Palermo's forty-six families answered to roughly fifteen district chiefs. [fact]
Its members—called capi mandamento—each represented three geographically contiguous families. For the approximately forty-six families in Palermo province, therefore, we can assume that there were about fifteen capi mandamento, which was in fact the figure given by a confidential source to Judge Terranova twenty years earlier, in 1965.
Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 287