Title and Money
One day Jilly’s crew, the one Pistone started out with in Brooklyn, had something to celebrate: Jilly had been made in the Colombo family. He was glowing. He couldn’t stop telling everyone how fantastic it had been. Pistone writes that the very same evening everybody started treating Jilly with more respect, without the old familiarity. The crew had a made man of its own.
What did Jilly get? Not a pay rise: there are no salaries in the Mafia. He got a title. And in that world a title meant a lot. Made men, Pistone explains, are respected; the Mafia itself stands up for them; other families have no right to meddle in their affairs without permission. Total immunity. Compared with ordinary mortals, he writes, made men are royalty.
A Title Is Currency Too
That’s the first thing to know about titles: they are currency too, and sometimes worth more than money. A man who has been given a post, a rank, signing authority, a seat at the table has got something you can’t buy in a shop: recognition. For many people that matters more than a bonus.
A title costs less than a raise for whoever gives it, but it isn’t free. Every time you make someone senior, you change the relationships across the whole team. Someone is pleased, someone takes offence, someone starts waiting for his turn. And a title given to the wrong person devalues all the other titles. If every other person in the office is a “lead specialist”, the words no longer mean anything.
Don Vincenzo handed out titles sparingly. When Anna started doing well on the front counter, he first made her shift supervisor, and gave her a raise only six months later, once he’d seen she ran the shift as well as she’d run the counter. He used to say: a title is an advance, money is the settlement. You give an advance when you believe. You settle up when you see the result.
Who Doesn’t Need a Title
Second: not everyone needs a title. For some people it just gets in the way.
Gambetta tells the story of the Costanzo brothers, the biggest builders in Catania. None of them was formally a member of the Mafia, though they worked hand in glove with it. Antonino Calderone explained why: his brother used to say that Enzo Costanzo had all the right qualities and hesitated for a while. But if Costanzo had become a man of honour, he would have had to be introduced to all the other men of honour, and they would have considered themselves entitled to come straight to him for work and favours. And if he turned anyone down, he risked being “removed”, and would certainly have lost his peace of mind.
A title gives rights, but duties too. Sometimes it pays to stay without one. The man you offer a manager’s job may turn it down not out of modesty but because he doesn’t want calls at the weekend. Don’t take offence. He may understand more about titles than you do.
And sometimes a man simply doesn’t care about titles. The smuggler Spadaro, the “Agnelli of smuggling” himself, was a member of a family, but for breaking the rules on smuggling his protector demoted him to a plain soldier. Buscetta testified that although this should have caused a conflict, Spadaro didn’t seem the least bit bothered, and carried on as if nothing had happened. Gambetta explains: had Spadaro cared about his status as a mafioso, he would have reacted more strongly. What interested him was money and business, not rank. Demotion is no punishment for a man who doesn’t live for his position.
Look at what drives each of your people. One needs a title, another money, a third interesting work, a fourth freedom. Give everyone the same thing and half of them will be unhappy.
“Next Time You’ll Be First”
Third: promises of titles must be kept, and the queue has to be fair. Otherwise a promise turns to poison.
One evening in a Brooklyn restaurant Sonny Black praised Pistone: he liked the way Pistone handled things in Florida; he was independent, he didn’t need pushing, he didn’t come begging for money like the rest. And he added that at the end of the year the books were due to open, he could put up five names, and he already had his list. The first place was already taken. The other four were relatives of made men, so they jumped the queue. But next time Pistone would be first. Next year, he hoped.
“Next time” and “relatives go first” are the oldest formulas in the history of promotion. Pistone didn’t care; he was after something else. But imagine a genuine associate who had worked for years, taken risks and heard that every single year.
There were plenty of them. Guido from the Brooklyn crew, Pistone says, was forever grumbling about the new made men in the Colombo family, especially the boss’s son: he worked twice as hard as those kids, and they still got made; what business did that one have being made, he only got in because of his old man. Jilly cut him off: shut up, the shop was full of people, they’d all end up buried for badmouthing the boss’s boy. But the grievance didn’t go anywhere.
In Goodfellas, mind you, this is a film, there’s a scene everyone who’s seen it remembers. Tommy, hot-headed and dangerous, puts on his best suit: today he’s going to be made. They take him to a house, he walks into a room, and they kill him. Not for doing bad work, but for an old killing of a man who wasn’t to be touched. The title promised in return for loyalty turned out to be a trap.
In the office a cheated hope of promotion rarely ends that horribly, but it always ends the same way: the best leave and the rest stop trying. If you promise a promotion, deliver. If you can’t, don’t promise. If you push a relative to the front of the queue, be ready for everyone else to remember it for ever.
Raises Are for Results
One last thing, about money. Give raises for results, not for length of service, not for complaining and not for loyalty. If you raise the pay of whoever asks loudest, you teach the whole team to ask loudly. If of whoever has sat there longest, you teach them to sit. If of whoever has done the most good, you teach them to do good.
Sonny, notice, didn’t praise Pistone for loyalty or for having been around a long time. He praised him for earning on his own, not begging and not needing a push. Those are the right reasons, even coming from a man you wouldn’t take as a teacher.
The Bottom Line
A title is an advance. Money is the settlement. And never invite a man to “get made” when you actually have quite different plans for him. Even in an office, people notice.