All for One
Young men think the Family runs on fear. Old men know fear is only one wheel. The Family runs on one wheel turning another, the second turning a third, and the third turning the first again. Learn to see those wheels and you’ll understand more about your office than two years of meetings will ever teach you.
The Wheel That Speeds Up
Start with the simplest one. A shopkeeper pays the Family because he knows nobody touches the ones who pay. His neighbours see that nobody touches him, and they come to pay too. The more people pay, the more men and money the Family has. The more men and money, the safer the protection. The safer the protection, the more people want it.
The result has turned back into the cause. That’s how a wheel works when it speeds itself up, and every turn comes easier than the last.
Don Vincenzo had a favourite wheel of this kind: the favour. He helped a man and took no money. The man was in his debt. He paid the debt not in cash but by bringing along a brother, an in-law, a neighbour who were in trouble too. Every new debtor brought the next one. Ten years on, the Don had never placed a single advertisement, and half the neighbourhood owed him. Chemists call this autocatalysis: a reaction that makes the very thing that speeds it up. We put it more simply: a good deed comes back, as long as you write it down properly.
Same thing in the office. A happy client brings you two more. A good specialist pulls in other good ones, because he’s interesting to work with. Money put back into the business brings in more money. Find a wheel like that in your shop and don’t be stingy with the grease.
The Wheel That Slows Down
But there are wheels of another kind. They don’t speed you up. They put you back where you were.
You raise the cut you take from the neighbourhood. At first the Family’s funds fill up. Then the shopkeepers start closing, because they have nothing left to pay with. Then the most desperate go and complain, and the police suddenly wake up and take an interest. There’s nobody left to pay, and more and more eyes on you. You bring the cut back down, and everything settles.
Then there’s a nastier loop, one that doesn’t put the system back in place but blows it apart. In the early nineties Totò Riina answered the growing number of turncoats the way he always answered things: with terror. One member of the Commission, Salvatore Cancemi, heard Riina say that turncoats should be killed along with their relatives to the twentieth degree, starting with children of six. The more frightening life became on the inside, the more men decided the state was safer. Dickie writes that the turncoats were counted in hundreds, and that in 1996 their number peaked at four hundred and twenty-four. Cancemi himself, after that conversation, walked in to the carabinieri. The fear that was meant to hold the organisation together became the thing dissolving it. Riina kept his foot on the pedal, and all it did was send the car into the ditch faster.
The braking wheel is a loop too, only this one keeps the system in a narrow corridor. However hard you push, it pushes back. A foolish capo fights wheels like that all his life and thinks his enemies are getting in his way. A clever one finds them in advance and doesn’t waste his strength trying to shift a wall.
In the office, that kind of loop looks like a boss who squeezes overtime out of his people. For a week, output goes up. A month later people are getting sick, making mistakes and looking for new jobs. Six months on, output is lower than it was. Whoever can’t see the loop blames the people.
The Weather
No Family lives in an empty room. Around it are the city, the laws, the police, the newspapers, the money, the fashions. That’s the weather, and it doesn’t ask whether you like it.
When America repealed Prohibition, the men who lived on liquor alone were left with nothing to do. They hadn’t got any stupider. It was just that yesterday’s goods were now poured legally in every bar and sold in the shop on the corner, cheaper and with no risk. The weather changed, and they were still in their summer clothes. The ones who survived were those who, while Prohibition was still on, had set themselves up with gambling houses, unions and building sites.
Sometimes the weather changes because someone else starts doing your job, and for free. In the twenties, as Gambetta tells it, New York’s garment industry relied on the persuasive muscle of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and his partner to keep everyone on the same prices and the same wages. It was a cartel, and the gangsters made sure nobody broke ranks. Then, according to a sociologist Gambetta cites, one of the first acts of the New Deal was the National Recovery Administration, which brought in industry codes and fixed prices. What had been a “useful” role for the gangsters turned into plain extortion. Ambitious prosecutors went after them, and Lepke was eventually executed at Sing Sing. It wasn’t a competitor who fired him. It was the state, which had started doing his job itself.
Every kind of weather sets its own exams. Do you have enough money to pay your people? Do your people keep their mouths shut? Are you too visible to the ones who go looking for the visible? A Family that fails even one of these exams disappears. Not for being wicked and not for making a mistake, but for failing the selection. And when the weather changes, so do the questions on the paper.
Your office sits the same exams every month: is there enough coming in for wages and rent, does anyone still want what you sell, has somebody turned up who does the same thing for a third of the price. Look at the weather more often than in the mirror. The mirror won’t tell you anything new.