bookkeeper

The Don had an old bookkeeper, “no taste, but he could add.” The Don handed him the most beautiful offers to take apart, and he knew what each one cost and how much of it would be left. The bookkeeper doesn’t decide, but deciding without him is dangerous. It helps if your finance man isn’t afraid to spoil the mood at a meeting either.

Business

With a capital B, it’s what the Family exists for and gets paid for: a shirt by tonight, the new season’s oil, a service people are waiting on. Business with a small b is just keeping busy; the Business is a promise somebody wants to buy. If a client can’t say what he’s paying you for, you don’t have a Business, you have chores. Chores cost money too, only you’re the one paying.

Capisce?

Capisce? is a question that expects no answer. The Consigliere puts it at the end of a paragraph, on its own, when he’s said the main thing and wants to be sure you didn’t skate past it. If you didn’t understand, read the paragraph again; in our world you don’t ask your elders to repeat themselves.

capo

These books are addressed to a young capo, and the Consigliere talks to him the way an old hand talks to a younger man. A capo already answers for people and results, but doesn’t yet decide for the whole Family: soldiers below, the Don above, other capos on either side. The most awkward job there is, and the best one for learning. If at the office you have people under you and a boss over you, this means you.

client

A client isn’t the man you talked into it; he’s the one who pays and comes back. The Don’s hotels could have gone to another laundry any month they liked, and that kept the laundry sharper than any overseer could. The street only watches, the client has already trusted you; the soldier works, the client pays. You can lose a client in a day and spend years winning him back.

Code of Honour

The Consigliere closes a chapter or a part with the Code of Honour: a few maxims, no explanations, no sermon. Read the chapter, then check yourself against the Code; no time for the chapter, read the Code at least. It has nothing in common with the oaths of men of honour: nobody here promises silence unto death, they just get advice on how not to go broke.

consigliere

The man who tells the Don unpleasant things in private and stands by him in public. The narrator of all three books: no name, but forty years of service at Don Vincenzo’s side. Real families had a consigliere too: in 1990, at the initiation ceremony in the Patriarca family that the FBI recorded, he was the one questioning the recruit. To you the Consigliere is neither boss nor teacher, just an older man who has seen how good ideas end.

Cosa Nostra

Cosa Nostra is an organisation made of families, men of honour and strict rules of entry. Salvatore Contorno didn’t talk about joining the organisation; he talked about becoming Cosa Nostra, becoming the thing itself. According to Antonino Calderone, a recruit was told that you come into Cosa Nostra with blood and leave it only with blood. The Consigliere talks about it a great deal and without admiration: its history shows clearly what holds an organisation together and what it costs.

Don

In these books that means Don Vincenzo Carmuso, owner of three laundries and a wholesale olive-oil trade. The narrator is honest about it: the Don was no mafioso, he ran laundries. He didn’t read books, and every lesson other people had written down long ago he paid for out of his own pocket. The real Dons of Mafia history stand beside him for comparison, not as role models.

Family

The Consigliere’s word for any company, from the Don’s three laundries to your office. Capital F: not relatives and not a gang, but a shared business where everyone answers for everyone else’s mistakes. The real Mafia families in these books get a small f — the Bonanno family, the Patriarca family — and it pays not to mix them up with ours. In our Family, at least, nobody takes an oath over a burning saint.

initiation

Men wait years to be made: follow the rules, kick up your share, keep quiet in front of your elders, and one day you’ll be put up. In 1990 the FBI recorded such a ceremony for the first time, in Medford, Massachusetts, in the Patriarca family: the oath, a saint’s picture set alight in the recruit’s hands, the promise to leave the organisation only dead. The office manages without the fire, but the rule is the same: a title is an advance, not the settlement. And never dangle initiation in front of a man when you have quite different plans for him.

lean years

Every business has its lean years. The Family’s rule: cut from the top, and start with yourself. When a long strike at the port stopped the oil coming in, the Don first halved his own share, then the Consigliere’s, and only then cut the hours at one of the laundries, without letting anyone go. A year later just one presser had left them, and she left to get married.

man of honour

That’s what Cosa Nostra calls its sworn members. Under one of the best-known rules of that world, a man of honour couldn’t introduce himself to another man of honour: it took a third man who knew them both. The Consigliere uses the term only for real mafiosi from history. Honour at the office he measures more simply: do you keep your word or not.

omertà

Omertà is the name of the law of silence. By one account the word grew out of the Italian umiltà, humility, which would make omertà a code of submission at first, not just of silence. In the oath the FBI recorded in Massachusetts in 1990, the recruit promised to obey “with love and omertà.” The Consigliere doesn’t sing its praises: silence is useful until it turns into complicity.

pizzo

Pizzo is the Sicilian word for regular payments squeezed out of shopkeepers. “Wetting your beak” sounds almost friendly: nobody says “handing over money out of fear.” Historians found that in an 1857 dictionary the word means only “beak”, while in an 1868 one it already means extortion too. The Consigliere cites it as a fine example of our gift for choosing words; your office isn’t short of that gift either.

protection

Protection is paying a little at a time so that, when trouble comes, somebody turns up and sorts it out. Joe Valachi remembered his father, a poor vegetable seller in East Harlem, paying a dollar a week for “protection”, or his cart would have been smashed: in effect he paid not to be touched by the collector himself. An insurance company, says the Consigliere, is protection that learned to count. If you’re offered protection with no reserves, no tables and no court, it isn’t insurance; it works until the first hot summer.

