According to Contorno: "The Cosa Nostra was born to help the poor and helpless... If something happened to [these] people, they did not go to the Carabinieri; they came to the family of their area [and said], 'They stole my car,' 'they stole [from] my house,' and we found those things for them" (TC-GdS, April 12, 1986). Since a theft can be seen as a breach of a particular contract called property rights, as I argued in Chapter 1, in analytical terms this form of protection is like dispure settlement.

DEFINE: Analytically frames mafia 'protection' as dispute resolution rather than simple coercion, reframing theft recovery as contract enforcement.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 434