A Caveman in a Suit
On 8 May 1922 in New York, a block from police headquarters, five men on Grand Street opened rapid fire on one another. A war for power was on between two gangs, and among the shooters was Giuseppe Masseria, the future “boss of bosses”. The New York Herald summed up the battle with deadly precision: the gunmen had wounded four men and two women, but not one another. Masseria dropped his pistol, ran, and was arrested.
Three months later, on 8 August, two men lying in wait for him opened fire on Masseria, unarmed this time, at the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street. Three shots at point-blank range. Masseria ducked, and the papers wrote afterwards that he had dodged the bullets with astonishing agility. The gunmen escaped by car. The ones badly wounded were two passers-by who had tried to stop that car.
Professionals with guns, experienced, determined, shooting almost at point-blank range, and they miss. Why? The paper didn’t know, and neither do I. The confusion, the distance, bad pistols, plain chance. But I have a suspicion, and it isn’t one you’d read in a newspaper. In a second like that, the hand is guided less by experience than by fear, and fear has no interest in aim. It wants one thing: to survive. Drop, run, pull the trigger, don’t think. Whether Masseria ducked so neatly because he knew how, or because he was frightened before he could think, nobody can say. What you can say is this: in that minute on Second Avenue he was the target, and it was the passers-by who got hit.
Under the Suit
This is the main thing I want to tell you about people, before I tell you anything else. Under every suit, at every negotiating table, in every accounts department, there sits a caveman. Our heads are the same ones the hunters with spears had. The world around us changed faster than the head could rebuild itself.
The caveman wants to eat, to sleep warm, to belong to the tribe, not to lose what he has, and not to end up between a predator’s teeth. Everything else—contracts, reports, strategies—is painted over those wants in a thin coat. When the pressure rises, the thin coat is the first thing to wear off. That’s why people who reason beautifully over a cup of coffee shout in an argument, run when they’re scared and become unbearable when they’re hungry.
Don’t expect from people, and above all from yourself, behaviour that a hunter with a spear couldn’t keep up. Arrange the work so that the caveman in everyone is fed, calm and doesn’t feel threatened. Then the one who knows how to think can get on with his job too.
The Tank
Agent Pistone tells how he once spent a whole night out on the town with Anthony Mirra, a few mafiosi and their girlfriends. At about four in the morning they all wanted breakfast. In the diner Mirra got going yet again: the eggs were cold, the service was lousy. One thing led to another and, as Pistone writes, it all turned into a real tantrum. Pistone calmly stood up for the waitress: it wasn’t the girl’s fault, she was doing her best. Mirra leaned across the table and, in front of the whole company, promised to cut him if he opened his mouth again.
Pistone, by his own account, backed down: he told Tony he was right and that he’d got a bit carried away. Inside, he says, he was boiling: working like a dog, not seeing his family for months, sitting here at four in the morning with a bunch of creeps and swallowing all this. He hadn’t cooled down even by the time he got home.
What happened there I can explain to you without any psychology. Four in the morning. A night without sleep. Drink. An empty stomach. Mirra’s tank was on empty, and so was Pistone’s, and all the politeness, all the rules, the whole “man of honour” wore down to the caveman who wants to eat and won’t stand being contradicted in front of the tribe.
A man is a machine with a tank. That’s an image, not physiology, but it works well. You fill the machine with food, sleep, movement, rest. When the tank runs low, the most expensive parts fail first: patience, judgement, manners. The last to go are anger and fear—they run even on fumes.
Don Vincenzo never read a single article about this, but he kept an iron rule: serious business only after a meal. Never on an empty stomach, never after midnight, never when a man has just come off the road. One morning a supplier came to see us demanding that the price be renegotiated—angry, straight off the train, no breakfast. The Don sat him down at the table, fed him, poured him a coffee, asked after his children, and only an hour later let him bring up the price. A conversation that might have ended in a break ended with a handshake and a small concession, for which the supplier even thanked him. Before you negotiate, ask yourself whether this man has eaten. And whether you have.
Two Voices
People used to like drawing the head as an onion: inside, the ancient brain of a lizard; on top of it, a layer of feelings; outside, a thin crust of reason, and each layer supposedly added by evolution on top of the last. A pretty picture. Scientists threw it out long ago: the brain wasn’t built like a house, floor by floor, and there is no separate flat in it for fear and another for arithmetic. A simpler image will do for me, and I’m warning you honestly that it’s an image, not anatomy. Inside the head, two voices are arguing. One is fast: got scared, took offence, grabbed. The other is slow: it counts, plans and talks nicely. The fast one often gets there first. First you get scared, then you think up why.
In January 1993 the carabinieri finally arrested Totò Riina, the “boss of bosses”, who had been in hiding for almost a quarter of a century. Identifying him was hard: the only photograph the police had was taken in 1969. Help came from an arrested mafioso, who recognised Riina’s gardener, his son and his wife on surveillance footage. One morning Riina drove out of his house, and when the car stopped at a traffic light in Piazza Einstein, four men jumped on him and his driver. Dickie writes that Riina didn’t resist: he had clearly panicked, and he only came round a little when he learned that the ambush had been laid by the carabinieri and not by enemy mafiosi.
There it is, that argument, in a single episode. First the ambush, and fear answers at once: death. Only then does the reckoning catch up: it’s the state, so it means lawyers, courts, prison—but life. The most powerful man in the Sicilian Mafia, judging by Dickie’s account, came to his senses only on learning that he was being arrested. The fear of his own world was stronger than the fear of the law.
There’s a scene in The Godfather—it’s a film, I’ll remind you, not a chronicle—that I love for the same reason. Michael Corleone is standing at night outside the hospital where his father lies, together with Enzo the baker, who is frightened out of his wits. A car pulls up with men who could turn out to be killers. Afterwards Michael holds out a lighter for Enzo. The baker’s hands are shaking so badly he can’t light his cigarette. Michael looks at his own hands: they aren’t shaking. In that minute the slow voice shouts down the fast one for the first time. That’s where the Don begins.
The Bottom Line
If someone is behaving like a savage, first ask what’s in his tank and what he’s afraid of, and only then decide what to think of him. And remember Grand Street: when there’s shooting in the room, it’s the bystanders who get hit. A capo’s greatest skill is making sure nobody shoots in his room at all.