Us and Them
On the morning of the fifth of December 1928, Frank Osowski, a patrolman with the Cleveland police, noticed several tough-looking men getting out of two cars outside the Hotel Statler. They looked the sort that made him call for backup. The police checked the hotel register and raided the rooms. Twenty-three Italians were detained. The historian Critchley quotes a detail from a newspaper report that I can’t read without smiling: nearly all of them were wearing new silk underwear and fine shirts.
Not one of the men admitted knowing any of the others. Yet they were all carrying pistols, and most had records. Ten days later fifteen of them pleaded guilty to being “suspicious persons”; they were told they’d be fined or jailed if they didn’t leave town, and they left. The rest were acquitted, and they too quickly vanished from the city. It was, as came out later, a Mafia meeting from several cities.
Twenty-three men who don’t know each other turn up at the same hotel with pistols and the same new silk underwear. Their own kind recognised their own kind. So did the police.
The Tribe
People live in tribes, and there’s nothing wrong with that: it’s how we survived. We stick with our own, trust our own, help our own, and we’re wary of outsiders. Each of us belongs to several tribes at once: family, town, trade, company, club.
Every tribe has its signs by which its own are recognised: clothes, words, habits, places. Lefty, as you remember, first of all told Pistone to shave off his moustache and wear a sports jacket and slacks when he went out. Those were the tribe’s signs. Pistone writes later that in the Bonanno family everyone stayed in his own borough: the Brooklyn guys in Brooklyn, the Manhattan guys in Manhattan, that was the way it was done. Even inside one family there were little tribes with their own borders.
Signs help your own find each other, and help outsiders understand who they’re dealing with. It works both ways, as in Cleveland. If you want to be accepted in some circle, learn its signs. If you don’t want to be recognised by the wrong people, don’t wear silk underwear to a meeting the police aren’t supposed to know about.
One Small Detail
The second thing: the signs have to match. One small detail that doesn’t fit the picture brings the whole picture down.
Throughout the operation Pistone never took off the ring his wife had given him: an Irish Claddagh ring, two hands holding a heart beneath a crown. A sign of love and loyalty. According to his cover story, Donnie Brasco was single. Nobody noticed the ring until one summer, at a barbecue at one of the hoods’ houses, somebody’s girlfriend started asking him about it, as Pistone tells it: wasn’t that a Claddagh, wasn’t that a love ring, a wedding ring even, and why was he wearing it if he wasn’t married?
Pistone answered that it was a present from a girl he’d loved; a few months later they had split up, and he wore it as a keepsake. One of the guys thought about it and asked, more or less, whether Donnie was sure he wasn’t married, because something didn’t add up: he loved her so much he still wore her ring after she’d dumped him? Pistone wriggled out of it by saying everybody has that one special person in their life. Nobody asked about it again.
A spy who fooled the Mafia for almost five years was nearly given away not by a wiretap but by his faithfulness to his wife. Make sure all your signs say the same thing. If you promise clients care and your reception room is dirty, the reception room will speak louder than the promise. If you say you value people and then turn up late to meet them, the lateness will tell the truth.
Ask Around
The third thing: people believe what other people believe. If everyone around thinks you’re reliable, you’ll be believed faster than if you set out to prove it yourself.
Gambetta gives a cunning example from Calabria. An extortionist phones and advises the victim to get in touch with the “friends” of Palizzi (a small Calabrian town). The victim naturally asks who they are and where to find them. And the answer he gets is that he should ask around and he’ll find out. Why so complicated? Because a direct address is easy to fake: anyone can phone and call himself a friend of Palizzi. But if it turns out that everyone around knows who these friends are, that is the guarantee you’re dealing with the real thing. No wonder, Gambetta concludes, that the main capital of the protection trade is reputation.
See how this works in an honest business. A client choosing a supplier isn’t satisfied with your word. He needs other people to talk about you: neighbours, acquaintances, colleagues. Let him “ask around” and find out. That’s why the best advertising isn’t yours but what people say about you. Make sure that when someone asks “who does this best round here?”, the neighbours name you.
Poor Relations
One last thing: the borders between us and them aren’t for ever. Today’s outsiders may be one of us tomorrow, and yesterday’s poor relations may become the masters.
Dickie tells how in the fifties and sixties American mafiosi treated their colleagues from Sicily. They took them under their wing, treated them like poor relations, and called them “zips” because they spoke their Sicilian dialect too fast. But as soon as the “zips” were allowed into drug trafficking in North America, they quickly forgot their deference. By the seventies, Dickie writes, the “zips” were already running the drug business of the once mighty Bonanno family.
And here is what happened in the cinema, in Goodfellas—mind you, this is a film. Henry Hill, the main character, explains in voice-over that neither he nor his friend Jimmy will ever be made, because they have Irish blood, and only pure-blooded Italians get made. A tribe can guard its border so tightly that it won’t let in even the men who bring it the most money.
There are two lessons in this for you. Don’t look down on outsiders: among them may be the people who decide your fate tomorrow. And don’t guard your tribe’s borders too tightly: the people you keep out will find somewhere else to go, maybe to your competitors.