What a Soldier Needs

During the First World War the Neapolitan Camorra was operating in Brooklyn: the Navy Street gang was run by Alessandro Vollero, the Coney Island gang by Pellegrino Morano. They had a young man in the gang called Ralph Daniello, known as “the Barber”. Dash writes that Vollero and Morano barely noticed him. The Barber lived on a fixed wage of about fifteen dollars a week. For that money he collected tribute and carried out whatever assaults and killings the bosses thought necessary. The married men got about twenty, the occasional members of the gang seven.

In May 1916 the Barber shot a man in a quarrel over a cocaine deal and left town, taking his sixteen-year-old mistress with him. In Reno, on the dusty streets of Nevada, his money ran out. So he wrote to his boss, Vollero: send me money and keep up the payments to my parents in Italy. He felt he had earned it with years of loyal service.

Vollero didn’t answer a single letter.

Dash writes that the Barber took it hard. So hard that the next time he picked up a pen, he wrote to none other than the New York police. In the last week of November 1917 they brought him to Brooklyn, and he told them everything. His testimony shed light on twenty-three unsolved murders and hundreds of lesser crimes. The Navy Street and Coney Island gangs were smashed. Vollero was sentenced to death, later commuted to life. Morano got twenty years for murder. The Camorra, Dash writes, would never again be a power in New York.

The Camorra wasn’t brought down by the police or by its rivals. It was brought down by a boss who didn’t answer a letter from a fifteen-dollar soldier.

Everyone Needs to Matter

What does a man who works for you need? Money, of course. But the Barber didn’t turn because of money. He’d run out of money before. He turned because nobody noticed him. Fifteen dollars a week, murders on command, and not one reply to his letters when things went bad for him.

Every man needs to feel that he matters. That his work means something. That he’s seen, remembered by name, that someone knows what his life is about. A soldier needs this as much as a captain, maybe more: a captain has other sources of self-assurance, while a soldier often has only his boss.

And it comes very cheap. Answer a letter. Ask after his mother’s health. Say in front of everyone that the job was well done. Remember his wife’s name. Don Vincenzo knew every presser and every loader by name, knew who had how many children and whose father was ill. It didn’t cost him a penny, and our pressers stayed with us for twenty years, while the laundries next door changed theirs every six months.

Safety

The second thing a man needs is safety. To know that if something happens to him, he won’t be abandoned. That his family will be looked after. That he won’t be thrown out on the street for one mistake.

Sonny Black, for all his brutality, understood this. One day, as they stood on the roof by his pigeon coop, he told Pistone, as Pistone recounts it, that he would put Donnie up for membership once the Old Man was gone; that he loved him like a brother, trusted him like a brother and believed in him. And he added a request: if anything happened to him, Donnie was to make sure money went to his family regularly, he was counting on him, the kids were to get a thousand a week.

Sonny knew that life in his world was short, and he looked after the ones he would leave behind. He demanded this of his men and, I’m sure, would have provided for his own men’s families himself. Vollero understood nothing of the kind: he stopped paying the Barber’s parents the moment the Barber stopped being useful. And signed his own sentence.

In the office, safety looks different: insurance, fair rules, the certainty that you won’t be fired for an honest mistake, that your boss will cover for you with his own boss. A man who feels safe works boldly, suggests new things, owns up to mistakes. A man who is afraid works cautiously, hides his mistakes and leaves at the first chance for somewhere he isn’t scared. And if there’s nowhere to go, he writes to the kind of place he’d have done better not to write to.

Thanks, Courtesy, Respect

There are three things everyone wants from the people they work with, and they cost nothing.

Thanks: when your work is noticed and you’re thanked for it. Not once a year at a meeting, but straight away, as soon as it’s done.

Courtesy: when people talk to you as a person, not as a tool. “Please” and “thank you” cost a boss nothing, and the man under him remembers them.

Respect: when your opinion is asked for, your time is valued, and your dignity is left alone in front of others.

You remember how Mirra insulted Pistone in front of everyone, and how Lefty humiliated him in restaurants for years. Both were experienced men in their world. And neither understood that every public humiliation is a debt that one day gets called in. In their case it was called in by an FBI agent. In yours it will be your best worker, walking out to a competitor at the worst possible moment.

Explain Why

One last thing. People need to know why they’re doing what they do. An order without an explanation is carried out grudgingly and only as far as it’s checked. An order with an explanation is carried out better, even when nobody’s watching.

Remember how Lefty taught Pistone the rules? He didn’t just order him to shave off his moustache. He explained: real wiseguys don’t wear moustaches, that’s for old Sicilians. He didn’t just forbid him to talk on the phone, he showed him: we’re being bugged. The explanation was naive—the aerials on the school were for television—but the rule stuck, because it came with a “because”.

Don Vincenzo always explained why. Why we don’t deliver on Sundays: because on a Sunday the cooks aren’t ready to take goods in, and the tins stand in the sun for a week. Why we starch collars separately: because office clerks judge us by their collars. His people knew the reason for every rule, and so they came up with better ways of doing things themselves. A man who knows why will find out how on his own.

The Bottom Line

Almost everything a soldier needs, apart from money, costs nothing. Answer the letter. Find out his wife’s name. Don’t humiliate him in front of people.

Vollero saved himself the trouble of answering the Barber. It was the most expensive saving in the history of the Brooklyn Camorra.