These alliances are particularly apparent in wartime as the coalitions cut across the urban-rural divide. The city offers more opportunities for the protection business since the number and range of transactions taking place there is greater. The country, meanwhile, supplies labor and is more easily policed by protection firms, and so offers greater opportunity for hiding out, conducting meetings, and providing alibis. Michele Greco, head of the Palermo cartel in the 1970s and early 1980s, hid for a long time in a farmhouse near Caccamo protected by the local family. To be equally secure, city families are obliged to take costly measures. Tommaso Buscetta provides what is probably an extreme example: "Pino Greco, known as 'Scarpuzzedda,' felt he had to clean up his territory... and forced all [natural] families which failed to provide sufficient guarantees of absolute loyalty to leave" (TB: III, 16). Judge Falcone reached this conclusion: "In some respects the Sicilian interior matters more than the center of Palermo. In the geography of families Palermo counts for a lot, but only up to a point. Palermo endorses decisions made by the interior and by the areas surrounding the city. I am not thinking just about the Corleone mafia. I am thinking also of the provinces of Calta nissetta and Trapani, areas where the mafia has a widespread control over the territory" (Repubblica March 1, 1991).

XREF: Connects to broader network/organized-crime geography literature on hybrid territorial governance.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 280