Twelve Trades
Once I asked Don Vincenzo how many ways there are in the world to make money. He thought and said: “There’s one way to make money. Give a man something he’ll pay for. But that one way comes in a lot of shapes.” Then we sat up till late at night counting the shapes. We got to a dozen. Later I found out that learned people had counted roughly the same number. It cost us one bottle of grappa. It cost them several years of work.
Let’s go through them. For each one I’ll give you an example from our life and tell you where the example stops being honest. That matters, because in our world a lot of things are passed off as one shape when they’re really another.
The Thing
Product: you make a thing once and sell it many times. Prohibition beer, wine, cheese, bricks. The good side of a product is that it’s separate from you: make a batch and keep selling while you sleep. The bad side is stock, spoilage, and how easy a thing is to fake. Giuseppe Morello, whom historians call the head of the first New York family, faked precisely a product—money. In 1910 the court gave him twenty-five years. Forgery, as you see, is the shortest road from a product of your own to lodgings at the state’s expense.
Resale: buy cheap, sell dearer, and take on the risk and the bother. At the start of the century Ignazio Lupo, known as the Wolf, Morello’s relative and right-hand man, ran a large wholesale business in New York in Italian food and wine. As the historian Mike Dash tells it, grocers were made to buy through that wholesale network at high prices, and they soon learned how dangerous it was to go to a cheaper supplier. That’s where resale stops being a trade: an honest middleman earns by bringing the right goods to the right place, not by forbidding people to go elsewhere.
The Job
Service: you do for a man what he can’t or won’t do himself. You wash his linen, fix his car, handle his case in court. A service can’t be made in advance and put on a shelf; it lives only while you’re working, so its price is your time and your skill.
Brokering: bring together two people who need to find each other, and take a percentage for it. Remember Peppe, who got the cattle breeder and the butcher to agree? That’s pure brokering. Broker, agent, dealer, matchmaker—it’s all the same work: knowing both sides better than they know each other.
Insurance: take on someone else’s risk for a regular fee. Gambetta, who studied the Palermo Mafia as an economist, believed its main product was in fact protection, a close relative of insurance. But the difference is enormous. An insurer takes on a risk that exists without him. The man who starts the fire himself and then sells you fire insurance is no insurer. He’s an arsonist with good manners.
Access
Shared use: one thing that many people use, each a little. A gym, a swimming pool, a club. Lefty Ruggiero, whom I’ve already told you about, had his own club at 43 Madison Street in New York, and his people came there to talk, to play, to make arrangements. Shared use pays when none of them could afford the thing alone, but together they easily can.
Renting: let someone use a thing for a while and get it back. The FBI agent Pistone described how Anthony Mirra of the Bonanno family ran his route of vending machines and gaming machines. The machines stood all over the city, in shops, diners and clubs. Mirra drove round the spots, opened the machines with a key, gave the owner of the place his share, twenty-five dollars or so, and collected around two thousand a week off the route. On paper the business has a lawful shape: placing equipment in return for a share of the takings. How he found new spots was another matter. He’d simply walk in and offer the owner twenty-four hours to find out who Tony was. By the second visit everyone agreed. That’s not renting. That’s renting at gunpoint.
Subscription: a man pays regularly and regularly gets something for it. A newspaper, water, rubbish collection. Don Vincenzo had an arrangement with several hotels: every week we collected and brought back their linen at a fixed price. The hotels could leave for another laundry any month they liked, and that kept us on our toes better than any overseer. The shopkeeper’s monthly payment “for peace and quiet”, though, which in Sicily they call pizzo, is not a subscription, even if it also comes round every month. In a subscription the client can cancel. With pizzo he can’t.
Money
Lending: give money now and get more back later. When Pistone first got close to the Bonanno and Colombo families, he was even a little disappointed: it turned out they were doing ordinary loan-sharking. Nothing mysterious, just money at interest for people the bank won’t lend to. An honest lender earns by taking a risk others turned down. A loan shark earns by the debtor having nowhere to go.
Option: sell the right to do something later. A theatre ticket, a reservation, payment in advance for a harvest. In The Godfather there’s a scene where the Don agrees to help the undertaker Bonasera and says that some day he’ll ask for a service in return. In effect he’s acquiring an option: the right to make a demand in the future, with neither sum nor date named. A very powerful shape, and a very dangerous one for whoever granted it: he doesn’t know what he’ll be asked for.
Capital: put money into a business and become a co-owner. In the fifties Meyer Lansky put in most of the fourteen million dollars it cost to build the Hotel Riviera in Havana. It opened in December 1957. A little over a year later came the revolution, Lansky left, and the business was nationalised. Capital gives you a share in the future, and in its disasters too.
Gathering a crowd: bring people together and sell access to them. A newspaper, a magazine, a radio station, any hall where people come in a crowd. In our laundry there was a board on the wall, and the shopkeepers on our street paid the Don to pin up a notice on it: on a Saturday forty people stood waiting for their washing, and every one of them was bored.
What to Do with It
Twelve shapes aren’t a menu where you pick one dish. A good business often combines several. Don Vincenzo’s laundry was a service for passers-by, a subscription for the hotels, a tablecloth rental for the restaurants and, as you see, a bit of a newspaper. Each shape had its own money, its own risk and its own clients.
When you come up with an idea, ask yourself: in what shape am I taking the money? And couldn’t I take it in one more? If you sell a thing, maybe it’s worth renting it out. If you provide a service, maybe people would find a subscription easier. Sometimes changing the shape turns a thin business into a fat one without changing anything in the work itself.
And one last question, which in our world has to be asked out loud. Is it really the shape it says it is? Or is it a subscription you can’t cancel, a loan you can’t get out of, a rental you can’t turn down? If the client can’t walk away, you’re not selling a trade. You’re selling fear. And fear, as you’ll see, doesn’t age well.