How to Get into the Family

In May 1976, in Sicily, nineteen-year-old Giovanni Brusca was made a member of the Mafia—the man who would later blow up Judge Falcone. Dickie describes the ceremony from Brusca’s own testimony. Brusca’s father was a local boss, and the young man had committed his first murder before he was even made. One day he was invited to yet another banquet at a country villa. There were many men of honour there, among them Totò Riina, whom Brusca already called his godfather. Someone started asking him questions: how do you feel about killing? Could you commit a crime? Brusca found this odd: he had already killed, and here they were asking how he felt about it. He had no idea the ceremony had already begun.

Then everyone went into another room, and he was left alone. When they called him in, his father wasn’t there, and the others were sitting at a round table with a pistol, a dagger and a small picture of a saint lying on it. If you go to prison, will you stay loyal? Do you want to become a member of the association known as Cosa Nostra? Brusca answered, as Dickie tells it, that he liked his companions—and that he liked killing. They pricked his finger, he smeared the blood on the holy picture, Riina set fire to the paper in his palms and told him: if you betray us, your flesh will burn like this image.

And then Brusca’s father came back into the room, and Riina introduced them to each other, telling them that the two of them belonged to the same company as he did. His father. To his own son.

Through a Third Man

This rule, according to Dickie, is one of the best known in Cosa Nostra: men of honour are forbidden to introduce themselves as mafiosi, even to each other. You need a third man who knows both and will say: “This is a friend of ours,” or “You two are from the same company.” Gambetta gives an even funnier case. In the fifties the son of a prominent member of a Catania family, Al Indelicato, went to Philadelphia and was made in the local family there. A few years later he came back to Sicily and couldn’t tell his own father that he was a man of honour. He had to wait until a certain Calogero Sinatra, who knew about the initiation and could introduce them, got back from a trip. Father and son dined together and kept quiet about the main thing until the third man returned.

I’m not telling you this for the exotic touch. You get into any serious organisation through a third man. In our world the rule is written in blood, in yours in good manners, but it’s the same rule. People need someone who knows both you and them and is ready to say: he’s one of us. They read your CV. They read the signature under it more carefully.

Agent Pistone writes about this with professional precision: members of crime families deal only with people they know personally or whom others have vouched for. So for the first two or three months he didn’t try to achieve anything; he only laid the groundwork for meeting people who could later vouch for him. For his cover story the FBI had arranged in advance with a thief in Miami, an informant: if anyone asks about Don Brasco, you say you worked together and this Brasco is a solid guy. The informant had no idea who Brasco was. Seven months later Donnie had to give that name to some gangsters who wanted to check up on him, and he was nervous, he says: what if the informant hadn’t been warned, or had forgotten? A wrong answer would have cost him his life. The answer came back right.

If you want to get in where something important is decided, don’t start with yourself; start with the people who can put in a word for you. Earn their respect before you need it. And remember that whoever vouches for you answers for you. Don’t let him down. In our world they kill both of you for that. In yours they just stop trusting both of you, and sometimes that’s worse.

The Right Place

But before you look for a sponsor, choose where you’re going in. That matters more than young people think. They look at the salary, the title, the office. What they should look at is what kind of place it is and where it leads.

In 1893 Bernardino Verro lived in Corleone. He was a leader of the peasant movement that was rising across Sicily at the time. He had been threatened, and a local man offered him guarantees of his personal safety. Verro agreed and was initiated into the local group known as the “little brothers”: blood from his finger on a drawing of a skull, the drawing burned, a password taught. Dickie writes that very soon Verro regretted it. The little brothers took over the New Era club, the centre of the republicans and socialists, and started playing cards there and putting counterfeit money into circulation through the games. Verro understood that all this was ruining his good name, kept his distance from the club, then broke with them altogether. He was declared a traitor. Twenty-two years later, on the third of November 1915, as he was leaving Corleone town hall, he was shot at from around a corner. He managed to draw his Browning, but it fired once and jammed.

Verro went for protection to an organisation that was alien to him, and in twenty-odd years he never got free of it. It’s an extreme case, but the idea is simple. The place you go into decides who you’ll become. A good salary in a bad place is payment for gradually becoming like that place. Find out in advance what the organisation stands on, how it makes its money, what it does with those who make mistakes and with those who leave. Find out who’s at the top and how they got there. If you don’t like the answers, don’t go in, whatever they promise you.

The Junior Keeps Quiet and Watches

One last thing. Once you’re in, for the first few years your main job is to keep quiet and watch.

One hot July evening Lefty drove Pistone to the Casa Bella restaurant. Five or six men from Captain Sabella’s crew were standing at the entrance. “We’re guarding the Old Man,” Lefty explained. The Old Man was Carmine Galante, head of the Bonanno family, just out of prison. Through the window Pistone could see his hawk-like profile and his cigar. And he innocently suggested: why don’t we go inside and guard the Old Man sitting down? Lefty, Pistone recalls, sighed and told him that sometimes he acted like a real idiot. Lilo didn’t eat with just anybody, only with captains or his equals from other families. Donnie wasn’t even allowed to speak to him, except through the men above him.

Standing in the street guarding a man you’re not allowed to speak to—in our world that was a promotion. The new man isn’t let in to the table yet, but he’s already put at the door. And while he stands at the door, he learns: who goes up to whom, who sits with whom, who waits for whom, who leaves early.

In the office everything is softer, but the rule is the same. In your first year you listen more than you talk. You learn who really makes the decisions and who only signs. Who’s friends with whom, who owes whom. Which subjects are dangerous and which aren’t. You go to the top brass through your own boss, not over his head. They’ll ask your opinion when they know what it’s worth. If you give it before then, they’ll never ask.

The Bottom Line

Go in through someone who knows both you and them, and don’t let him down. And don’t be surprised by rules that seem strange. After all, Riina introduced Brusca to his own father. Rules are rules.