The Mercenary and the Crusader
In The Godfather, Coppola’s film, there’s a scene I’ve watched more often than the film of my own wedding. Virgil Sollozzo, whom everyone calls the Turk, comes to see Don Corleone. He proposes going into the narcotics trade. The money is huge. The Turk wants two things from Corleone: a million dollars to start with, and protection—that is, his friends among the politicians and judges. The Don hears him out and says no. He explains it calmly: the people who are his friends today put up with gambling, a weakness they consider harmless. With narcotics, they’ll stop being his friends.
That’s a story, not a chronicle, and I won’t pass it off as a lesson from the life of real families. But look at how the refusal is built. Sollozzo counts only money: what the new business will bring in. Corleone also counts what he’ll have to live with afterwards: which relationships he’ll lose, what he’ll become in the eyes of the people everything else rests on. He doesn’t choose the most profitable business. He chooses the one he can run for years without wrecking himself.
The Mercenary
The mercenary is the man who goes into a business only for the money. You’ll say: what’s wrong with that? The Family works for money too. What’s wrong is that a business is almost never the way it was sold to you.
You were promised a month, and it turns into a year. They talked about one warehouse, and there are four, each with its own headache. Any business, even the simplest, is made of the same thing repeated a thousand times: get up, drive over, check, count again, have a row, come back. Every day, in the rain, with a fever. A man held only by money lasts a few months at this. Then he starts working out how much he gets for each hour of boredom. Then he leaves for whoever pays ten more and takes everything he knew with him. At the office they see a man like that off with a cake. Our send-offs were different, but just as permanent.
If you want to see what a life looks like when there’s nothing in it but chasing money, read the memoirs of Joseph Pistone. He was the FBI agent who in the late seventies spent several years among the men of the Bonanno family under the name Donnie Brasco. His sponsor and mentor was a soldier, Benjamin Ruggiero, known as Lefty. Lefty chased the next deal all his life and was broke all his life. Because of his gambling debts the family wouldn’t make him for a long time; they could only do it in the summer of 1977, when he’d scraped together enough to pay off at least some of his creditors. Then he fell into debt again, this time to his own boss, and handed over almost everything he earned. Pistone writes that in that world everybody was forever pleading poverty. Lefty, it seems, wasn’t pretending.
I’m not moralising. I’m showing you a treadmill. If the only reason to get up in the morning is money, there will never be enough money, because you have nothing else.
Hence my advice. Pick a business where at least something interests you. Not necessarily everything. Dull businesses are often the most reliable ones: fewer people are after them. A laundry looks dull until you realise how many people and conversations pass through it. Don Vincenzo kept three laundries for forty years and never once yawned. He used to say a laundry is the best place to get to know a city: people bring in everything they’ve got dirty.
The Crusader
The crusader is trickier, because you like him.
His eyes are shining. He doesn’t ask about money; it embarrasses him to talk about it. He’s come with an idea, and the idea is beautiful. The Don had a nephew who dreamed of a real Sicilian trattoria, like his grandmother’s, with proper dough and wine from a single village. The Don gave him the money because he loved him. The trattoria stood empty: the city was happy with the pizzeria round the corner, and nobody understood what made this dough better. After a year the nephew closed down, owing money to the wine supplier. The wine, by the way, was superb. We finished it off ourselves, at the trattoria’s wake.
The crusader looks at his dream for so long that he stops seeing whether there are any people with wallets around it. A good idea and a good business are different things. An idea is judged by the man who thought it up. A business is judged by the man who takes out his wallet.
I’m not saying you should throw the dream away. Let the trattoria open on Sundays for friends and family. A dream is fine as a sideline and as a school: it teaches you things nobody teaches for money. Just don’t feed the Family on it. First set up a business that pays for the lights and the people. Then, when the Family’s funds are full, save the world as much as you like.
And if you’re not sure whether you’ve gone blind yourself, call in someone who doesn’t love your idea. Let him do the sums. He’ll do it in an evening, and you’ll save a couple of years. That’s exactly what the Don did: he handed his most beautiful proposals over to be taken apart by the old bookkeeper, who had no taste and no imagination, but he could add. The Don called him the most honest man in the Family: he simply had nothing to lie with.
In Between
Between the mercenary and the crusader runs a narrow road, and it’s walked by the people who stay in business a long time. They like what they do, but they test it with money. Corleone in the film is no crusader: he understands perfectly well what profit is. And no mercenary: he knows what he stands on. So he asks himself two questions instead of one. Will this make money? And can I do it for twenty years without losing what I already have?
If the answer to both is “yes”, take it. If it’s “yes” only to the first, you’re a mercenary. If only to the second, you’re a crusader. Either way, put it aside and think some more.