What He Bites On
In Casal di Principe, the Casalesi clan’s town outside Naples, there is a villa the locals simply call “Hollywood”. It belonged to Walter Schiavone, brother of the famous boss known as Sandokan, and for many years Walter ran concrete for the clan. Saviano retells what the town says. That the boss supposedly asked his architect for a villa exactly like the one the Cuban gangster Tony Montana has in Scarface. That he supposedly watched the film a thousand times and came to see himself as Al Pacino’s character. That he supposedly handed the architect a videotape: I want the villa in the film, and no other.
Saviano is honest enough to admit that all these stories sound like legends, and for a long time he didn’t believe them himself. From outside, the villa looked like a bunker behind high walls and armoured doors. What convinced him was the one distinguishing mark by the entrance: two small Doric columns and a triangular pediment over the gate, completely out of place among the modest little houses with their red garden gates.
Someone Else’s Picture
Why would a man who runs the concrete of an entire district want a villa out of a Hollywood film? For the same reason other people want a watch of a certain make or a car of a certain colour. The human mind moves feelings from one thing to another when the two stand side by side. Tony Montana on screen is power, money, the fear he puts into people. Build a house like his, and some of those feelings move in with you. That’s how association works.
Advertising men live on nothing else. A beautiful woman next to a car, an athlete next to a watch, a cosy kitchen next to a bottle of oil. The car and the watch have nothing to do with it, but the mind glues the pictures together and carries the feeling across. Our world is no different: we’ve already talked about how mafiosi copied The Godfather. Saviano notes that the new Neapolitan bosses watch The Matrix, The Crow and Pulp Fiction, because those films explain faster than any words who a man wants to look like.
Use association, but use it honestly. Put your business next to what it’s really related to, not next to whatever people happen to like. If you stand a modest laundry next to the image of a palace, and the client walks in and sees a laundry, the association turns on you: he’ll remember the lie, not the palace. And remember that everything sticks, not just the good things. Once your name has stood next to a scandal, it’s hard to peel it off.
Change Gets Noticed
Now, how Walter got caught, because that’s a lesson about another habit of the mind.
Police and carabinieri, Saviano writes, call on fugitives’ relatives ten or twelve times a day: they look around, they search, they lean on people’s nerves. Signora Schiavone was always polite with them and cheeky at the same time; she would calmly offer a cup of tea and biscuits, knowing full well they’d say no. But one evening her voice on the intercom sounded tense. She took a very long time to open the door. She followed the officers around the whole villa at their heels, instead of standing at the foot of the stairs as usual, and she talked so loudly she could be heard in every corner of the house. In the bedroom, on the bed, lay a pile of freshly ironed men’s shirts, clearly not her son’s size. Walter had come home. They caught him trying to climb over the wall he himself had ordered built around the house.
Look at it: twelve visits a day, and not one of them turned up anything. The thirteenth turned up everything, because it wasn’t like the twelve before it. The human mind is bad at seeing what stays the same and very good at seeing change. That’s called contrast. We don’t judge things on their own; we compare them with whatever stood next to them or came before them.
For business, that gives you a few rules. Price is judged by comparison: next to an expensive option the middle one looks sensible; next to a cheap one it looks expensive. Quality is judged by comparison: service that was good yesterday will look bad today if the shop next door got better. And your people are judged by change too: a worker who was always even-tempered and suddenly goes quiet is telling you more than his reports ever would. Watch for change. It talks louder than what stays the same.
You Can’t See What Isn’t There
The third habit is the opposite one: the mind doesn’t notice what isn’t there. Absence doesn’t catch the eye. You see what’s been done and don’t see what hasn’t. You see the clients who came in and don’t see the ones who walked past.
The Mafia, oddly enough, is trained for exactly this. Gambetta writes that mafiosi can run a real investigation through a network of relatives and friends while pretending to be merely curious. Who was at work that day? Who wasn’t seen in his usual spot? The network is so dense that even the most anonymous thief is easily found. An ordinary man notices who turned up. A mafioso notices who’s missing.
Learn to do it. Once a month, ask yourself: which regular clients didn’t order this month? Which complaint has stopped coming in—because we fixed it, or because people stopped complaining and simply left? What’s missing from the report they’ve just brought me? Whose voice wasn’t heard at the meeting? The most expensive problems are the ones you can’t see, because they aren’t on the table.
What’s Scarce and What’s New
And two last hooks that anyone will bite on.
The first is scarcity. The less there is of something, the more people want it. Gambetta tells how in 1957 the American families decided to take in no new members until 1976. Nineteen years with the door shut. The reason was simple: the families wanted to control how many people could call themselves members of the Mafia, because that title was their main product. And Frank Scalise, who, according to a researcher Gambetta cites, was selling membership to anyone who wanted it, was shot dead in that same year, 1957. Selling off a scarce thing cost him his life. That’s how much what’s scarce is worth.
The second is novelty. Something new attracts people simply because it’s new. Pistone tells how once in Florida, Sonny Black, a dangerous captain in the Bonanno family, saw little potted palm trees along the road and lit up: Sonny couldn’t get over how everybody would flip—palm trees in Brooklyn! Pistone objected that palms wouldn’t survive a Brooklyn winter. Sonny waved it off: they’d wither sooner or later anyway, so what. They had to buy five or six palms and ship them to Brooklyn by courier. A man who wouldn’t have blinked in front of a gun barrel fell for a palm in a pot, because nobody in Brooklyn had one yet.
Use both hooks carefully. Scarcity you’ve made up—“only three left” with a full warehouse—works once and ruins trust for good. Real scarcity—a limited batch, seats there really are few of—is honest, and people respect it. Novelty wears off fast: today’s palm trees won’t surprise anyone tomorrow. So novelty is good for catching attention, but you’ll have to keep the client with something else.
As for the Hollywood villa, by the way: after Walter’s arrest it was confiscated, but for six years no one could be found to take it over. So Walter ordered his men to “take care of” the house. If a house can’t belong to its owner, it mustn’t belong to anyone. They tore off the doors, ripped out the window frames, pulled up the parquet, stripped the marble, smashed the fireplaces, and then set tyres on fire inside. The association with Tony Montana, as you can see, worked out perfectly, right down to the ending.