In Case of War
In May 1926 Cesare Mori, “the Iron Prefect”, came to the little town where Don Vito Cascio Ferro ruled and made a speech in the square. The sirocco was blowing, chasing sand across the square. Mori opened with a pun: his surname sounds like the Italian for “to die”, and he promised that crime would vanish just like this sand carried off by the wind.
A few days later the police carried out a round-up in Bisacquino, Corleone and Contessa Entellina. More than a hundred and fifty people were arrested, Don Vito among them. His godson went to a landowner he knew to ask for support and was politely told that times had changed.
Then came years the Mafia never forgot. Sixty years later a turncoat remembered how, under Mussolini, mafiosi were given five years’ internal exile without trial, and when the five years were up, a new order came out, and another five years. His uncle Luigi, he said, a boss who had real power, was brought so low that he had to steal to earn a crust of bread.
It was the harshest test of strength the Mafia went through before the end of the twentieth century. And the most interesting thing about it isn’t the ones who were broken but the ones who held out. That’s what we’ll talk about: what in your business breaks first when the blow comes, and how to find out before it does.
Who Held Out
According to American official sources that Dickie cites, five hundred mafiosi simply left for the United States. Prohibition America turned out to be very hospitable to them. Others discovered that the iron fist of Fascism often turned into an open palm. Giuseppe Genco Russo, head of the group in Mussomeli, survived all of Mori’s round-ups. He was accused of theft, extortion, murder, and every time the case fell apart “for insufficient evidence”. After the war he became one of the most prominent men of honour on the island.
And in 1943 the regime collapsed, and the Mafia came back as if it had never been away.
Look at it as a test. Mori leaned on the system with all his strength, and it became clear at once which parts of it could take the load and which couldn’t. The ones who didn’t hold out were tied to one place and had no connections. The ones who held out had a back door: a steamer to New York, the right man at the courthouse, witnesses who were more afraid of them than of the police. And the business as a whole held out because it didn’t so much outlast Mori as outlast the regime behind him.
Don’t wait for life to test your business. Test it yourself. What happens if your biggest client leaves? If the price of raw materials doubles? If the man everything depends on falls ill? If the bank turns down your loan? That’s called a stress test. You can’t prevent the blow, but you can find out in advance which link will break first and strengthen it while things are calm.
A Plan for the Worst
One October Joe Pistone got an order from headquarters: shut the operation down at once. It turned out that Frank Balistrieri, the boss in Milwaukee, had learned that Tony Conte, whom Pistone had brought to him, was an FBI agent. By Mafia rules Balistrieri was supposed to share this with New York. And then the unmasking of Donnie would become a matter of time.
Pistone flew to the senior agent and sat down to think. His reasoning is worth giving almost in full, because it’s textbook scenario planning.
Balistrieri hadn’t been in touch with New York yet, or Pistone would have known. Suppose he gets in touch. What next? If New York decides to kill him, they’ll do it without warning. But Pistone didn’t believe it would go that way. Yes, he had put Conte in touch with Milwaukee, but he had vouched for him only up to a point. And if Lefty started pressing him, he had an answer ready: he’d worked with the guy ten years ago and there’d been no problems; maybe he was already an agent back then—how was he supposed to know? On top of that, Lefty himself would be caught in the crossfire: he had personally vouched for Conte to Balistrieri and called him his friend.
See how it works? First: what do I know for certain. Then: what branches are there. Then: what will I say and do on each branch. And finally: what suits the other side, because it didn’t suit Lefty to admit that an FBI agent had got through on his say-so. Pistone and his colleagues saved the operation, and he worked right up to the exit. But, in his words, every time the family sent for him, the thought flashed through his mind: could Balistrieri have told them after all?
A plan for the worst doesn’t take away fear. It takes away confusion. When the worst happens, you already have an answer, and you don’t have to make it up with someone else’s eyes on you.
The Myth of the Brilliant Plan
There’s a flip side. In hindsight, any piece of luck looks like a brilliant design.
You’ve probably heard the legend of how the American army landed in Sicily in 1943 with the Mafia’s help. Supposedly Lucky Luciano struck a deal with the Sicilian bosses from his prison cell, and a local don with a yellow handkerchief in his hand led the Allies across the island. Many Sicilians believe it to this day. Most historians, Dickie writes, consider it a fable.
