It depends, for instance, on whether the protection which the mafia supplies in daily litigations will one day be satisfactorily discharged by the courts, whose inefficiency at present is simply appalling—that is, it depends on whether the state will at last choose to deliver genuine protection. Above all, it depends on whether the scope for illegal protection is reduced by intelligent intervention—for instance, liberalizing the drug market, abolishing state control over the price of cigarettes, making the procedure for assigning public contracts simpler and more transparent, improving antitrust legislation and applying it to wholesale markets, redesigning the voting process to minimize opportunities for selling votes.

XREF: Connects to economics-of-crime literature on why organized crime fills vacuums left by weak institutions, echoing earlier readings on state capacity. Builds on: "Mafia thrives where state enforcement is absent and transactions are unstable"

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 677