Edited by Sergio Killuminati

Money, the Family Way

23 chapters · 3 parts · 46 essays

Money,the Family WayEdited bySergio Killuminati

Read side by side with another language: Italiano · РусскийSide-by-side reading in two languages works on a computer, a tablet in landscape or a foldable phone.

How it begins

In the America of the 1850s a steam boiler blew up almost every four days. Boilers sat in factories, in mills, on riverboats, and every one of them was a little bomb with a pressure gauge. In 1865 the boilers of the steamboat Sultana went up on the Mississippi, and more than eighteen hundred people died. There has never been a worse disaster of its kind.

Ban steam? Nobody suggested it. Steam turned the whole country. They suggested something else. A group of young men in Hartford who worked with steam engines themselves had argued about one idea in their club for years, and in 1866 they founded a company. It insured boilers and inspected them too. The logic was simple. The insurer doesn’t want to pay for an explosion, so he sends an inspector. The owner doesn’t want to be refused cover, so he fixes whatever the inspector finds.

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Part One. How Money Works

Chapter 1. The Invention of Protection

In the America of the 1850s a steam boiler blew up almost every four days. Boilers sat in factories, in mills, on riverboats, and every one of them was a little bomb with a pressure gauge.

Chapter 2. The First Families with a Charter

In August 1926 a company with the modest name of United Lathing Company was registered in the Bronx. Lath, plaster, building work. Dull. Articles, a seal, seven directors. Nothing special. Unless you read who the directors were.

Chapter 3. The Capo Who Steals from the Don

The Medici Bank was founded in Florence in 1397, and for a hundred years it was the best bank in Europe. It was cleverly built. Every branch—Venice, Rome, London, Bruges—worked as a separate partnership.

Chapter 4. Selling a Stake in the Family

Lefty Ruggiero, who was Joe Pistone’s teacher in the Mafia, once came into the club in a foul mood.

Chapter 5. A Cut of the Profits

The Dutch East India Company, which we’ve already mentioned, paid its shareholders not a penny for eight years. Ships sailed for Asia and came back years later, and the company spent the money on new ships, forts and wars with the Portuguese.

Chapter 6. Who Keeps the Market Going

In January 1920 America banned alcohol. And Giuseppe Masseria, a small-time crook with two convictions for theft who lived in a room over a bar, woke up rich. Without lifting a finger.

Chapter 7. Houses and Neighbourhoods

In Palermo, by Piazza Francesco Crispi, there’s an open-air car park crammed with advertising hoardings. Look closely and under the hoardings you can see the rusty curls of an old wrought-iron fence. That’s all that’s left of the Villa Deliella.

Part Two. Risk

Chapter 8. The Mutual Aid Fund

In the spring of 1903 the Morello gang went on trial in New York for what became known as the “barrel murder”: a body had turned up in a barrel on the pavement, and the police had no doubt whom to pick up.

Chapter 9. The Bookie Always Wins

In 1654 a French nobleman and keen gambler, the Chevalier de Méré, came to the mathematician Blaise Pascal with a question gamblers had been racking their brains over for centuries.

Chapter 10. The Vig

In 1980, in Florida, Sonny Black, a capo in the Bonanno family, was talking with Joe Pistone, whom he took for one of his own, about how to set up in a new place: take bets, lend money.

Chapter 11. The Bookkeeper's Arithmetic

I promised you at the start that there would be few formulas in this book. I keep my word. But there are five checks any good bookkeeper runs on other people’s numbers, and almost none of the people whose money he counts ever run them.

The Bookkeeper’s Arithmetic

Chapter 12. Fear and Greed

Diego Gambetta, an economist, studied the Mafia as an industry. He asked himself a question: why do people buy protection even where they don’t seem to need it? His answer is worth retelling in full. It’s about markets in general, not just about us.

Chapter 13. Don't Keep It All in One Cellar

By 1912 Giosuè Gallucci, “the King of Little Italy”, had a business in East Harlem for every occasion, Dash writes. In summer he sold ice, in winter coal. He lent money at interest, and few in the neighbourhood lent more.

Chapter 14. A Market That's Hard to Buy

On 28 January 1986, at 11.39 a.m. Eastern time, seventy-three seconds after lift-off, the American space shuttle Challenger blew up. Seven people died. The whole country watched it live.

Part Three. The Big Game

Chapter 15. Who Knows First

In 1888 the New York Detective Bureau was run by Inspector Thomas Byrnes, a forty-six-year-old Irishman with a shaggy moustache and eyes that Dash likens to steel needles. He was thought to be the smartest policeman in the city.

Chapter 16. The Don of Dons

Once, on the border between the provinces of Naples and Caserta, a farmer was ploughing a field he had recently bought. The tractor kept getting stuck, as if the ground had hardened that day. Suddenly scraps of paper came flying up from under the plough.