Character
In August 1981, a few weeks after the FBI showed him the photograph of Donnie Brasco, Sonny Black left for some meeting in New Jersey. He told nobody the details. His girlfriend Judy found out later that just before he left he had given Charlie the bartender all his jewellery, the keys to his apartment and so on. All he took with him were his car keys.
When Judy told him this, Pistone said that Sonny had understood he wasn’t coming back.
Not long before that, Sonny had called Santo Trafficante in Florida and told him what the agents had come to see him about. Pistone writes that he made no excuses and offered no theories. That same day he sent word to the boss of his family in prison and to the head of one of the other New York families. A man who had made what was, by the standards of his world, an unforgivable mistake—bringing an agent into the family—didn’t go looking for someone to blame. He reported, gave away his things, and went.
I’m not asking you to admire Sonny Black’s life. I’m asking you to look at how he met what wasn’t up to him. There’s a lesson in it you won’t find in most books on character.
What’s Up to You
People come in two breeds, told apart by one simple sign. Some believe their life depends mainly on themselves. Others believe it depends on circumstances, the bosses, the competition, the weather and wicked people. The first look for what can be done. The second look for who’s to blame.
Lefty Ruggiero was a shining example of the second breed. Forever broke, forever in debt, and always through somebody else’s fault. When Agent Tony Conte faked a heart attack so as not to give Lefty money for a deal on video recorders, Lefty raged and fumed. In his telling, Conte was by turns a piece of shit, a fantasist who borrowed from his wife, and a total moron; Lefty threatened to make one call to the right people and have Conte’s business taken off him in no time. And all the while Lefty loved to repeat that he’d been thirty years in the life and knew every pitfall like the back of his hand.
Thirty years in the life and not a single year with money. Experience that teaches you nothing is just time served. And it taught him nothing because in every failure Lefty saw somebody else’s stupidity and never once his own.
Sonny was of the first breed, even at the very end. He couldn’t undo what had already happened. But the way he went to meet it was still in his power, and that he took charge of.
You don’t control the market, the weather or other people’s decisions. You control your own actions and your own attitude. Start every failure with the question: what here was up to me? Almost always something was. Find it, fix it, and next time will go better. If all you look for is someone to blame, next time will go the same.
Without a Net
The second trait of character is being able to live with not knowing. Most people look for certainty, guarantees, insurance. That’s understandable. But the world doesn’t hand out certainty, and anyone who can’t do without it will always be on edge.
In September 1976, Agent Joseph Pistone disappeared. He cleared his desk at the FBI’s New York office, his name was removed from everything, and his personnel file was put in a safe. Anyone who called asking for him was told there was no such employee. His colleagues didn’t know where he’d gone. Nor did his friends. In the years that followed, he writes, he never went anywhere near a bureau office. He had to set up an apartment, a car and a bank account himself, with no help from the feds, and he couldn’t call anyone he knew. From then on, as he puts it, Donald Brasco could count on nobody but himself.
How do you live with that much not knowing? Pistone had a simple recipe, and I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice about life there is. Donnie Brasco had to have a cover story, but without details. The less you say, he writes, the less you lie; undercover, he always stuck to the truth whenever he could. An orphan, an orphanage in Pittsburgh, papers lost in a fire. A minimum of detail, a maximum of truth wherever possible.
You don’t have to defeat not knowing. You have to learn to stand in it. For that you need a small but solid footing: a few rules you believe in, and the truth wherever the truth is possible. With footing like that you can go anywhere.
Value It, Don’t Cling to It
Third: attachment. Valuing people, things, a business—that’s good. Clinging to them so hard you can’t let go when it’s time—that’s bad.
Pistone writes about Sonny with remarkable honesty. They really had grown close; he respected him a great deal. And at the same time it didn’t bother him in the least that because of what he did, Sonny would go to prison or be killed. Those were the rules of the game. He kept a hard emotional discipline. When a colleague worried about how he’d look the defendants in the eye, Pistone reminded him that he’d simply been doing his job. And he adds that when your life is on the line every day, too much emotional attachment only gets in the way.
Sonny, as you remember, had told Judy that he’d come to love Donnie like his own flesh and blood. One got attached, the other didn’t. Sonny paid for his attachment with his life. Pistone, without it, got the job done.
You don’t need that kind of coldness: you don’t live among people who might kill you tomorrow. But the idea is useful at the office too. Respect your partner, but don’t marry the deal. Love your business, but be able to close it when it stops working. Value people, but don’t keep around those who drag the team down just because you’ve known each other a long time. Attachment that stops you seeing isn’t loyalty, it’s blindness.
Keep Growing
One last thing. There are people who believe character and ability are handed out once and for all. And there are people who believe all of it can be developed if you work at it. The second kind grow. The first kind sulk at life.
William Flynn, chief of the Secret Service’s New York bureau, didn’t complain about the police after his first failure with the Morello gang in 1903, though he had plenty to complain about. For six years, Dash writes, he worked hard at making his service more effective. He hired new agents. One of them, Peter Rubano, who spoke Italian, he sent undercover into the immigrant quarter around 1905, and Rubano gradually got to know several of Morello’s men, Lupo the Wolf among them. Flynn built up Italian informants whose names he kept in the strictest secrecy. Under his leadership the bureau became, as Dash writes, what the New York police could have been but wasn’t. In November 1909 Flynn arrested Morello, and in February 1910 the court gave him twenty-five years.
Flynn wasn’t born a genius detective. He grew into one out of failure, because he saw failure not as a verdict but as an assignment. Do the same. After every flop, don’t ask “why am I so unlucky”, ask “what do I need to learn”. And learn it. In six years you’ll surprise yourself.
The Bottom Line
Look for what was up to you, not for who’s to blame. Lefty stayed the same old Lefty for thirty years. In a little over six years Flynn went from the failure of 1903 to Morello’s conviction. Choose which one you take after.