A Fight in the Crew
Six months after Pistone attached himself to Jilly’s crew in Brooklyn, two old members of the gang, Patsy and Frankie, came out of prison. They took a dislike to the new man straight away. One day Pistone walked into the shop and found the whole crew sitting in dead silence. Jilly took him by the elbow and suggested a walk.
Out on the street Jilly said it straight: nothing personal, Don, but you’ve got a problem with Patsy and Frankie. They don’t trust you, and they want to check you out with your people in Miami. Pistone asked: and do you trust me? Jilly got flustered: sure I trust you, but I grew up with these guys, we worked together long before they got sent away, I can’t go against them. Let’s go back, sit down and talk it over.
Pistone later goes over the episode with professional respect. The two of them did everything by the rules: they went to the senior man and laid out their complaint. Jilly, who ran the crew, couldn’t brush them off, because he’d known them much longer. The conflict became his problem, and he too went by the rules: first he talked to Pistone one to one, out on the street. And when Pistone dug his heels in, he proposed that they all sit down together. At the table, Pistone writes, everybody puts their cards on the table and says to each other’s faces what they’ve got against each other.
The talk at the table was rough, with a gun lying on it, and it ended with Pistone giving them a name to check, and the check, to his relief, came through. But what interests me in this story isn’t the gun. It’s the procedure. It works for any office.
How a Dispute Is Heard
Look at the procedure again, without the gangster colour. The unhappy parties don’t go to each other; they go to the senior man. The senior man doesn’t decide on the strength of one side: first he talks to the other, separately and without witnesses. If they can’t sort it out in private, everyone sits down at one table and says it to each other’s faces. The senior man runs the conversation. The decision is made right there.
Why? Because a quarrel that’s left to grow poisons everyone. If two people fall out and each complains to his own friends, within a week the team has split into two parties and nobody remembers how it started. If the senior man knows and says nothing, everyone decides he doesn’t care, and they quarrel more boldly. If the senior man takes one side without hearing the other, the second will remember for ever that there’s no justice to be had here.
Break it up fast. Talk to each of them in person. If that doesn’t work, one table, with you there, face to face. And decide. A bad decision made quickly is better than a good one that arrives a month later, when everyone has already said things to each other that can’t be taken back.
How Not to Do It
And here is what a hearing looks like when it drags on.
In the spring of 1981 Tony Mirra, whom Pistone had run around with in his first months in Little Italy, decided to win him back from Lefty. He went to the head of the family and declared that Donnie had worked for him from the start, and so belonged to him. Sit-downs began at the club of the Bonanno family’s consigliere on Prince Street in Little Italy. FBI informants reported a strange surge of activity: well-known mafiosi were turning up there from all over.
Lefty phoned Pistone at the end of his tether. In Pistone’s account, he said Donnie couldn’t imagine what it was like: this was the eighth day they’d been fighting Mirra over him, and that day alone Lefty had spent four and a half hours getting him off the hook. New accusations got mixed into the business: another man claimed Donnie had made money with him on the side and hadn’t shared it. And then Lefty lost it: right in front of all the bosses he shouted at his own captain, Sonny, then at the other captains, and said more than he should have. The upshot, as Lefty put it, was that they threw him out of the sit-down.
Five days later, according to Lefty, the sit-downs decided in Donnie’s favour. But look at what that dispute cost. Almost two weeks of meetings over a single associate whom nobody even asked. A quarrel between two men had swollen into a dispute involving captains, consiglieri, bosses and even the head of the family, who was in prison. And the man who lost his temper lost his seat at the table, even though in the end he turned out to be right.
Two mistakes in this story are worth remembering. First: a dispute that isn’t settled at once gathers new accusations like a snowball. Second: whoever loses his self-control in a dispute loses, even if he’s right. Lefty was lucky that others spoke up for him. You may not be.
Inside or Outside
And one more rule. A quarrel inside the team is settled inside the team. Taking it outside, to strangers, to competitors, to the bosses above over the head of your own, means admitting you couldn’t cope.
Joe Bonanno, explaining how the American Commission worked, said that in an internal revolt the matter was usually settled within the family. The Commission stepped in only if asked, and only if both sides agreed to accept its decision. Even in a world where people argued with guns, they tried not to drag their quarrels next door.
The office is the same. If two of your people fall out, it’s your problem, not your boss’s, and certainly not your clients’. If you fall out with a colleague yourself, talk to him first, not to his boss. Going higher is worth it only once everything inside has been exhausted. And remember: everyone you drag into somebody else’s quarrel will remember afterwards that you couldn’t handle it yourself.
The Bottom Line
When you hear about a quarrel, deal with it at once: first with each of them alone, then, if need be, at one table, face to face. And remember Lefty, thrown out of the sit-down. Being right is no reason to shout at the bosses. Even if they deserve it.