Diego Gambetta - Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate

Abbreviations

Copies of the sources marked with an asterisk (*) are deposited at the Cambridge University Library. Volumes and pages in these copies do not always coincide with those in the copies held in the archives of the Tribunale of Palermo.

PARLIAMENTARY AND JUDICIAL SOURCES

TESTIMONIES OF MAFIOSI WHO TURNED STATE WITNESSES

Acknowledgments

I have been at this book on and off for nearly ten years. I was able to take a major step forward thanks to a British Academy Research Readership, which gave me two blissful years of leave in 2000-2002. Then new projects intruded, especially on suicide attacks, and completing the last 10 percent took me as long as writing the first 90 percentone more thing you can blame on 9/11.

Another cause of my delay was a rather more fortunate oneand I am not referring only to my two children. Unlike the protagonists of this book, whose world is laced with mistrust, violence, and fraudulent communications, I am lucky to inhabit one that enjoys quite extraordinary levels of cooperation, in which what matters is getting an argument or fact right, and in which people are very generous with their ideas. Don't get me wrong; there is no shortage of bad apples in the academic world tooa few of whom earn an honorable mention in the bookbut that isn't surprising. What is surprising is to be able to count on so many kindred spirits. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Biggs, Avinash Dixit, Jon Elster, Peter Hill, Marek Kaminski, Gerry Mackie, Thomas Schelling, Federico Varese, an anonymous reviewer for Princeton University Press, and last but most emphatically not least my wife Valeria Pizzini-Gambetta. They all read the whole manuscript and showered me with stories, sources, comments, and criticisms that made me embark on some thorough rethinking and lengthy revisions. Together they produced a total of forty single-spaced pages, plus myriad e-mails and a countless number of words scribbled by hand on the copies I had given some of them to read. Had they given me fewer and shallower comments, you would not have been deprived of this book for so long!

The list of events and people, young and old, we should blame for my procrastination, while it should definitely exclude me, should include several other sharp friends and colleagues who helped me with individual chapters. On Information as Hostage (), and Marina also helped me with bibliographic searches and editing the manuscript. Finally, many more people sent me stories and suggestionsScott Atran, Robert Ford, Wolfgang Herbert, Stephen Holmes, Velisarios Kattoulas, Chu Yiu Kong, Dan Sperber, Laura Stoker, and Clinton Watson Taylor are those whom I can remember.

My good fortune grew even larger thanks to Ian Malcolm, the editor of this book for the Press. Ian, who is gifted with patience worthy of Job, edited and commented on all the chapters in the book, just as the editors of a bygone era used to dorarae aves now, whom authors are more likely to encounter in their dreams.

Bibliography

Abadinsky, H. 1983. The criminal lite. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Akerlof, G. 1970. The market for lemons: Qualitative uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, 488500.

kerstrm, M. 1983. Crooks and squares. Lifestyle of thieves and addicts in comparison to conventional people. Lund, Sweden: Studentlitteratur (also published in 1985 in the United States, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books).

Aleksenko, D. M. 2003. From the experience of the intelligence services of the Russian Empire in combating terrorists. In