When to Close Up Shop
In the spring of 1981 Joe Pistone was one step away from something no FBI agent could have dreamed of. Sonny Black, a capo in the Bonanno family, under whom he now worked, was getting him ready to be made. A little longer, and a Bureau agent would have become a real member of a Mafia family. Pistone knew what that meant. A made man can sit in on any meeting. And once it came out that an agent had gone through the ceremony, the myth that nobody could get inside the Mafia would collapse.
And just then a war broke out in the family. High-ranking men were being killed. Headquarters decided it was time to pull out and ordered everything wrapped up by the first of June. Pistone didn’t want to go. He asked to be left in at least until August.
His colleagues saw it differently. His life, they said, was in danger now. Enough information had been gathered, and there was no point in taking further risks. Pistone writes that, galling as it was, he had to obey.
Then came a meeting at a hotel outside Washington. Pistone’s operation was tangled up with a great many other investigations, and it couldn’t be cut off all at once: his colleagues needed time to get ready. Those who needed a month were told to manage in two weeks. The exit was set for 26 July 1981.
Pistone came out alive. Sonny Black, who had been bringing him up, soon went off to a meeting of the bosses and never came home. And Pistone’s almost five years of work turned into trials after which, in his words, the Mafia was changed for ever.
Quit While You’re Ahead
The hardest decision in any business is to shut down something that still works.
Shutting down a failure is easy: everyone can see it’s a failure, and there’s nothing to argue about. But shutting down something that’s paying off is torture. A little longer, and there’ll be more. One more month, and he’ll be made. One more year, and the shop will turn a profit. That’s how everyone reasons who stays at the table too long.
Look at how the decision to pull Pistone out was made. He didn’t make it. He was in love with the operation, and you can see why: almost five years of his life. The decision was made by people who watched from the outside and asked not “how much more can we get?” but “how much more can we lose?” When the risk starts growing faster than the results, it’s time to get up from the table.
Hence a simple rule. When you’re deciding whether to close down your business, bring in someone who didn’t start it. The one who started it will always find a reason to wait a bit longer. And the second rule: close early, not at the last minute. Pistone came out according to plan, with his colleagues prepared and his cover story thought through. Getting out in a panic, when they’ve already come for you, goes by another name.
Don Vincenzo once closed down the oil deliveries to the next town. We had kept them going for seven years, and they even brought in a little. But when the new road was built and the wholesalers from the capital started going there, our share began to melt away, and the driver was spending a whole day on that one trip. The Don didn’t wait until the deliveries started losing money. He gave the three restaurants two months’ notice, put them in touch with a reliable wholesaler and freed up the driver’s day for his own neighbourhoods. I asked why not wait another year. He answered: “In a year I’ll be closing it in anger. Now I can close it with a bow.”
How Not to Close
There’s another way to close up shop. I don’t approve of it, but you ought to know it, because it isn’t only gangsters who use it.
In Goodfellas—a film, don’t forget—a restaurant owner who owes money comes to Paulie’s people for help and ends up handing them the restaurant. The new owners order goods on credit, from liquor to tablecloths, and sell them straight out the back door for cash. The bills go unpaid. When there’s nothing left to squeeze, they burn the place down.
That’s a closing designed as one last robbery. The creditors are left with nothing, and the suppliers never trust that address again. In offices they do it more gently: before a department is shut down, they wring everything out of it, stop paying the contractors, promise clients things that will never happen. A gain today, and afterwards your name takes a long time to wash clean. When you close up shop, pay your bills. You’re closing a business, not your reputation.
Change to Survive
Sometimes what you have to close isn’t a shop but your old way of living.
In 1910 Giuseppe Morello went to prison for a long stretch. For months on end he ran the family from his cell, sending instructions in the Corleone dialect, which baffled even the people assigned to read his letters. He didn’t want to let go of power. Only in 1911, when his appeal was turned down and it was clear he wouldn’t be back any time soon, did Morello hand control to the Lomonte brothers, Tom and Fortunato.
It was a strange choice. Dash writes that the brothers weren’t members of the family, were young, undistinguished and, most likely, simply the only ones left standing after the arrests. And the situation was desperate. At the end of 1909 Flynn had put the gang at a hundred and ten men and brought forty-five of them to trial. The family had lost its leaders and almost half its men.
The Lomonte brothers did what everyone who survives in that position does. They changed the firm. They took on new men, and only a few of the newcomers were from Corleone; some weren’t even Sicilian. Eugene Ubriaco, a Calabrian, became the first non-Sicilian to hold a high place in the family. They made alliances with other gangs. Dash sums it up: the alliances gave protection, but at the cost of the family’s old clannishness and independence.
That’s flexibility. The family of men from Corleone, which took in only its own, survived when it stopped taking in only its own. The price was high. But there was only one alternative: stay true to itself and disappear. When the world around you has changed, clinging to the old set-up out of pride means choosing a beautiful death. Sometimes, to keep a business alive, you have to give up what it used to be.
If You’re Gone Tomorrow
And there’s another side to the same question. What happens to your business if tomorrow it isn’t a shop that gets closed, but you?
Morello didn’t think about that in advance, and the family spent months waiting for instructions in an incomprehensible dialect, then fell to whoever happened to be left on their feet. That’s the worst succession plan there is: no plan.
Keeping the work going without a break means making sure the business doesn’t depend on one person, one machine, one piece of paper. Signora Lucia kept our order book for forty years. One day the Don asked her: “And if the book burns?” She was offended, because she looked after it better than she did her own children. But from then on, every Saturday, she copied the week’s orders into a second book, and that book lived at the Don’s house. Did the first one ever burn? No, not once in forty years. Did the second one ever come in handy? Once, when Lucia couldn’t come to work for three weeks, and without the book we wouldn’t have known what to deliver, to whom, or when.
It’s the same with people. Every one of our pressers could work the press. Every driver knew two routes. I myself knew everything the Don knew, except what he told no one. Not because we were expecting trouble. Because trouble doesn’t give notice.
The Bottom Line
Close early and with a bow, not at the last minute and in anger: you close a shop, not your reputation. And build everything so the business can live without you for at least three weeks. Forty years is better.