Prologue
People often asked me where I studied. They asked in different ways: bankers politely, investigators with interest, young men from good families with badly hidden pity. I always told the truth.
Edited by Sergio Killuminati
Business, the Family Way
Business,the Family WayEdited bySergio KilluminatiRead side by side with another language: Italiano · РусскийSide-by-side reading in two languages works on a computer, a tablet in landscape or a foldable phone.
How it begins
People often asked me where I studied. They asked in different ways: bankers politely, investigators with interest, young men from good families with badly hidden pity. I always told the truth. At Don Vincenzo Carmuso’s kitchen table, forty years, no weekends, no holidays. They didn’t hand out diplomas there. The exam was every day, and there were no resits. Expulsion was final too.
You’re smiling. Don’t. Our world has always had its schools. They just never put up a sign. Historians who have spent their whole lives on the Sicilian Mafia say it plainly: from the middle of the nineteenth century, the Ucciardone prison in Palermo was something like a university for the Mafia. Men sat there, waited for trial, traded news and contacts. They learned how to talk so outsiders wouldn’t understand, how to ask, how to refuse, how to tell whom to pay and whom you must never pay.
Contents
Chapter 1. The Business
In the eighties a young Italian sociologist, Diego Gambetta, came to Palermo. He wanted to understand the Mafia the way an economist would: what it produces, whom it sells to and why people pay it. He went round the shops, sat in furniture stores, listened.
Chapter 2. Reputation
In the 1940s there was no better-known face in Sicily than the face of Salvatore Giuliano.
Chapter 3. The Offer
Nicola Gentile, known in America as Cola, spent half a century in our world and in old age dictated his memoirs. He was a vain man, and historians read him with care. But one of his parables is worth a whole library on selling.
Chapter 4. Keeping Your Word
Around 1902 Giuseppe Morello, whom you’ve already met as a counterfeiter, ran into a problem any manufacturer would recognise.
Chapter 5. Counting the Money
Don Vincenzo Carmuso couldn’t read a balance sheet. What he could do was ask one question, and he asked it of everyone who brought him good news: “How much of this is ours?”
Chapter 6. Inside People's Heads
On 8 May 1922 in New York, a block from police headquarters, five men on Grand Street opened rapid fire on one another. A war for power was on between two gangs, and among the shooters was Giuseppe Masseria, the future “boss of bosses”.
Chapter 7. Be Your Own Don
In 1903 the New York police arrested Giuseppe Morello and Ignazio Lupo, and the arrests came to nothing: not enough evidence, and the case fell apart.
Chapter 8. The Way Up
In May 1976, in Sicily, nineteen-year-old Giovanni Brusca was made a member of the Mafia—the man who would later blow up Judge Falcone. Dickie describes the ceremony from Brusca’s own testimony.
Chapter 9. The Family's People
Until 1936 Charles “Lucky” Luciano was one of the most powerful men in New York. Then they put him in prison, and in 1946 they deported him from America to Italy.
Chapter 10. A Crew of Your Own
In 1945, not long after the war, the young Tommaso Buscetta began to be approached, as he later recalled, by courteous, mysterious men who expressed themselves in half-sentences and subtle hints. He could feel he was being watched and weighed up.
Chapter 11. The Machine
In October 1957, in the Palermo restaurant Spanò, over that same five-hour lunch we talked about, Joe Bonanno suggested to the three or four Sicilian mafiosi sitting around him that they set up a Commission. Buscetta was there and later told how it all went.
Chapter 12. Taking It Apart
In April 1903 some new loaders turned up on Stanton Street in Little Italy. They worked in a strange way: from eight in the morning till dark they stood in a doorway across from one particular shop and loaded nothing at all.
Chapter 13. Fine-Tuning
In the autumn of 1933 Charles “Lucky” Luciano took charge of a syndicate that went after the brothels of New York. The idea was businesslike: take control of the whole trade and collect tribute from every house. It ended, Dickie writes, in commercial failure.
Epilogue
Don Vincenzo lived to eighty and died in his own bed. In our trade that alone is an achievement someone ought to write a separate book about. But there won’t be such a book, because the Don’s secret was a dull one. He didn’t chase anything flashy.
The Family's characters are fictional; historical episodes are told from public sources.