How the Don Decides
One summer, at the height of the Milwaukee operation, Frank Balistrieri, head of the local family, invited Lefty and Pistone to a dinner party and then on to a restaurant. At the bar the talk turned to rats, and in passing Frank complained that he had no reliable man to run his bookmaking. Lefty jumped right in: Donnie was just the right material, he’d helped Lefty with the betting, he had a head on his shoulders. Frank looked at Pistone and asked whether he was ready to take it on; as Pistone tells it, he said he was, and then some.
Pistone writes afterwards that it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. A network of bookmaking operations, and from there it was a short step to the schemes by which the Mafia’s Las Vegas casinos hid part of their takings. For the FBI, a gold mine. And he knew at once he couldn’t take it. Frank’s books lived on football bets. The season ran five months, with bets coming in round the clock, no days off. It was already August. He could not, he writes, leave his family for the best part of half a year.
Worse still, Frank announced that he had to call New York to make it official that Lefty would answer for Donnie with his head. And turning down an offer like that after a call to New York, Pistone writes, is what either cops or rats do. So the decision had to be made in one night, before the morning talk with Lefty. That night he met his bosses at the FBI, told them his family came first, and in the morning he turned Lefty down, passing it off as not wanting to spend the winter in raw, damp Milwaukee. The refusal even strengthened his cover: what policeman would turn down a chance like that?
To Decide Is to Cut Off
The word decide, like the Italian decidere, comes from a Latin word that means “to cut off”. To decide is to cut off every option but one. Until you’ve cut, you haven’t decided; you’re just thinking out loud.
Most people are afraid to decide not because they don’t know the answer, but because they don’t want to lose the other options. That’s understandable: what if one of the others turns out better? But as long as you keep every door open, you don’t walk through any of them. And time, as in Milwaukee, decides for you.
Look at how Pistone decided. He saw what it really came down to: six months away from his family. He gathered the facts: the season, the bets, the call to New York, the deadline of the next morning. He weighed the options and the consequences of each: say yes and lose his family; stall and blow his cover; say no and lose the chance, but keep both his family and his cover, provided he found the right excuse. He chose. And straight away he named the next step: talk to Lefty in the morning, before breakfast.
Don Vincenzo decided the same way, only without the drama. When someone came to him with a question, he asked three others. What is this really about? What do we know for certain, and what do we only think? What roads do we have, and where does each one end? Until those three questions had answers, he didn’t decide. Once they did, he decided in five minutes and never went back to it.
Why and How
There are two tools that help you get to the heart of a thing.
The first is to ask “why” several times in a row. Not once, but five times if need be. Why are takings falling? Because there are fewer orders. Why are there fewer orders? Because two restaurants left. Why did they leave? Because deliveries were late. Why were they late? Because the new driver doesn’t know the route. Why doesn’t he know it? Because nobody taught him. You started with takings and ended with a driver who needs to be shown the route. The answer turned up at the fifth “why”, not the first.
William Flynn of the Secret Service thought exactly like that. One of his contemporaries described him as a man who thought big, brushed the small stuff aside, went straight to the root of things and was stubborn as a bulldog. When new counterfeit money started turning up across the country in 1909, it was brought in by bankers in Philadelphia, shopkeepers in Pittsburgh, in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston. Flynn asked: where is it being passed? Answer: in the Italian neighbourhoods of every city. So who’s making it? In New York the answer was clear in advance: watch Morello first. A chain of a few questions led from a heap of fake notes in different cities to one man.
The second tool is to ask “how” when the goal is clear but the road isn’t. How do we get the two restaurants back? Apologise and sort out the deliveries. How do we sort out the deliveries? Train the driver and draw up a schedule. How do we train him? Have him ride with the old driver for a week. That way you get from a big goal down to something you can do tomorrow morning.
The Next Step
The most useful word in management is “next”. Not “we need to deal with the deliveries”, but “tomorrow at eight I get in the van with the old driver”. Not “I need to talk to Lefty”, but “in the morning, before breakfast”. As long as a task has no next step, it hangs in your head and drains your strength. Once it has a next step, it moves on its own.
Write It Down or Remember It
The mind is bad at storing things and good at thinking. So whatever you need to remember is better taken out of your head and put on paper, leaving your head free for thinking. It’s one of the simplest and most powerful rules there is.
Only in our world, paper was always complicated. Bernardo Provenzano, the “boss of bosses”, stayed in hiding for more than forty years and ran the organisation from his secret lair by means of notes, which in Sicily are called pizzini. Dickie quotes some of them: full of blessings, appeals to the Lord and assurances of respect. The system worked beautifully: no phones, no meetings, just notes passed from hand to hand. And then the notes started turning up. In 2003 they were found in the hideout of the man in charge of Provenzano’s own security. And in the summer of 2006, after the boss’s arrest, the police arrested forty-five people in a single morning, most of them of capo rank, and, as Dickie writes, most of the information came from decoded pizzini.
Pistone, as you remember, did the opposite: he kept everything in his memory and remembered licence plates and gun serial numbers in groups of three digits. One wrote—and got caught. The other didn’t write—and put people away.
For you, luckily, the choice is simpler: you don’t have neighbours who want to decode your notes. Write things down. Write down tasks, promises, thoughts, questions. A head freed from storing things thinks better. Only remember Provenzano’s lesson: everything written down will one day be read by someone else. Write so that you won’t be ashamed if they read it.
Ask Yourself
And the last tool: asking yourself questions. Sometimes you already have the answer; you just haven’t asked yourself for it yet. What do I really think of this man? What am I afraid of in this decision? What would I do if I weren’t afraid? What would I advise a friend in my place? A question asked out loud or on paper pulls out of your head what was lying there all along, out of sight.
Tommaso Buscetta made the hardest decision of his life after the Corleonesi killed two of his sons, his brother, his nephew, his brother-in-law and his son-in-law. He was arrested in Brazil and sent back to Italy, and there he swallowed the strychnine he always carried with him. He barely survived. And once he’d recovered, he decided to tell the authorities everything about the secret society he had joined at seventeen. He set one condition: he would talk only to Giovanni Falcone. He cut off every option but one and chose the only man he could trust. A terrible decision, but a decision.