Who’s Who in the Crew
When Tommaso Buscetta began talking to Judge Falcone in 1984, one of the first things he explained was how the organisation was put together. Dickie sums it up. At the very bottom are the soldiers, grouped in tens, each group commanded by a capodecina. Every capodecina answers to the elected boss of the family. The boss has a deputy and one or more advisers, consiglieri. Three families on neighbouring territories make up a district. The heads of the districts sit on the Commission, which Dickie calls the Mafia’s parliament, or the board of directors of the province of Palermo. Some five thousand men of honour. Significant killings are planned at the top and carried out only with approval from the very highest level.
A neat pyramid. Then Gambetta, having gone through the testimony of every mafioso who talked, added corrections that make the picture far more honest. There are never more than three consiglieri, according to Buscetta, but in some families the posts don’t exist at all, or nobody pays them much attention. The word capodecina comes from “ten”, but that’s a convention. The Bontate family in 1981 had at least a hundred and twenty members; the Calderone family in 1962, thirty to thirty-five; the Colletti family in Ribera, about fifteen; the Marsala family in Vicari, ten. In Terrasini there were just two. And according to Buscetta, a family can consist of one man.
A family of one, where he is his own boss, consigliere and capodecina. That’s not a joke but a reminder: you set up posts to fit the size of the business, not to follow a textbook.
Roles, Not Nameplates
Every team, large or small, has roles. They exist even if you’ve never named them. Someone does the main work. Someone commands the people who do it. Someone advises the one who decides. Someone keeps the money. Someone knows everything that’s going on, because every paper and every call passes through them. Someone picks the people. If you don’t know who plays which role in your team, you don’t know your team.
Pistone describes the American set-up like this. Every boss has an underboss, a consigliere who settles disputes and helps the boss make decisions, and capos who run the soldiers. And then there’s a whole swarm of associates: they do business with the made men but aren’t part of the family. For every two hundred made men there are about ten times as many associates. They follow the rules and pay their share, but, Pistone writes, they get less respect, and nobody stands up for them the way they stand up for their own.
Look how many roles there are in that picture, and how differently each is treated. Staff and non-staff, insiders and near-insiders. The office is the same: permanent employees and contractors, the core and the fringe. Each group has its own rights and its own expectations. Trouble starts when a contractor thinks he’s one of us and gets treated like an outsider, or the other way round.
Soldiers and Lieutenants
Let’s start at the bottom. Soldiers are the ones who do the work. Without them there’s nothing. Lieutenants, or captains, are the ones who command them. It’s easy to spoil a good soldier by making him a lieutenant: being good with your hands and being good with people are different skills. The best presser won’t necessarily make the best manager. Sometimes she will, like our Anna. More often she won’t, and then you lose a good presser and gain a bad manager.
Dash makes a useful point about the Sicilian clans of the nineteenth century. There the hierarchy protected the captain: he passed his orders down through a second-in-command and the lieutenants, while the dirty work was done by novices and a whole pack of “wild dogs” who weren’t full members. Since the captain himself committed no crimes, it was almost impossible to prove anything against him. The hierarchy was not only a way of managing but a way of keeping the man at the top well away from anything he could be called to account for.
In the office this sounds innocent, but the idea is the same. A capo shouldn’t do a soldier’s work, and not only because his hour costs more. Because he has to see the whole thing and answer for the whole, not for one piece of it.
The Consigliere
Now about my own role, since I held it for forty years. The consigliere is the man who tells the Don what the Don doesn’t want to hear. The rest is detail.
The Don has plenty of people who carry out orders. Plenty of people who flatter. Few people who look at the business from outside and say, “Stop, think again.” The consigliere doesn’t command soldiers and doesn’t earn money himself. What he sells is judgement. If the judgement is bad, you don’t need a consigliere. If it’s good but he’s afraid to say it, you need him even less.
If you have someone like that, look after him, even when he annoys you. Especially when he annoys you. If you don’t, find one. It might be an old partner, a former boss, your wife, a friend from another line of work. What matters is that he doesn’t depend on you so much that he’s afraid to disagree with you.
The Secretary and the Bookkeeper
And two roles that everyone underrates. The person every paper and every call goes through, and the person who keeps the money. They know more about the business than anyone, the Don included. Because they see everything: who rang, what was signed, where the money went, who owes whom.
For Don Vincenzo it was Signora Lucia who kept the order book. For forty years she knew which hotel paid when, which cook was in a temper, whose birthday was when, which client was about to leave, and she knew it before I did. The old bookkeeper I’ve already told you about knew what every offer brought to the Don would cost and how much each one ended up bringing in. If either of them had wanted to do harm, they could have done more of it than any competitor.
Hence two rules. First: choose the people for these places with special care, and pay them well. Not for what they do, but for what they know and don’t say. Second: never give them cause for grievance. An aggrieved secretary and an aggrieved bookkeeper are the most dangerous people in any office. You remember how it ended for Vollero when he didn’t answer the letter from a fifteen-dollar soldier. Imagine how it would have gone if it had been his bookkeeper.
The Man Who Picks the People
And one last role worth mentioning. The person who picks the people decides what the team will look like in five years. In our world that was the job of the sponsors and of whoever drew up the lists for making. In the office it might be the personnel department, or it might be you. If the person picking people gets it wrong, the mistakes multiply: bad people bring in bad people, and the good ones leave. So you don’t hand the picking to someone who has nothing better to do. You do it yourself, or you give it to your best.
The Bottom Line
Don’t turn your best soldier into a bad lieutenant, and keep a consigliere close who isn’t afraid to disagree with you. And remember that there are families of one. They just don’t last long.