with one another and coordinate their activities to a certain degree. Either extreme seems to be a mystification of criminal activity – either they are perceived as being capable of extraordinary coordination, or they are perceived as being completely incompetent. Most likely, people involved in criminal activity have the same capacity to organize themselves as people involved in any other kind of activity. Interests play a role: mafiosi stand to benefit both from the existence of a popular belief that they are well organized and powerful, and also from a popular lack of knowledge about how.

There is evidence of some level of stability and organization (104-105): the relatively consistent of number “firms” in Sicily over a long period of time (suggesting that there is some coordination and a low level of challenges to the system) and the relatively high average age of “bosses” (suggesting the existence of a “career path” and a process of qualification). A possible conclusion from this: incidents in which there are high levels of “gang violence” probably derive from the efforts of somebody outside the cartel of groups trying to alter the balance of power by force, and the efforts of the insiders to prevent outsiders from succeeding (107).

Evidence from the testimony of protected witnesses (110- ) also suggests a relatively consistent system of organization among “firms,” though not all of them hold to it with the same rigidity, and also that there are systems of coordination in most territories. There is some lack of clarity over exactly what is regulated by these local commissions (and how successfully). Unsurprisingly, it seems that the larger the territory in question is, the weaker the regulation.

I'll leave aside the question of rituals and rules in mafia “firms,” except to note that the style of presentation Gambetta uses seems to be derived from the fact that not very much is known about these things, but there does seem to be enough information available to suggest that rules are enforced unevenly, and that many of them, except the ones related to control of information, are symbolic in nature.

At our next meeting, more about mafia symbolism.