Take It Apart and Count
In April 1903 some new loaders turned up on Stanton Street in Little Italy. They worked in a strange way: from eight in the morning till dark they stood in a doorway across from one particular shop and loaded nothing at all. Every few hours others came to relieve them, always in pairs. They were Secret Service agents, and they were doing the dullest job in the world: writing down who went into the shop where the Morello gang met, and when, and who came out, and when.
Our old acquaintance William Flynn hadn’t chosen this for the fun of it. He had failed to get a man of his own inside the gang: the Sicilians kept clear of outsiders, and when Flynn’s man, a trader from the mainland, tried, one of them told him haughtily that Sicilians had been cheated enough already. If you can’t look from the inside, all that’s left is counting from the outside. Watching one address took at least three men, and Flynn had nine agents for the whole of New York. He gave up a third of his force to standing in a doorway and watching.
After two weeks, Dash writes, the results were mixed. The Secret Service already knew a few of the most frequent visitors. With the help of informants they managed to name a dozen or so members of the gang. Another seven or eight men they never managed to identify, and Flynn went down to Stanton Street to have a look himself.
Note that last figure. Flynn didn’t pretend he knew everybody. He wrote it down: ten known, seven or eight unknown. That’s what honest bookkeeping is. A list with a column marked “don’t know” is worth more than a list without one.
Break the Whole into Parts
A few years before Flynn, in Palermo, this kind of reckoning had been done in full. The police chief Ermanno Sangiorgi, whom I’ve mentioned before, wrote a report that ran to 485 handwritten pages. Dickie compares reading it to the work of an archaeologist gently brushing the earth off an ancient vase, only to realise at the end that what he’s dug up is an unexploded bomb.
Sangiorgi didn’t write “the Mafia is at work in the city”. He took it apart. Eight groups, each with its own suburb: Piana dei Colli, Acquasanta, Falde, Malaspina, Uditore, Passo di Rigano, Perpignano, Olivuzza. The name of each boss, the names of the men under him. Information on 218 “men of honour”: who owned land, who guarded the citrus groves, who dealt in fruit. The initiation rite. The code. How they forged money, how they frightened witnesses. Even the fact that the Mafia had a common fund to pay the families of men in prison and their lawyers.
That’s deconstruction in its purest form. As long as you say “business is bad”, there’s nothing you can do about it. Once you’ve taken “business” apart, every part gets its own name, its own size and its own culprit.
Don Vincenzo did this without any words like “deconstruction”. When they told him the second laundry was doing badly, he didn’t believe the word “badly”. He asked, in order: are we losing things on the front counter? Ruining them in the wash? Waiting at the press? Is delivery running late? Usually it turned out that “badly” lived in one place, and the other three were running like clockwork. There was no need to fix the whole laundry. You had to fix one link.
Now for how Sangiorgi’s report ended. On the night of 27–28 April 1900 the police carried out a round-up using the list from the report. It was more than a year before the verdict. In June 1901 only thirty-two men were found guilty, and most of them were let go on the spot, since the time they’d spent awaiting trial counted towards their sentences. The most accurate description of the Mafia in the whole century went into the archives. A good analysis on its own changes nothing. It only shows you where to dig. The digging is a separate job.
Three Numbers
Now about what exactly to count.
When Joe Pistone was working under Lefty, Lefty started sending him to Toyland, the club of Nicky Marangello, underboss of the Bonanno family, with weekly reports on the bookmaking. Pistone reported in numbers only. How much came in over the weekend. How much had to be paid out. How much was made in the end. He answered questions curtly and didn’t hang about in the club.
Three numbers. Takings, payouts, what’s left. A man who ran the betting for the whole family had no need of stories about how the weekend went. He needed to know what the outlet had brought in. Everything else was noise.
That’s what key indicators are. Not everything you could count, but the few things you can’t run a business without. If you’re watching thirty numbers, you’re not watching any of them. Pick three or four that are tied directly to the result, and look at them regularly, always on the same set day.
Don Vincenzo had three of them, and he looked at them on Mondays: how many kilograms of laundry came in over the week, how many items came back with a complaint, and how much was left in the till. The first told him whether the business was growing. The second, whether it was going bad. The third, whether it was alive at all.
And one subtle point. Pistone understood that while he was reporting, Marangello was making inquiries about him. A report checks not only the outlet but the man who brings it. Someone who turns up every week with the same three numbers, no trimmings, earns trust. Someone who brings a long story instead of numbers raises questions.
Garbage on the Tape
Numbers are only as good as what they were made from.
In 1975, on one of his first operations in Florida, Pistone wore a recorder. A cassette machine, ten by fifteen centimetres, taped to his back, so that from the side the agent looked like he had a hump. The man buying a stolen pickup kept walking round him in circles, and Pistone had to keep turning to stay face-on. That evening it turned out the recorder had chewed up the tape. There was no recording.
Later Pistone explains why taping is a thankless business anyway. A microphone picks up everything: the rustle of clothes, a rumbling stomach, the air conditioning, the cars in the street. And mafiosi always switch on the television or the radio, in a hotel room, in a car, anywhere at all, because they’re afraid of being bugged. For years the Mafia defended itself against the FBI with the cheapest technology in the world: a television that was switched on.
Programmers put this crudely long ago: garbage in, garbage out. If the data was collected badly, no analysis, however clever, will turn it into the truth. A survey where clients were asked in a way that made it awkward to answer honestly. A report where the salesmen record their own sales and get a bonus for them. A complaints log where only the complaints that couldn’t be hushed up get written down. All these numbers look like numbers. Only they’ve been lifted off a tape with the television playing.
Before you believe a number, ask how it was got. Who counted, what they counted, and whether it suited them to come up with exactly that much.
When to Stop Counting
One last thing, and the most unpleasant.
In 1929 Mori, “the Iron Prefect”, received a short telegram from the Duce: the job was done. In the thirties it was the official line that Fascism had crushed the Mafia for good. And Mori’s successor, Dickie writes, told the press to cut down on reports of crime. No round-ups, no show trials. Suspicious characters were quietly sent into internal exile without a trial.
That’s the cheapest way to bring crime down: stop writing about it. The number got better. The Mafia stayed. Dickie sums it up: it had been suppressed, but by no means rooted out. Fourteen years later the regime collapsed, and the Mafia came back as if it had never been away.
In the office they do it more politely. They drop the awkward line from the report. They change the way they count when the old way starts showing something bad. They stop asking clients, because the answers spoil the mood. Each time the number gets better and the business doesn’t. Honesty in analysis comes down to one thing: you measure to find out, not to reassure yourself. If you don’t like the number, change the business, not the ruler.
The Bottom Line
Keep a “don’t know” column on your list and don’t be ashamed of it. Flynn stood in a doorway for two weeks for ten names and seven question marks. A little over six years later he put Morello away.