Your Capo
Lefty Ruggiero was the mentor every new man dreams of, and the mentor every new man dreams of getting rid of. One and the same man.
On the one hand, Pistone writes, Lefty treated him with real warmth. He taught him everything: how to dress, how to talk, when to keep his mouth shut, how to introduce people. He kept promising him a big future: be patient, Donnie, make money, stay out of trouble, don’t be rude to people, and you’ll get in. He vouched for him with his own head.
On the other hand, Lefty could humiliate him in no time at all, and in front of people. Once, in a Chinese restaurant, Pistone ordered something that wasn’t Chinese, and Lefty started holding forth, loudly, that only half-wits go to a Chinese restaurant and don’t eat Chinese food. He didn’t mean to get at him in particular, Pistone writes; that was simply how he was used to talking to people. But patience runs out. At the end of 1979 his snapped. As Pistone tells it, he told Lefty he wasn’t his slave and he’d had enough of being put down in public. Lefty told him to cool it: he was only trying to make a man of him. Had Donnie ever once heard him talk to Mike Sabella in that tone? Was he counting on getting made or what?
Some time later, at Tampa airport, Pistone for the first time didn’t lift Lefty’s bag off the carousel, as was their custom. Everyone collected their things, and Lefty’s bag went round and round on its own until it dawned on him and he reached for it himself. All of it in front of the others. Lefty, Pistone writes, was practically smoking with resentment.
Obey First
I’m starting the chapter on your capo with this story because it has everything in it: why you need a mentor, why he’s hard to live with, and where patience ends.
The first rule is simple and unpleasant: before you give orders, learn to take them. Not because the boss is always right. But because only by carrying out someone else’s orders do you learn what orders look like from the inside: which are clear and which aren’t, which can be done, which are stupid, how it feels to be the man on the receiving end. Someone who has never obeyed gives orders badly. He doesn’t know what it’s like at the other end.
Lefty taught Pistone more than rules. He taught him how to stand in the hierarchy: where your place is, whom you speak to yourself and whom you approach through the men above you. Pistone put up with it for years. Not out of weakness—he had a job to do—but also because he understood that Lefty had his own position, his own bosses, his own responsibility for him. While you’re the apprentice, your job is to learn, not to prove the teacher wrong.
Just don’t overdo the deference. A capo surrounded by yes-men goes blind. A good boss values the man who carries out the order but can tell him the order won’t work. A bad one doesn’t. If your boss is a bad one, that’s one more reason to learn from him how not to do it.
Ask Again
The second rule: if an order isn’t clear, ask again. Don’t be ashamed. What’s shameful is doing the wrong thing.
In our world orders were often given in hints, and that was a constant headache. Gambetta gives a case: when old Don Mariano Marsala asked the head of his district about the disappearance of one of the family’s members, the man answered with something like this: once a sheep went missing in Misilmeri, and nothing has been heard of it since. Don Mariano understood that the man had been removed by the family itself: otherwise they would have answered him not with a parable but by organising a search.
He understood—good. But what if he hadn’t? Antonino Calderone used to say that in the Mafia what matters most is accurate information; otherwise nobody understands anything and confusion sets in. Around 1975 his brother was very nearly killed by three men from Catania who had fled to Milan: their boss had got it into his head, by mistake, that Calderone’s brother had become the leader of a hostile gang. He was saved by a chance stranger who pretended to join the killers and shot two of them on the way. Calderone’s conclusion: wrong information can cost a man his life.
In the office a misunderstood order costs money, time and trust. So when you’re given a task, repeat it back in your own words: have I got it right that I need to do this by such-and-such a date, and this is why? A good boss will appreciate it. A bad one will wince, but he’ll wince harder later when he gets the wrong thing. And when you give orders yourself, ask people to repeat them back. You’ll be amazed how many different orders fit into a single sentence of yours.
When the Boss Changes
Third: bosses change, and often suddenly. You have to know how to steer between the old one and the new.
In the summer of 1979, after the killing of Galante, which we’ll come to later, everything in the Bonanno family was reshuffled. Lefty gave Pistone the news, in Pistone’s account: the two of them were now under Sonny Black, a made captain, who had been handed Mike’s whole crew. The former captain, Sabella, was busted down to soldier. Sonny Black, whom Pistone had barely known until then, became their new boss.
Then came what happens in any office. Little by little Pistone started going to Sonny directly, without Lefty. And Lefty got jealous. Once, on the phone, he complained that Sonny hadn’t passed on some message from Donnie: Sonny, as Lefty put it more or less, thought he was King Arthur now, and everybody was sick of his antics. And he added, like a jealous wife, that he would never have done Donnie that way.
An old mentor whose pupil is being taken away by a new boss is a sad figure and a dangerous one at the same time. He loses his monopoly on you and may start getting in your way. What do you do? Respect the new boss: he’s your boss, and his orders come first. But don’t betray the old one: don’t tell the new one what the old one says about him, don’t go over the old one’s head for show, thank him for what he taught you. That’s exactly how Pistone carried himself: Sonny was his boss, he’d say, and he respected the boss. But he didn’t drop Lefty either, right to the end.
When Your Mentor Stands in Your Way
And the hardest part. Sometimes the mentor who brought you up becomes the one holding you back. He won’t let you go further, he takes credit for your work, he’s afraid you’ll get past him. What then?
Then remember that he has his fate and you have yours. You’re grateful to him, but you don’t belong to him. First talk to him straight, without witnesses, the way Pistone talked to Lefty: I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but it can’t go on like this. If that doesn’t help, look for ways that don’t require going through him: another department, another boss, another line of work. Just don’t make open war on him. In our world they killed you for that. In yours they remember, and your next boss will know how you treated the last one.
Sometimes you have to submit even to someone who yesterday stood below you. Giuseppe Morello was the first “boss of bosses” in New York. While he was in prison, his place was taken by Toto D’Aquila, younger and far less experienced, who until then had recognised Morello as the head. When Morello came out, D’Aquila sentenced him to death, and Morello fled to Sicily. At the beginning of 1922, through the mediation of a respected boss from Pittsburgh, a compromise was reached. In all probability, Dash writes, Morello gave up his claims to his former position and even to the leadership of his own family, and was forced formally to recognise D’Aquila as his boss. The founder of the firm signed the order for his own demotion. And stayed alive, while D’Aquila was killed in October 1928.
The Bottom Line
Deference, yes; yes-manship, no. And remember the bag on the carousel. Sometimes, to make people start respecting you, it’s enough to fail just once to do what they expect of you out of habit. Once. Not every day.