Leaving, Stealing, Lean Years

On 14 August 1981, seventeen days after FBI agents showed Sonny Black a photograph of Donnie Brasco, the bosses called a big sit-down in New Jersey. Sonny, Pistone writes, had three options: come in to us, run, or go to the sit-down. He chose the last. Pistone wasn’t the least bit surprised. Sonny never came home.

As soon as word got out that Sonny had disappeared, Pistone told his boss: if anybody comes for his pigeons, you can close the case, because Sonny’s dead. A week later some men turned up on the roof and smashed the pigeon coop to pieces.

Exactly a year later, in August 1982, his body was found on Staten Island. Pistone explains Sonny’s offence, by the standards of his world, quite simply: he had brought an FBI agent close, trusted him like a brother and was about to put him up for membership.

Whoever Hires Answers for the Hire

I start with this grim story because it holds the main rule of this chapter. Responsibility for a man in the team lies with whoever brought him in. In our world that responsibility was collected in the most terrible way. In yours it’s collected in reputation, trust, career. But it is always collected.

So every time you take someone on, remember that you answer for him. And every time you let someone go, remember that you’re also correcting your own mistake. Don’t put all the blame on the man you’re firing. You chose him. You kept him. You didn’t notice in time.

Fire Quickly and Without Humiliation

Firing people is unpleasant, so everyone puts it off. That’s the worst thing you can do. A man who isn’t coping can feel it himself. His misery drags on, the team sees you can’t make up your mind, and starts to have doubts about you. A bad worker kept on out of pity costs the team more than finding a good one would.

Once you’ve decided, act fast. Tell him in person, one to one, briefly, without long accusations and without lies. Explain why. Don’t humiliate him: not in front of people, not with shouting, not with a list of every sin for the last ten years. Help him leave with dignity: give him a reference if he’s earned one, pay what’s owed and a little on top. A man let go with respect will speak well of you, or at least keep quiet. A man let go in disgrace will take his revenge for the rest of his life, and he’ll have both the time and the knowledge about you to do it.

In forty years Don Vincenzo fired ten people at most. He would call each of them into the back room, pour a coffee and say everything in five minutes. Then he paid a month in advance. Two of those ten went on to work for our competitors. What they said about the Don at someone else’s table I don’t know. I know they both came to his funeral.

A Thief Is Not Forgiven

There’s one exception to the gentleness: theft. Whoever steals from the business doesn’t get a second chance.

Pistone writes that in the Mafia, for holding back loot or disrespecting your superior, they didn’t throw you out or fine you, they simply killed you. Hiding earnings from the bosses was considered the second mortal sin after ratting. Obviously that’s not how it’s done in an office. But the idea is sound: theft from your own can’t be forgiven, because forgiven theft becomes the rule. If one man stole and stayed, the rest will decide it’s allowed.

Once, in one of our laundries, a counter girl was taking money for express pressing and writing it down as ordinary, keeping the difference. Not much, but every day. The old bookkeeper spotted it in the books after three months. The Don called her in that same evening, showed her the book and told her not to come in tomorrow. No shouting, no police, no scene. She gave the money back herself, but not all of it: what had gone missing before those three months the bookkeeper never did manage to account for. The Don explained nothing to anyone else: by the next day everyone knew anyway. It didn’t work miracles. A couple of years later a driver started siphoning petrol from the lorry, and the Don had to call another man into the back room with the book. But nobody at our place ever again passed off express pressing as ordinary.

The Ones Taken On for One Job

A word apart about people who are taken on for a single job and then got rid of. In our world that was done literally. Gambetta writes that the Mafia seldom entrusts delicate tasks to outsiders. When it does, to spies and hired hands from the criminal underworld who are easy to blackmail, such people run the risk of vanishing as soon as the job is done, because they become both dangerous and unnecessary. Giuseppe Scozzari, a petty thief from Turin, went to Sicily to carry out a job for a local boss, was wounded, was driven back to Turin by his brother-in-law, and there he disappeared. His remains were found four years later at the bottom of a well.

In the office, thank God, temporary workers don’t get thrown down wells. But the attitude to them can be similar: taken on for a project, squeezed dry, thrown out. Remember that this person will take away everything he’s learnt about your business, and will tell people how he was treated. Treat temporary people as if they might come back. Sometimes they come back as clients.

The Lean Years

One last thing. Every business has its lean years: orders fall, a big client leaves, prices go up. Then you have to cut costs. How do you do it?

First rule: cut from the top. Start with yourself. If in a lean year a capo leaves his own pay alone and cuts his soldiers’, he’ll lose the soldiers, and the business with them, once the lean year is over. When we had a bad year, with a long strike at the port, the oil not coming in and the restaurants starting to buy elsewhere, the first thing the Don did was halve his own share, and then mine. And only after that, when it wasn’t enough, did he cut the working hours at one of the laundries, without letting anyone go. A year later, when everything had come back, only one presser had left us, and she left to get married.

Second rule: don’t cut what holds people. Do you remember what the man who recruited Comito into the Morello gang told him? That even when they were badly in need of money, the moment the police started moving there was never any difficulty finding the money to protect the members of the society. It was a recruiting speech, not a set of accounts, but the idea in it is sound. In a lean year you can cut a lot, but not the thing your people’s loyalty rests on: their certainty that they won’t be abandoned in trouble.

And third: a lean year is the time to put things in order. When there’s plenty of money, nobody looks at the extras. When there’s little, you can see everything that does no good. Use that. Half of what you cut in a lean year you didn’t need in a fat one either.