What really happened? In February 1942 the luxury liner Normandie caught fire and capsized in the Hudson. It was probably an accident, but at the time nobody was sure. Naval intelligence, fearing sabotage in the port, turned to the men who ran the port: first to Joseph “Socks” Lanza, master of the huge Fulton Fish Market, and through him to Luciano. Lucky was moved to a prison that was closer and more comfortable, and officers talked with him.
The Navy was preparing for a real scenario, sabotage in the port of New York, and found an unexpected resource for it: men who knew the port better than any intelligence service. That was smart. But there’s no evidence that Luciano set foot in Sicily during the war, or that he was released in exchange for help with the landings. He was let out and deported in 1946, and for those days ten years for his crime was the longest sentence anyone had served.
When someone tells you how brilliantly he foresaw everything, check what was in the documents and what the legend added later. And don’t be ashamed that your scenarios don’t come true to the letter. The Navy had a modest, sensible scenario. The brilliant one was invented afterwards.
The Middle Way
Sometimes the first to break is the one who hits hardest. There are wars it’s better not to win all the way.
Totò Riina waged a war of annihilation: first against his own, then against the state. Dickie writes that the Corleonesi, without meaning to, almost finished off the Mafia as a criminal organisation. His successor, Bernardo Provenzano, chose differently. You already know how he hid and how he worked quietly. Here is how he fought. His motto: eat, and let others eat. He saw internal peace as the main goal. He staked everything on extortion from businesses, because it fits well, Dickie writes, with the strategy of “submersion”: there’s hardly any need to kill; arson or an exemplary robbery is usually enough.
I don’t enjoy praising Provenzano, but on one point he was right: between all-out war and surrender there’s a wide strip of ground, and sensible people live on it. With a competitor you don’t have to fight to the death; you can split the market. With a difficult client you don’t have to break off; you can renegotiate. With a partner who let you down you don’t have to go to court for years; you can come to an arrangement. A victory that leaves you with no people, no money and no friends is a defeat, just nicely dressed up.
Try It First
There’s a cheaper way than war to find out what will break: deliver a small blow yourself, while the stakes are low. That’s called an experiment. When an offer came to us from a second olive mill, Don Vincenzo neither switched suppliers nor turned it down. He took the new mill’s oil for five restaurants for one month and told them nothing. A month later he asked the cooks how the oil was. Three hadn’t noticed any difference; two said it had got worse. The Don stayed with the old mill. The experiment cost us five tins and one month. A mistake would have cost twenty years of friendship.
It’s Not Over Yet
One last thing: the blow can come after a victory too, when testing yourself seems unnecessary. A war rarely ends where it seems to.
Pistone writes that killing the head of a family is never the end, only the beginning. After a boss is killed, all his men are obliged to go over to the winning coalition; otherwise a purge begins, and it can drag on for years. It looks as if everything was settled with one shot. In fact, it’s only beginning.
And now a story I want to end this chapter with. Ignazio Lupo, known as the Wolf, once Morello’s partner and the terror of the Italian neighbourhoods, came out of prison in the mid-thirties. And went back to his old ways: he started leaning on the Brooklyn bakers the way he had twenty years before. Only the world around him was different now. His old friends had died or retired. A new mayor had shaken up the police. The bakers weren’t afraid any more. On the eleventh of January 1936 they complained to the governor, and it turned out that Lupo’s pardon had been conditional. That summer he was sent back to Atlanta without trial. He had seven thousand one hundred and seventy-four days left to serve.
He got out only on the twenty-first of December 1946, with seven dollars and eighty-three cents in his pocket. A guard lent him the money for the fare to New York. Three weeks later, on the thirteenth of January 1947, Lupo died. The newspapers, Dash writes, didn’t print a word about it.
Lupo didn’t lose to the police. He lost because he didn’t notice how the world had changed while he was inside. He came back with his old habits to a city where they no longer worked. Life ran his stress test for him, and he failed it.
No victory is final, and no defeat either. Mori thought he had finished off the Mafia, and it came back. Lupo thought he was back, and it was all over. Every morning the world is a little different from yesterday, and whoever checks himself against yesterday’s map will one day take the wrong turning.