Secrets
In 1990 the FBI, using sophisticated equipment, recorded a Mafia initiation ceremony for the first time in history. It happened in Medford, Massachusetts, in the Patriarca family. Gambetta sets out what later found its way into the court papers and the newspapers. The four recruits were kept in separate rooms and made one at a time, in front of the boss, four seated lieutenants, the consigliere and eleven soldiers. The consigliere asked one of them, Carmen Tortora, whether he would leave his dying mother if Cosa Nostra called him. He said yes. Then he swore the oath, which ran more or less like this: he, Carmen Tortora, wanted to enter the organisation to protect his family and his friends; he swore not to reveal this secret and to obey with love and omertà. They placed a holy picture of a saint in his cupped hands and set it alight: as this saint burns, so will my soul burn. I enter the organisation alive, and I will leave it dead.
He swore not to reveal this secret, Tortora said, straight into an FBI microphone.
Every Secret Comes Out
That is the first thing, and the main thing, to know about secrets. Every secret comes out sooner or later. Not because somebody didn’t try hard enough. Because secrets are known by people, and people change, fall out, grow old, take fright, repent and land in prison.
The Mafia was built on secrecy for centuries. Now look at how its secrets got out. On the twenty-ninth of March 1973 a young mafioso, Leonardo Vitale, thirty-two years old, a capodecina in a family from the Palermo suburbs, walked into a police station of his own accord and told them everything: the structure, the initiation, the Commission. He was going through what Dickie calls a spiritual crisis: he had found God, he was tormented, he walked barefoot round his cell shouting “I am mad!”. The psychiatrists declared him partly sane. In 1977 the case came to trial, and of the twenty-eight accused only Vitale himself and his uncle were convicted: the rest were acquitted, because the court didn’t believe a “partly sane” witness. Vitale spent years in an asylum, came out in 1984, and was killed soon afterwards. And almost everything he said in 1973 was confirmed ten years later by Buscetta.
Even earlier, in 1962, in America, Joseph Valachi, a gunman from one of the New York families, started talking with the electric chair hanging over him. He didn’t talk very convincingly, Dickie writes, and few people on the Senate committee believed him. But J. Edgar Hoover heard him. In 1959 four hundred agents in the FBI’s New York office were working on the American Communist Party and just four on organised crime. By 1963 a hundred and forty were on it.
Look at that carefully. A secret doesn’t keep for ever. It keeps until the people who hear it are ready to believe it. After that, one man is enough.
Where Secrets Really Leak
The second thing: secrets don’t leak where they’re being guarded.
Lefty Ruggiero spent his whole life afraid of being bugged. You remember him pointing out the aerials on the school roof to Pistone. On the phone he only ever spoke in hints. He was sure he was being watched everywhere. And yet in Milwaukee, as Pistone writes, he was taped for the first time: Agent Tony Conte drove around with him in a car with a tape recorder hidden in it. Lefty hunted for bugs on school roofs and told everything to the man sitting next to the microphone.
Pistone himself, by the way, didn’t take to the hardware straight away. On his first operation, before the Mafia, they gave him a recorder he had to wear on his back. He spent the whole day turning to face the crooks so nobody would spot the hump, and then he rang his boss: he was never wearing that damn recorder again, he walked around like a hunchback. On top of that the machine chewed up the tape and the recording failed.
Secrets don’t get out through walls. They get out through people. Through the man sitting next to you. Through papers you threw away without tearing them up. Through drafts you forgot in the printer. Through the pizzini a bodyguard kept along with his pistols. The old men in our line of work used to say that all secrets end up in the wastepaper basket. In the office that’s literally true: in the bin, in the email, in the chat, in a folder left lying on a desk. Guard not only what you say but what you write and what you throw away.
What Not to Say at Home
The third thing: there are places where business is never discussed at all. Home most of all.
Salvatore Contorno told the judges the rule: it is forbidden to talk to women about the affairs of Cosa Nostra. A cruel, old-fashioned rule, but its point isn’t women. Its point is that the home shouldn’t know things that can harm it. Gambetta tells a story that shows what a secret like that costs. The wife of a major mafioso serving a life sentence bought some expensive clothes at a boutique in the Aosta Valley, and on her way home to Palermo the box was stolen from her on the train. The boutique owner urged her to report it to the police so she could claim on the insurance, and couldn’t for the life of her understand why her customer kept politely answering that her husband “didn’t have the time”. In the end the mafioso’s wife chose to pay for the stolen goods. A man of honour doesn’t report a theft to the police, even when it’s his wife who was robbed. The secret cost her the full price of the box.
In the office it’s gentler. Don’t take home things that could hurt your family if they ever came out. Don’t talk over dinner about matters the children shouldn’t know. And don’t talk at work about what concerns your home. Two halves of a life with a wall between them are stronger than one where everything is mixed up.
Don’t Say What You Think
In The Godfather, the film, there’s a scene I’ve watched more than once. After the meeting with Sollozzo, where Sonny, the Don’s eldest son, interrupted his father and showed he was keen on the deal himself, Don Corleone tears into him: never again tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking. One sentence from Sonny told Sollozzo more than an hour of negotiations, and it very nearly cost the Don his life.
That’s the cinema, but the rule is real. The most dangerous leaks aren’t stolen documents but thoughts let slip. You showed you liked the offer, and you lost your price. You showed you were unhappy with your boss, and it will reach your boss. You showed you were afraid, and somebody will use it. Keep your thoughts to yourself until you’ve decided it’s time to show them. And when you do show them, show them on purpose.
The Bottom Line
Behave as if one day everything will be read, and guard the bin, the email and the man sitting next to you. And remember Carmen Tortora. Sometimes the loudest way to give a secret away is to swear solemnly to keep it in the wrong room.