Friends and Enemies
In 1980 Tommaso Buscetta came out of prison and, before leaving to join his young wife in South America, spent a few months in Palermo. He stayed as a guest of Stefano Bontate and Salvatore Inzerillo, the two richest and most powerful bosses in the city. Dickie passes on his impressions. Bontate and Inzerillo paid no attention whatsoever to what was going on around them: they were completely absorbed in the heroin business, which was then at its peak. Every day between fifty and a hundred lorries pulled up at the gate of Inzerillo’s villa. Buscetta remembered the two of them talking about villas by the sea and on the mountainsides, about millions of lire, yachts and banks, and doing it, he said, as casually as if they were discussing the delivery of groceries for breakfast.
Meanwhile Totò Riina’s Corleonesi, whom the rich Palermo bosses took for country bumpkins, were quietly recruiting men inside those bosses’ own families.
Buscetta, who always had a remarkable nose, saw which way the wind was blowing. He declined to stay on and put a bit of money aside, and in January 1981 he flew to Brazil. On the twenty-third of April Bontate was driving home in a brand-new red collector’s Alfa Romeo from a party for his own birthday. At a traffic light he was cut down with a machine gun. Two and a half weeks later they killed Inzerillo. He drove an Alfa Romeo too, only an armoured one, and the killers waited for him as he came out of his mistress’s house and walked to the car.
The Weak Opponent
The richest man in the room never noticed that the room had changed hands. That is the first lesson about enemies: there are no weak ones. There are only the ones you underestimated.
Bontate and Inzerillo thought they were stronger, and by every visible measure they were: money, connections in America, politicians, heroin. The Corleonesi looked like provincials. But the provincials had something the rich men didn’t. They were watching their opponent, not their yachts. While one side counted millions, the other counted the men in other families who could be won over.
In the office it looks like this. A big firm doesn’t notice the small one taking its clients one by one. An experienced boss doesn’t notice the young deputy quietly gathering people around himself. A man who feels secure in his position stops watching the people his position is in the way of. Never think an enemy is weak just because he is poorer, younger or simpler than you. Work out what he wants and what he is doing to get it.
Seeing Isn’t Enough
Second lesson: it isn’t enough to see the danger. You have to do something in time.
A few years before all this, a mafioso called Giuseppe Di Cristina, one of Bontate’s men, did something people of his kind almost never dared to do. He went to the carabinieri and told them what the Corleonesi were planning. He knew a great deal: about a fourteen-man “death squad”, about how the Corleonesi had worked their way into other families, about where Provenzano had recently been seen, though by then he had been in hiding for a good fifteen years. He advised the carabinieri to strike first. And he ended the conversation on a grim note: a bulletproof car, he said, was due to be delivered to him by the end of the following week, because it was better to be on the safe side.
A few weeks later Di Cristina was shot dead on the edge of Palermo, at Passo di Rigano, on Inzerillo’s turf. Dickie observes that it is hard to imagine a more brazen insult than a killing on ground everyone knew belonged to someone else: it was a message to the owner of that ground as well. Neither the carabinieri nor Inzerillo read the message.
Di Cristina saw the enemy more clearly than anyone. But he ordered his armoured car for the following week. If you see danger, act today. Tomorrow the enemy has plans too.
Keep Him Closer
The third lesson is the best known. In The Godfather, in the second film, Michael Corleone quotes his father: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. That’s the cinema, but the idea is old and sound. You need to know your enemy better than your friend. A friend won’t give you a nasty surprise. An enemy will, if you aren’t watching.
Sonny Black understood this in his own way. After the three captains were killed in the spring of 1981, he inherited Captain Sabella, who had been on the other side. As Sonny told it to Pistone, Sabella thought Sonny was going to whack him; then they met and talked, Sabella explained he had stayed on the other side because he’d been threatened, Sonny told him he worked for him now, and Sabella calmed down. He would serve, Sonny said, like a faithful dog.
A beaten enemy is worth more on your side than finished off. He knows things you don’t. He is grateful to be alive. And he is where you can see him. But not every one. Tony Mirra, who on the eve of those killings had announced he was staying with the other side, got no offer from Sonny, only a warning through his uncle. As Pistone drily notes later, in his list of what became of everyone, Mirra was killed in New York in 1982.
In the office you don’t kill your rivals, but the choice is the same. The man who fought you for the job can become your best deputy if you give him a place and some respect. Or he can stay your enemy, if you keep putting the boot in. Decide whom to bring close by one test only: is he ready to work with you? Not whether he was against you.
The Most Dangerous Enemy Is Yesterday’s Ally
And the last lesson, the bitterest. The most dangerous enemy isn’t the one you know. It’s the one you think is yours.
In Naples in 2004, at the height of the Secondigliano war, one of the first targets of the Di Lauro clan was Ferdinando “Uncle Fester” Bizzarro. He had once been the clan’s obedient local boss in Melito; then he wanted to run the money and the decisions himself. Saviano describes how they tracked him. He went out only on Tuesdays and Saturdays, in four cars. The clan’s leadership even faxed instructions to its men. And the precise tip-offs on Bizzarro, as the investigation showed, came to the clan from his own business partner, a local politician and former mayor of Melito, who looked after Bizzarro’s interests in all sorts of public offices. Saviano calls him Uncle Fester’s angel of death.
Four cars of bodyguards protect you from the people you’re afraid of. They don’t protect you from the man who knows your routine because you told it to him yourself. Keep an eye on allies whose interests may one day part company with yours. Not because everyone betrays. Because interests change, and yesterday’s partner may decide tomorrow that he does better without you.
The Bottom Line
Don’t make enemies you don’t need, and don’t take the ones you have for harmless. Bontate and Inzerillo didn’t die because they had too few friends. They died because they never noticed their room had changed.