International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 115

Mafia: From the Use of Violence to Artificial Scarcity
In practical terms, the Mafia monitors the access to resources and to goods
finished in the territories over which it has sovereignty. This allows it to discriminate
between non-Mafiosi and Mafiosi by limiting access by the former. It even carries out
further discrimination between non-Mafiosi to reward (or punish) certain behaviors
which are more or less cooperative or, more generally, to encourage non-Mafiosi to
adopt non-hostile and even subservient behavior. Artificial scarcity affects a wide
variety of areas in the daily lives of consumers and producers. For example, obtaining
a place in a day nursery or retirement home in Mafia territory is mediated by the
criminal organization. It is not the Mafia which creates these places but it manages
to set itself up as an intermediary facilitating access to the resource for whoever
is requesting it. In return, the beneficiary of the Mafia “favor” becomes de facto
indebted and thus puts himself—albeit involuntarily—in a situation of dependency
vis-à-vis the Mafia.
The same system is set up on a larger scale at the production level. The most
sophisticated version of artificial scarcity in this context consists in the Mafia’s
infiltration of key sectors of the legal economy. In order to achieve this, the Mafia
controls legal enterprises whose activity is declared and visible, taking care to
choose sectors which will allow them to condition a whole network. For example,
Italian Mafias are especially present in the building and public works sector. Within
this sector, the Mafia more specifically targets concrete production and clearing/
earthmoving activities. These activities have the characteristic of being upstream
in the procedures involved in building and public works, and of being territorially
embedded. Pouring concrete and supplying machines are necessarily extremely
localized activities. Not delivering the concrete, or delivering it late, means wielding
real power to obstruct work on the building site and to damage clients further down
the line. It is the same if, in the end, the clearing/earthmoving machines are not
available at the right time. Mafiosi thus have the power to block a building site or
cause production to be late, which entails a considerable cost. Controlling these key
activities therefore allows the Mafia to condition the whole of the building and public
works sector, to impose its own suppliers and dictate its conditions. The Chinese
Triads, on the other hand, have control over the soya bean market so that they can
condition the Asian catering/restaurant sector.
Artificial scarcity is based on—and, conversely, causes—a fundamental asymmetry
between Mafiosi and non-Mafiosi: on the one hand, Mafiosi benefit from strong
cohesiveness (the famous “force of the associative tie” defining the Mafia according
to article 416-bis of the Italian Penal Code); while, on the other hand, non-Mafiosi are
largely unorganized, not structured within an association and therefore in a position
of weakness vis-à-vis Mafiosi and the scarcity which they create. Thanks to artificial
scarcity, the Mafiosi accentuate this asymmetry by putting possible opponents in an
economically vulnerable position, while favoring access to resources for those who
cooperate. This is how Mafia power takes hold and becomes widely accepted; it no
longer needs to resort to regular violence in order to impose its rules.
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