Power

Until 1936 Charles “Lucky” Luciano was one of the most powerful men in New York. Then they put him in prison, and in 1946 they deported him from America to Italy. A Sicilian by birth, he settled not in Sicily but in Naples, and from there he ran smuggling, drugs included, for the rest of his life. He had money enough. Connections on both sides of the ocean, too.

Dickie draws a distinction from this that is worth remembering. Before prison, Luciano headed what is sometimes called a power syndicate: a gang that collected tribute from everyone on its turf, legal and illegal alike. In Naples he headed an enterprise syndicate: trade, but no power over territory. And one day, Dickie writes, some petty Neapolitan thief gave a vivid demonstration of the drawbacks of that position: he beat Luciano up in public, and Luciano could do nothing to get even.

One of the richest gangsters in the world, and a pickpocket thrashes him in the street. Meanwhile the poorest don on his own street is untouchable.

Money Isn’t Power

Here is the first thing to understand about power: it isn’t money, it isn’t rank, and it isn’t fame. Power is the ability to make things go the way you want through other people. In Naples Luciano had money and fame. What he didn’t have was people on that street who would do what he said. So the thief walked away unpunished.

It’s the same in the office. You can have a big title and no power: they listen to you in the meeting and then don’t do what you said. You can have no title at all and a great deal of power: the old secretary without whom nothing gets signed, the bookkeeper who knows where the money is, the foreman the whole shop floor will follow. Don’t look at the names on the doors. Look at whose word turns into deeds.

Where does power come from? From a few sources, and you know them as well as we do. From what you can give people: money, work, protection, promotion. From what you can take away from them. From knowing what others don’t. From being respected and trusted. And from having other people behind you. That last source is the strongest. Money runs out, fear wears off, knowledge goes stale. But the people who are on your side stay, until you betray them.

Everyone Does What He Does Best

Second: power doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. Quite the opposite. A smart man hands others what they do better and keeps for himself what he does better than anyone.

Dickie describes two career paths in Cosa Nostra. The first is political: capodecina, consigliere, boss, power over men and territory. The second is commercial: travel, contacts, international trade. Tommaso Buscetta, for all the enormous respect he enjoyed, Dickie writes, never rose above the rank of ordinary member. But he spent his whole life travelling the world and became “the boss of two worlds”. He was strong at one thing and didn’t try to be strong at the other.

Economists call this comparative advantage, and their reasoning goes like this. Even if you can do everything better than your assistant, it pays to hand him the work where your edge is smaller and take on the work where it’s bigger. Don Vincenzo pressed shirts better than half our pressers. But in forty years I never once saw him at the press. An hour of the Don’s time was worth more than a hundred pressed shirts: in that hour he would strike a deal with a hotel that gave the laundry a year’s work. Others could press. Nobody could deal the way he did.

Don’t spend your power on what others can do. That isn’t laziness or putting on airs. It’s bookkeeping. Every hour a capo spends on a soldier’s work is an hour when the capo’s work doesn’t get done.

The More People, the Dearer the Talk

Third, and everyone who builds a crew forgets it. The more people involved in a job, the more every conversation costs. Two people only need to exchange a word. Ten need a meeting. A hundred need orders, memos, checks. And at every step something gets lost.

In Cosa Nostra this came especially dear, because everything rested on secrecy. Buscetta explained that if a man of honour needs to contact a member of another family, he asks his boss, and the boss sends him to someone who knows both sides. That keeps contacts to the necessary minimum, and everyone knows very little about the other families. The secret is kept. But Buscetta also named the price: in his world there were misunderstandings all the time, because apart from the men at the very top, nobody knew what was going on in the higher circles. Thanks to this grapevine, rumour and hints often took the place of the truth.

And sometimes talk turns out too dear even for power. Dickie tells how in 1979 a Sicilian mafioso gained great power in the Bonanno clan in New York. Rumour had it that he turned down the official top job only because his English was poor. Power you can’t get across to people isn’t power. It’s a title.

The same law holds in the office. Every new person on a team adds not one connection but many: one to each of the others. That’s why big teams are slower than small ones, and the bigger the team, the more effort goes not into the work but into talking about the work. Keep teams small. Speak plainly and briefly. Don’t pass anything important through five pairs of hands. And check that what you said got through the way you said it.

The Bottom Line

Don’t confuse money, rank and power: look at whose word turns into deeds. And if you ever find yourself in a strange town with money but without your own people, be polite to the pickpockets. It’s cheaper than it looks.