In general, we can expect to be better at protecting all transactions over a small territory rather than some over a variety of territories. The area where we were born or have lived longest is the best in which to begin operations, for there we know every resident and every street corner. Simply frequenting the right places—bars, shops, the bank, the church—is sufficient to bring useful information to our attention. We can monitor directly the reliability of the information we collect. We are likely to have a higher concentration of friends and relatives here than elsewhere, and they represent cheap and trustworthy sources of information. Women talk to other women, children to other children, and report back to us.

XREF: Connects to the principle that dense local social networks provide cheap, reliable information — parallel to how legitimate small businesses benefit from community embeddedness, described in Jane Jacobs' works on neighborhood economics.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 98