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Many large drug cartels pay for schools, give out food to the poor, and control some forms of crime to increase public support or at least prevent their protest.

Once organized crime gets big enough, it's really difficult to distinguish from a weak government.

Sure and many feudal warlords grew the same way but at some point the Castle decayed away and became a tourist destination and what was left behind was the community and governance.

Once organized crime gets really big, it stops being crime and persists on organization alone.

I agree, but I would argue that the label of "crime" is mostly semantics. The violence (or at least the threat of violence) of the crimes still persists, but whoever is the most powerful group gets to change the label of their violence from "crime" to "law enforcement".

We call those "paragovernamental organizations", for obvious reasons.

If they get too powerful, we just drop the "para" on that name.

Yeah, there is a huge difference between opportunist petty thiefs and organized crime bosses.

Of course, he left.