Who to Look Up To
When Tommaso Buscetta was young, an unknown member of a small Palermo clan, he once met Salvatore Giuliano, the famous bandit I told you about. That was in 1947. Dickie writes that Giuliano’s presence filled the young Buscetta with awe: it seemed to him that some special light came off the man.
At about the same time Buscetta met Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of the town of Mussomeli. Behind his back the mafiosi called Russo Gina Lollobrigida, for his incurable love of newspaper attention. By then Russo was a wealthy landowner and a Christian Democrat politician, but he still kept a mule in the house, and his toilet was a pit in the yard with a stone for a seat, no walls and no door. Buscetta, a city man, later recalled with horror how Russo would sit down on that stone in the middle of a conversation and use the “toilet” for its intended purpose.
Ten years later, in 1957, at the Spanò, a seafront restaurant in Palermo, Buscetta, by his own account, spent five hours over lunch with Joe Bonanno, the boss of one of New York’s five families, who had come to Sicily on holiday. All his life Buscetta remembered with admiration a man he described as outstanding, refined and gifted with a special intelligence. Dickie’s conclusion: Buscetta had found himself a role model. And he adds a detail I love. In his memoirs of that trip, Bonanno never even mentions the meeting at the Spanò.
Choose a Model
Every young man models himself on somebody, whether he wants to or not. The only question is whether he chooses the model or the model chooses him.
Buscetta went through three models, and each one taught him something. Giuliano dazzled him with the light of fame, and Buscetta saw how fame ends when there is nothing under it: you remember how Giuliano ended. Genco Russo showed him that money and position don’t make a man what he wants to be. Bonanno showed him what he himself wanted to become: refined, clever, a man of two continents. And Buscetta did become “the boss of two worlds”.
My advice is to choose your model on purpose. Find someone who can do what you can’t do yet, and who lives the way you’d like to be living in twenty years. Watch how he talks, how he decides, how he holds up in a bad moment, how he treats the people beneath him. Don’t copy everything: everybody has weaknesses, and copying them is stupid. Take what works.
And don’t expect your model to remember you. For Buscetta, that lunch at the Spanò was the event of a lifetime. For Bonanno it was a line he forgot to put in his memoirs. That’s how it almost always goes. The man you look up to has no obligation to know you exist. You can learn from someone at a distance.
Look at the Quality, Not the Glitter
Second: you can find a model even where you’d least expect one. Even on the other side.
Agent Pistone, who spent almost five years among the people he later put away, left a remarkable portrait of Sonny Black. If you count the Mafia as a job, he writes, Sonny was a real professional. No blowhard, no petty tyrant. A man of principle. Pistone admits it may sound strange, but he respected Sonny a great deal. And Sonny once told him about his plans: he wanted to put together a strong crew of reliable men, the kind you could turn your back on.
The best character reference that boss ever got came from the FBI agent who put him away. Pistone knew how to separate the trade from the qualities. He didn’t share what Sonny lived for, but he saw how Sonny kept his word, didn’t run his mouth, didn’t humiliate people, built a crew. And he respected those qualities, whichever side they turned up on.
Learn to do the same. There may be something to learn from a competitor. From a boss you don’t like, too. A man whose views you don’t share may turn out to have a remarkable knack for getting people to agree. Don’t look at whose side a man is on. Look at what he does well. And take it.
Soft and Hard
Third: the best models nearly always combine things that seem not to go together.
Nicola Gentile, the same man who told the parable of the “little professor”, was a famous peacemaker who helped settle several wars between families. In 1922 it was he who called a general assembly and brokered the compromise that saved Morello’s life. But Dash stresses that Gentile was by no means just a diplomat. He was a formidable boss, and he used to say himself that you couldn’t be a capomafia without being ferocious. He made his name in Pittsburgh in 1915 as a man not of words but of deeds.
The best go-between is the one whose ruling nobody feels like appealing. Softness without hardness is weakness; hardness without softness is just rudeness. A man worth taking as a model can be both, each time for a reason. Look for people like that. And learn from them above all when to switch on which.
America knew a man like that too. In May 1929, after the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, the heads of the Chicago gangs, Capone and his enemies, gathered at the resort of Atlantic City. Capone later explained to the Philadelphia police commissioner that they had met to bury the past and forget the war for the common good. The Literary Digest wrote that this “peace conference” had been chaired as arbiter by Johnny Torrio, a man older and much quieter than Capone. Capone was the loudest of them. They called in the calmest one to judge.
Who the Boys Copy
One last thing. Remember that you are somebody’s model too, whether you like it or not.
The historian Critchley, going through the life stories of American mafiosi, notes that two men from the Philadelphia family, Nicholas Caramandi and Thomas DelGiorno, grew up in a neighbourhood where the local family was strong, and from an early age tried to imitate the wiseguys next door. The boys in the street looked at the grown men in good suits and wanted to be just like them. Not at teachers, not at priests, but at the men who were respected on the street.
Your people look at you the same way. If you’re late, they’ll be late. If you lie to clients, they’ll lie to you. If you keep your word, they’ll keep theirs. You can’t help being a model. You can only choose what kind.
The Bottom Line
Choose your model yourself, not by accident, and look at qualities, not sides. And remember that people are watching you too. Somewhere right now a boy is deciding who to become, and he’s looking at you. Try to make sure he doesn’t remember you the way Buscetta remembered Genco Russo.