What He’s Afraid Of
On 15 November 1909, at about eleven in the morning, William Flynn, chief of the New York bureau of the Secret Service, with half a dozen agents and several detectives, crept up a creaking staircase to Giuseppe Morello’s flat. They had waited all night for the light on the fourth floor to go out: Morello worked until dawn. Flynn had a key, and the lock opened without a click. In the bedroom Morello lay fast asleep on a mattress, and on the bed beside him was his half-brother Nick Terranova. Flynn recalled, in Dash’s account, that they had no particular wish to wake the two men until they were sitting on top of them. Both were pinned down before they had a chance to wake up.
Then they began searching the room. Under Morello’s pillow, Flynn said, they found four loaded revolvers, and under Terranova’s, five—which, he admitted, made quite an impression. Two shotguns were loaded with buckshot. It was as if Giuseppe had been preparing to fight a war single-handed. Flynn said he had often wondered whether Morello was afraid of himself.
Nine revolvers under two pillows. And not one of them was any use. A man who had lived in fear for years, ducked into other people’s doorways, looked over his shoulder and had his post sent to a secret address was arrested in his sleep. Fear took his strength, his sleep and his peace of mind. It gave him no protection.
Losing Hurts More Than Finding
Let’s start with the main property of fear: people fear losing more than they enjoy finding. Losing a hundred dollars hurts more than finding a hundred dollars pleases. That’s not theory; anyone who has ever haggled knows it.
It follows that a man facing a loss is capable of things he would never do for the sake of a gain. He takes bigger risks, clings to losing positions longer, doubles his stakes when he ought to get out of the game.
Dickie describes the position Totò Riina found himself in in January 1992, when the Court of Cassation upheld the sentences of the maxi-trial. For years Riina had promised his men that Rome would fix everything. Rome didn’t. His authority and his life were now under threat. The prosecutor Guido Lo Forte explains it better than any psychologist: in the Mafia you can’t just hand in your resignation; you get eliminated. The choice before Riina and his men was this: either accept being eliminated, or prove once more to the whole organisation that they had strength.
Riina chose the second. They had to make war, he said, in order to make peace. What followed were the bombings that killed Falcone and Borsellino, and the bombs of 1993. The aim was to force the state to back down on the two questions Riina cared about most: the maxi-trial sentences and the 1982 law on confiscating mafiosi’s property. A man threatened with losing everything doubled his stake. And lost everything: a year later he was arrested, and the state, instead of backing down, came down harder than it ever had before.
It’s the same in the office, only without the bombs. A boss who is afraid to admit that a project has failed puts more into it. A salesman who is afraid of losing a client agrees to loss-making terms. A manager threatened with the sack starts gambling with other people’s money. When you see a man driven into a corner, expect from him not what’s sensible but what’s desperate. And don’t drive people into a corner unless you have to: a cornered man has no reason to behave decently.
When Fear Locks the Mind
The second property of fear: it narrows your vision. A frightened man sees only the threat and nothing around it. The head goes into a state of siege, and everything else is switched off. That’s useful when a lion is running at you, and harmful in almost every other case.
Morello with his nine revolvers is just such a case. His head was so taken up with the threat that his whole day turned into defence: looking over his shoulder, turning off, checking, changing addresses. And there was no strength left to think about where he was really vulnerable. They didn’t take him in the street, where he kept looking over his shoulder, but in bed, where he had finally fallen asleep.
Buscetta explained to the judges that a mafioso lives in constant fear in general. Not of the law, but of malicious gossip inside Cosa Nostra. The fear that someone will say something bad about him haunts him all the time. Dickie concludes that the result is acute paranoia. The men who frighten a whole city live as if in a besieged fortress themselves.
There’s a piece of screen fiction that showed this better than any study. In the first episode of The Sopranos—it’s a series, mind you—the boss Tony Soprano, a man his whole neighbourhood fears, suddenly passes out at his own barbecue. A panic attack. He goes to a psychiatrist, Dr Melfi, and it turns out that it all began with the ducks that lived in his swimming pool and flew away. The most frightening man in the area is afraid of losing his ducks. It’s funny until you recognise someone you know in Tony. Sometimes in the mirror.
What do you do with a locked mind? First, admit that it’s locked. A frightened man can’t think broadly, and neither can you. So don’t make big decisions when you’re frightened: put them off, get some sleep, talk it over with someone who isn’t frightened. And if it’s one of your people who is frightened, don’t demand creative solutions from him. First remove the threat, then ask for ideas.
Numbers You Can’t Feel
The third property of the head: it can’t feel large numbers. One death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. That isn’t cynicism; it’s how we’re built. The caveman’s head counted on its fingers: one lion, three deer, five in the tribe. A million is not its size.
Roberto Saviano lists in his book, year by year, how many people the Camorra killed. A hundred and forty-eight, a hundred and forty-seven, a hundred and thirty, ninety-one, a hundred and eighteen. Then he sums up: in the years of my life, three thousand six hundred people have died. More than at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, the Basque ETA, the Irish IRA and the Red Brigades put together. And he notes that on the maps of trouble spots that newspapers print, there are fires drawn over Kurdistan, Sudan, Kosovo, but over the south of Italy there isn’t a single marker.
Saviano knows that the figure “three thousand six hundred” won’t be felt. So elsewhere he does what every good storyteller knows how to do: he turns a number into a picture. By environmentalists’ reckoning, all the unregistered waste the clans have buried in the south would make a mountain fourteen thousand six hundred metres high on a base of three hectares. Mont Blanc is four thousand eight hundred and ten. Everest is eight thousand eight hundred and forty-four. Nobody will feel the figure “fourteen million tonnes”. A mountain of rubbish one and a half times the height of Everest, everyone will remember.
You need this lesson both ways. When you’re given big risk figures—a million in losses, a thousand unhappy clients—your head won’t feel them. Translate them into something you can picture: how many salaries that is, how many lorries, how many years of work. And when you want to be heard yourself, don’t pour out numbers. Show the mountain.
The Bottom Line
Don’t drive people into a corner where they have nothing to lose, and don’t decide anything important in fear. And don’t confuse the number of locks with safety. Nine revolvers under the pillow guarantee one thing: you’ll sleep soundly, because you’re tired of being afraid.