What Nobody Knows
In February 1962 two Palermo families, the La Barbera brothers and the Grecos, went in with others on a consortium that was financing a shipment of heroin from Egypt. To guarantee delivery to New York, a mafioso named Calcedonio Di Pisa was sent along with the cargo on the liner Saturnia. In Brooklyn the buyers found there was less heroin in the packages than they’d expected.
The waiter from the Saturnia to whom Di Pisa had handed over the goods was tortured, but he admitted nothing. Suspicion fell on Di Pisa himself. A select gathering looked into the matter and cleared him. But the La Barbera brothers let it be known they weren’t happy with the decision.
On the twenty-sixth of December Di Pisa was shot dead outside a tobacconist’s on the edge of Palermo. In January Salvatore La Barbera vanished: his burnt-out car was found, his body never was. On the twelfth of February a car bomb wrecked the house of Ciaschiteddu Greco, “Little Bird”. On the nineteenth of April gunmen in a car sprayed a fish shop where Angelo La Barbera might have been. After that came more killings and more bombs. Dickie writes that even the men fighting this war didn’t really understand what was going on, and he likens it to a game of death played in the dark.
On the thirtieth of June 1963, in a tangerine grove near Ciaculli, someone found an abandoned Alfa Romeo with a flat tyre and a gas cylinder on the back seat. The bomb-disposal men cut the fuse and said it was safe to approach. When Lieutenant Mario Malausa opened the boot, a bomb hidden inside went off. The blast stripped the leaves off the tangerine trees for hundreds of metres around and killed the lieutenant and six others. The bomb, by all appearances, had been meant for Greco.
All of it started because in Brooklyn there was less heroin in the bags than expected.
A Small Fault in a Tight Machine
That’s the first thing to know about the unknown. In a system where everything is tightly coupled and everything depends on everything else, a small fault can set off a catastrophe that nobody planned and nobody could have foreseen. Scientists call it a normal accident: normal not because it’s minor, but because in a complex, tightly coupled system it happens sooner or later all by itself.
A short weight of heroin is a trifle. A suspicion is a trifle. Grumbling over a decision is a trifle. But each trifle caught on the next, and a year and a half later seven men died on a road near Ciaculli who had nothing whatever to do with heroin.
In the office a normal accident looks peaceful, but it’s built the same way. A supplier holds up one part, the line stops because of it, an order falls through because of the line, a client walks because of the order, and because of the client there isn’t enough for wages. Nobody is to blame on his own. What’s to blame is that everything was coupled too tightly, with no slack between the links. The cure is to loosen the coupling: keep a reserve, have a second supplier, don’t bet everything on one order. When the links are coupled more loosely, a break in one doesn’t drag all the rest down with it.
The Consequences of Consequences
Second: every action has consequences, the consequences have consequences of their own, and the second lot often matter more than the first.
Whoever planted the bomb at Ciaculli wanted to kill a rival. The first consequence: the wrong men died. Now the second. On the night of the second of July the police surrounded Villabate and Ciaculli, arrested forty men and seized a lot of weapons. That was only the start: the police mounted the biggest sweep since the days of the Fascist “Iron Prefect”. About a hundred thousand people came to the funeral of the seven dead, led by the Minister of the Interior. In all, Dickie writes, nearly two thousand people were arrested. Buscetta said it was as if the police had gone mad. In the summer of 1963 the Commission met for the last time and decided to dissolve itself. The families scattered. According to one turncoat, in Palermo they even stopped collecting money for “protection”.
A blow against one rival turned into a blow against the whole industry. The most successful operation against the Mafia in decades was carried out by the Mafia itself.
Before you act, don’t just ask “what will happen?” Ask “and what happens after that?” Cut your prices, and your competitors cut theirs, and everybody earns less. Fire half a department to save money, and the ones left start looking for work. Punish one man in front of everyone, and the rest stop owning up to their mistakes. The first consequence is usually the one you wanted. The second is the one that surprises you.
Who You’re Counting On
Third: you depend on people who promise you things that don’t depend on them. That’s called counterparty risk.
On the twelfth of March 1992, on the road from a seaside suburb into Palermo, they killed Salvo Lima, a Christian Democrat politician. The same Lima who once used to get Buscetta tickets to the opera and who, together with Ciancimino, presided over the sack of Palermo. He was the first victim of the war Riina declared on the state, before Falcone and Borsellino. One turncoat later explained that Lima had guaranteed everything would be fixed in Rome, and hadn’t kept his promises. The issue was the sentences from the maxi-trial, which the Court of Cassation had upheld in January. Dickie notes that there are no grounds for claiming Lima ever really made such promises. What matters is that Riina managed to make his men believe those guarantees existed.
Look at this story from both sides. For years Riina built his plans on the politicians “fixing it in Rome”. The politicians couldn’t guarantee that: the Court of Cassation didn’t answer to them. And Lima, if he really did promise, promised something that didn’t depend on him, and paid with the one thing that depended on nobody but him.
Every time your business rests on somebody’s promise, ask: can he actually deliver? Not does he want to, but can he. And what happens if he can’t? Don’t build the whole house on one promise from one man, however reliable he seems.
A Bad Month
One last thing. Sometimes you make no mistake at all and still lose, because the world around you has changed and you didn’t know.
Gambetta tells the story of a contractor called Antonino Saladino. On the sixteenth of August he signed an agreement with his protectors. Fifteen days earlier Carmelo Colletti, the main man in those parts, had been killed. At the end of November the head of the neighbouring family was killed. On the tenth of December Saladino’s brother-in-law, his link to the men of honour, was shot dead. In January another one died. The last of the old coalition was arrested by the police. On the eighteenth of February 1985 Saladino took a load of buckshot from a sawn-off shotgun in the back, survived, and walked away from the contract. The contract went straight to someone else, at a higher price. Saladino’s mistake, Gambetta writes, wasn’t that he defied the Mafia. He simply signed with his protectors at a bad moment. In the province of Palermo between 1978 and 1988 the Mafia killed forty-eight businessmen, most of them builders.
Your safety depends on people whose fate you may know nothing about. A supplier, a bank, a big client, a partner—any one of them can get into trouble, and you’ll be the last to hear. Keep an eye on the people you depend on. Don’t hang the whole business on one partner. And when things start changing around you, don’t wait for the change to reach your door.
In Casino—it’s a film, mind you—there’s a scene I remember every time someone asks me to “write it all down, just to keep things tidy”. The Kansas City bosses’ man carefully notes down in a little book every expense on the trips to collect the casino money, and complains out loud about how much they cost. The notebook and his talk end up with the FBI, and the whole scheme comes down. One man’s household habit, one link in the chain, and nobody at the top knew about it.