reputation

Reputation isn’t what you say about yourself; it’s what people say about you once you’ve gone. It takes years to build and an evening to lose. The Consigliere insists that fear, respect, trust and fame are different things, and you can’t pass one off as another. The Don, by the way, gave no interviews: “Only brides and dead men get photographed.”

soldiers

The presser, the driver, the counter clerk: in these books they are the Family’s soldiers. A capo who cuts the soldiers’ pay in a lean year and leaves his own alone loses his soldiers, and with them the business, once the year is over. In real American families a soldier was a rank-and-file member; Benjamin Ruggiero, known as Lefty, sponsor of the FBI agent known as Donnie Brasco, was one. Mixing up soldiers and clients is forbidden: the first work for the Family, the second pay it.

sponsor

In the Mafia an outsider isn’t taken on trust: the man who brings him in vouches for him. FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who spent several years among the Bonanno family as Donnie Brasco, was brought in and looked after by a soldier, Benjamin Ruggiero, known as Lefty, who stood by his sponsorship right up until Donnie took the witness stand. In our world a mistake like that gets them both killed; at the office people simply stop believing them both, which is sometimes worse. So only vouch for someone whose mistakes you’re ready to pay for.

the back room

The back room is for conversations you don’t have in front of people. In forty years Don Vincenzo let ten or so people go, no more, and he called each one in there, poured coffee, said everything in five minutes and paid a month in advance. Every November, when the new season’s oil came in, he gathered the young cooks there too and showed them at what heat the oil starts to smoke. At the office it’s the meeting room with the door shut, if you use it the same way.

the Black Hand

Threatening letters demanding money were signed “the Black Hand”; it was more of a method than a single gang. In 1903 such letters reached the family of a doctor, Salvatore Romano, and Giuseppe Morello volunteered to mediate: he “settled” the matter for a hundred dollars and took the letters away, supposedly to study the handwriting. He had written them himself, of course. Later the Secret Service reported that once Morello was behind bars extortion had dropped by three quarters, and yet in 1911 twice as many Black Hand bombs went off as in 1910: a good reason to check a report before you celebrate.

the Camorra

The Camorra isn’t a single pyramid but a crowd of clans that sometimes make deals and sometimes make war, as in Secondigliano, where a war for power was fought in the early 2000s. Its own people call it “the System”; Neapolitan teenagers from a clan would say at the till, “I’m from the Secondigliano System”, and the shop assistant wouldn’t dare mention money. The Consigliere takes grim but very clear lessons from the Camorra: about segmentation, about power, and about how numbers deceive.

the Commission

Legend credits Charles “Lucky” Luciano with inventing the Commission, but historians found no documentary trace of the “revolution”: a council of bosses was being talked about before him. The Sicilian Commission, as Tommaso Buscetta told it, was proposed by Joe Bonanno in October 1957 over a long lunch at the Spano restaurant in Palermo. In the summer of 1963, after mass arrests, it met for the last time and voted to dissolve itself. The Consigliere sees it not as a stroke of genius but as a well-made patch on old rules.

the Family’s funds

Everything the Family has in ready money: in the drawer, in the bank, in its accounts. The funds pay the soldiers, the suppliers and the mistakes, and they are where you save for a lean year. It’s the Consigliere’s own term, not historical Mafia jargon, although a common fund that paid the families of men in prison and their lawyers was already described by the Palermo police chief Ermanno Sangiorgi around the turn of the twentieth century. The Don came to every deal with one question: “How much of this is ours?”

the offer

In The Godfather — mind you, this is a film — there’s the famous line about an offer he can’t refuse. The Consigliere means the exact opposite: an offer nobody wants to refuse, because it pays. Deadlines, shares, terms for walking away: all said out loud. If a man agrees out of fear, it’s no longer an offer, and he’ll stay your client only until his first chance to leave.

the office

The office is your world, and the Consigliere walks into it without warning: this is how we did it, and this is how it goes at your company. At the office nobody kills you for a mistake, but nobody forgives you either; they’re just more polite about it. They have more words there, too: nobody gets fired, the staff gets “streamlined.” Almost every lesson of the Family carries over to the office, except the debt-collection methods.

the street

The street isn’t an address, it’s people: the ones who haven’t bought yet, the ones who have, and the ones who changed their minds. It decides for itself what it wants and spreads what it thinks of you faster than any advert. Listening to the street is a capo’s first trade; arguing with it, his last. At the office they write reports about the street; the Don preferred to stand at the counter for a while.

“This is a friend of ours”

In Sicily a man of honour couldn’t announce himself to another man of honour: it took a sponsor who knew them both and the formula “This is a friend of ours.” The rule looks odd until you do the sums: lying is cheap for an impostor, but putting someone else’s name on the line is much harder. A stranger is trusted exactly as far as the man who brought him. A reference letter at your office is the same formula, just on letterhead.

turf

The neighbourhoods where the Don’s laundries take in linen, and the restaurants he delivers oil to: that is his turf. Taking it isn’t enough; you have to hold it, with quality, with your word, and by making sure it doesn’t pay the neighbours to move in. The best wall is the one nobody tries to climb. At the office your turf is your market, and you want to know its borders before your competitors test them.

your word

In the Family your word is both the promise and what you do afterwards. “The laundry promises”: a shirt by tonight, and if we’re late, the wash is free. The Don saw it simply: “A loss is once. Your word is for ever.” A broken word costs more than any fine, because the street keeps retelling it.