Traps in Your Own Head
At the end of July 1981, when Operation Donnie Brasco was over, FBI agents went to see Sonny Black at the Motion Lounge, a bar in Brooklyn. The man sent in to talk to him was Agent Fencl, whom Sonny knew: he dropped by now and then about small matters, and Sonny had even praised him, said this one was all right, he didn’t feed you a line. Fencl showed Sonny a photograph of Pistone standing next to him and, according to Pistone, asked whether Sonny knew the man, told him the man was an FBI agent, and said this was just for his information.
Sonny didn’t so much as blink: he said he’d never seen him before, and he’d make a note of it.
Then he called his people together, Lefty and the rest, and assured them it was all a fairy tale. Even if the feds had picked Donnie up, it was against his will, to set them up. For a whole week they held on to that version and searched for Donnie everywhere: at the club in Florida, in the hotels and dives of Miami; they sent messengers out to Chicago, Milwaukee, California.
Sonny’s girlfriend, Judy, later told Pistone why Sonny hadn’t believed it. They’d been through so many scrapes together, poured their hearts out to each other so many times, become such friends, that Donnie simply couldn’t be an agent. And she told him what Sonny had said to her: that he had come to love Donnie like his own flesh and blood.
Seeing What You Already Believe
I start with Sonny because every one of us makes his mistake, and more often than we’d like. A mind that has invested in something—a person, a business, an opinion—protects that investment. It doesn’t weigh new facts; it bends them to fit the old picture. If a fact doesn’t fit, it rewrites it: “they took him by force”, “it’s a set-up”, “it’s just a misunderstanding”.
Sonny was holding a photograph from the FBI. Not a rumour, not a suspicion, but direct evidence. And his mind found a way not to accept it. This is called confirmation bias: we look for what confirms our opinion and don’t notice what contradicts it.
There’s only one cure, and it isn’t pleasant. When you believe in something, go looking on purpose for evidence of the opposite. Ask yourself: what would have to happen for me to change my mind? And if it has happened, have the courage to change it. Better still, keep someone close who isn’t invested in your picture and can tell you what you won’t tell yourself.
“I Had a Feeling All Along”
When Pistone later met Judy, the first thing she told him was that she’d had a feeling all along. And then that she had always known he wasn’t one of them, that he carried himself quite differently, that she had understood he wasn’t just a crook.
I’m not laughing at Judy. She was a good woman, far removed from all that business, and Pistone genuinely worried about her. But her words hold the second trap of the mind, one everybody should know about. In hindsight, everything looks obvious. For five years Donnie was one of their own to an entire Bonanno family, and nobody suspected a thing. And a week after he was unmasked, everybody had “always known”.
What makes this trap dangerous is that it teaches you the wrong lesson. If after a failure you tell yourself “I knew it”, you learn nothing: after all, you knew. In fact you didn’t know, or you’d have acted differently. The honest question after a mistake goes like this: what did I know back then, at that minute, and what could I have found out if I’d asked? Only that kind of post-mortem teaches you anything. Everything else is consolation.
The House He Never Lived In
The third trap is thinking too highly of yourself. Being sure the rules are written for other people.
In Corleone there is a state agricultural college which, as Dickie writes, looks nothing like a state institution. A brand-new three-storey building with an underground car park, lifts, air conditioning, a garden in the courtyard, balconies, wrought-iron railings. Inside, desks, blackboards and computers that look absurd on floors of black and red marble. The college was built as Totò Riina’s villa. In all likelihood he meant to settle his whole sprawling family there once his career came to an end. A sort of retirement home, built on the assumption that the sentence could be changed.
Dickie writes that what strikes you most when you look at the building is Riina’s self-assurance and his complete inability to understand that the state had the right to question the legitimacy of a fortune built on dozens of murders. The villa was confiscated in 1992 and handed over to the town in 1997. By the end of 1995, about a hundred and twenty-five million pounds had been confiscated from Riina. Riina’s only project that ever did Sicily any good is a college for future farmers.
At the office, thinking too highly of yourself looks quieter, but it works the same way. A manager sure his department is the best stops comparing himself with others. A salesman sure the client isn’t going anywhere stops calling the client. A man sure it won’t happen to him doesn’t take out insurance. Check yourself through other people’s eyes. The surer you are, the more often.
The Worst-Case Scenario
The fourth trap is the opposite: picturing the worst and acting as if it had already happened.
In the summer of 1981, shortly before the operation ended, three captains were killed in the Bonanno family. Pistone had a meeting coming up with Sonny Black. His bosses at the FBI got nervous: there was talk that Donnie had been set up and would be killed at the meeting. Pistone argued back: why would they kill me, I’m on Sonny’s side, he invited me himself. He was fine with surveillance on the street. But the bosses also wanted to put a SWAT team on the rooftops. Pistone, by his own account, blew up: had they lost their minds—snipers on the roofs in a neighbourhood Sonny knew like the back of his hand? They made do with the surveillance.
Look at the right way to handle the worst case. You have to play it out: what if they really do want to kill me? From there you get a sensible measure: surveillance. But you mustn’t live in it. Snipers on the roofs would have wrecked the operation more surely than any plot. The worst case is a tool for getting ready, not a way of making decisions. Play it out, take measures you can afford, and switch it off.
The old men in our world used to say that a lot of trouble goes away by itself if you don’t wave your arms about. Not all of it. But a lot. Plan for the worst, and act on what you see.
“What If”
The fifth trap is endlessly going over what might have been. “If I’d said yes back then”, “if I hadn’t gone”, “if he hadn’t called”. A little of this is useful: it’s how the mind learns. A lot of it is harmful: it’s how the mind gets stuck in what isn’t there.
At the end of his story Pistone writes calmly and soberly that each of them, Lefty and Sonny, loved him in his own way, and each would have killed him without a second thought. If the Commission, in the dispute over him, had decided in Mirra’s favour back then, the contract on him could easily have come down, and they’d have carried it out without a word. He doesn’t torment himself with that “if”. He uses it to understand the rules of the game, and moves on.
Work Expands to Fill the Time
And the last trap, the most everyday one. Work stretches to fill exactly the time it’s given. Give a task a week and it takes a week. Give it a month and it takes a month. Give it no deadline at all and it drags on until somebody asks.
For Operation Sun Apple, which was how Donnie Brasco began, New York asked for ten thousand dollars for six months. The thinking was: if there are results, we’ll squeeze out more money and make another presentation. Nobody, Pistone writes, could have imagined the operation would stretch to six years. In his case that was for the best: the operation that stretched had results. But usually it’s the other way round, and a task with no deadline simply spreads.
Set deadlines. Short but honest ones. And remember that the deadline you don’t set will be set by someone else, and you’ll like it less.
The Bottom Line
Look for evidence against your own opinion, especially when you’re very sure of it.
Sonny, by the way, held on to his version for a week. Then, according to Judy, he went completely to pieces. The week he spent refusing to believe the photograph he could have spent thinking about himself.