The Story He Tells Himself

Lefty Ruggiero, like most mafiosi, was sure he was being watched. The agents, he kept saying, were tailing them everywhere. Once he and Pistone were walking along the pavement when Lefty suddenly jabbed a finger at a school building and, Pistone recalls, told him to look up at the roof: the agents had put those things there to hear what they were talking about.

What stuck up from the roof was ordinary television aerials.

And next to Lefty, along the same pavement, walked an FBI agent whom Lefty himself, with his own hands, had brought into the Bonanno family and vouched for with his life.

I tell this story to every young man who tells me he’s a good judge of people. Lefty was a good judge too. Thirty years in our world had taught him to be suspicious. His head had learned to recognise danger by its shape: wires, aerials, unfamiliar cars. And it recognised it beautifully—everywhere except the one place where the danger really was.

The Mind Loves to Recognise

The human head is a recognition machine. It doesn’t examine each thing afresh; it compares it with what it has already seen and sticks on a label. A wire on a roof: a bug. A man in an expensive suit: rich. A newcomer who asks a lot of questions: suspicious. It’s fast and usually useful: those of our ancestors who spent a long time studying a shadow in the bushes to work out whether it was a lion left no descendants.

But this machine has two weak spots. The first: it sees a familiar shape where there isn’t one—aerials turn into bugs. The second, more dangerous: it doesn’t see a danger that has no familiar shape. Lefty had no template for “an FBI agent who lives for years like a mafioso”. So he looked at Donnie and saw one of his own.

In the office it looks like this. A client resembles the one who cheated you, and you turn away a good man. A new project resembles the one that took off five years ago, and you put money in without checking what has changed. A competitor doesn’t look like the ones you’re used to fearing, and you notice him only when he has already taken half your clients. When your head has stuck on a label in an instant, ask yourself: what did I recognise—this thing, or just something like it?

Rehearsing the Scene

The head has another skill, a useful one: running through events before they’ve happened. Imagining what will happen if I do it this way, and what if I do it the other way. It’s a free trial run: a mistake in your head costs nothing.

Pistone describes how, even before the Bonanno family, he got close to a Brooklyn crew from the Colombo family. One of its men was Guido, a man who, as Pistone writes, was feared and respected. Once they were driving somewhere on business in Pistone’s car, and Guido suddenly asked him what that beeping was. Pistone heard nothing. Guido insisted that something was beeping in the dashboard, went to fetch the tools he always carried with him, and in five minutes had taken the whole dashboard apart. He looked it over, said everything was fine and started putting it back together. And when Pistone protested, Guido owned up honestly, in Pistone’s account: Pistone had come out of nowhere, so he’d been checking his dashboard for a wire.

Guido had run the scene “newcomer equals cop with a tape recorder” through his head and tested it in the cheapest way there is. The beeping was invented; the check was real. And Pistone, by his own account, never put a wire in his car. Why? Because he had already run the same scene through in advance, on Guido’s behalf. The winner was the one who rehearsed the scene further ahead.

Do this before any important conversation. Imagine what the other side will say, what will frighten them, what they’ll check. Imagine what will go wrong. Five minutes in your head save hours at the table. Only remember that your imagination works with the templates you already have. So check it against what you see, not the other way round.

A World Where Everything Means Something

The third thing the head does is interpret. Seeing isn’t enough for it; it needs to understand what it means.

In our world that was the main occupation. Judge Falcone once remarked that interpreting signs, gestures, cryptic phrases and silences is one of a mafioso’s main occupations. Buscetta explained the same thing from the inside: in my world you don’t ask questions, but the person you’re talking to, when he sees fit, will let you understand with a phrase, a nod or even a smile whose hand was behind certain well-known stories. And he added: even silence can speak.

A fine example is what Saviano saw in Naples at the height of the Secondigliano war, when Cosimo Di Lauro was arrested. They found him in a tiny flat, on an old sagging bed. As he was led out, the people of the neighbourhood rioted: they smashed cars, threw petrol bombs, set tyres on fire. An outsider would have thought they were trying to snatch the boss back. Saviano explains it differently. It wasn’t to stop the arrest but to head off revenge. A sign to Cosimo that he hadn’t been betrayed, that it wasn’t his neighbours in the building who had given away his hideout. A whole neighbourhood burned police cars for the sake of one spectator who had to read the letter correctly. No words, but plenty of smoke.

Where people say little straight out, the listener fills in the rest. That’s dangerous both ways. You can read a threat into someone’s silence that isn’t there. And you can be read in a way you never intended. So in the office, speak more plainly than we do. Don’t make people interpret you: they almost always interpret worse than you think. And when you’re the one interpreting, keep two or three explanations in your head, not one.

Telling It to Yourself Differently

And the last skill of the head, the most useful one: interpreting the same thing all over again. The event is one, but you can choose the story you tell about it.

Judges Falcone and Borsellino, the Mafia’s two chief enemies, lived in Palermo under constant threat. Every morning Falcone drove to work in an armoured car, with three more cars of bodyguards with submachine guns behind him, and traffic police closing off the streets. Dickie relates that the Giornale di Sicilia printed letters from residents who considered these traffic jams a worse plague than the Mafia. One neighbour even suggested moving the judge out to somewhere in the suburbs. That letter drove Falcone into a fury. Borsellino, a more good-natured man, took it differently. As he saw it, they were simply keeping the judges on their toes.

The fact is the same: the people you’re protecting complain that you’re in their way. One read it as ingratitude and suffered. The other read it as something that kept him sharp, and joked. The Mafia killed them both in 1992, two months apart. But they lived those years differently, and Borsellino, I think, had the easier time of it.

You don’t choose what happens to you. You choose the story you tell yourself about what happened. A client’s refusal is either “I’ve been rejected” or “I’ve found out what he doesn’t need”. A failed deal is either “I’m a loser” or “now I know where the trap is”. That isn’t fooling yourself. It’s choosing the interpretation you can go on working with.

The Bottom Line

Your head recognises and interprets faster than you can think. Make use of that, but when something is “obvious” in an instant, ask whether it isn’t just an aerial.

And when you feel you can see right through everyone, remember Lefty outside the school. He saw the FBI in every aerial. And didn’t see it in his own protégé, who was walking beside him and, most likely, looking up at the roof too.