Old Money
In 1891 the twenty-three-year-old Ignazio Florio Jr inherited, as Dickie writes, the largest fortune in Italy. It was said that in Palermo alone sixteen thousand people ate his bread. What didn’t he own? Sulphur, tuna, ceramics, Marsala wine, insurance, banks, and above all the biggest block of shares in the country’s leading shipping company. The newspapers called Palermo “Floriopolis”.
Ignazio had his clothes made by the London tailors who dressed the Prince of Wales, wore a pink carnation in his buttonhole in the mornings and a gardenia in the evenings. He married one of the great beauties of Europe—and a few months later went off on safari in Tunisia. His wife Franca, according to Dickie, believed money was there for showing off. And right into old age she didn’t notice the fortune melting away.
And it melted fast. The shipping company had grown rich on government contracts and subsidies that Ignazio’s father had won through his connections. The father died, and it turned out that without the connections the company couldn’t stand up to the competition. Meanwhile the country’s business was moving north—to Genoa, Turin and Milan. Before he was forty, Ignazio had finally let slip a fortune that three generations had built. In 1908 the family sold its stake in the shipping company.
The Gardener
But I’m telling you this story for the sake of one detail.
Early in 1897, Dickie writes, drawing on a report by the police chief Sangiorgi, the servants woke the Florios very early. Their villa at Olivuzza had been burgled in the night, and works of art were missing. Ignazio flew into a rage. But it wasn’t the police he shouted at. He summoned his gardener, Francesco Noto, and told him to put things right.
The Florios’ gardener was the head of the Olivuzza Mafia group. His brother worked at the villa as a guard. Did Ignazio know who was trimming his hedges? He knew perfectly well.
There’s the whole economics of old money in one scene. The richest family on the island can’t protect itself, and keeps a man who can on as its gardener. Old money is bad at fighting. But it makes the best clients.
Why They Make Poor Fighters
New money is made by someone who knows how to make money. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any. He knows where every dollar came from: he got it himself. He’s suspicious, greedy for work, and he remembers what it’s like to live without money.
Old money goes to someone who knows how to spend. He grew up when the money was already there. He knows how to show it off, but has only a vague idea of where it comes from. The father built the connections. The son wears the carnation. The connections dry up, the world changes, and the son doesn’t notice a thing, because he’s never seen how money gets made.
They tell a similar story about the American Vanderbilts. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt left about a hundred million dollars in 1877, and within a few years his son had doubled the fortune. Yet when the descendants got together in 1973, among a hundred and twenty people, so it’s written, there wasn’t a single millionaire. These figures get retold from a book written by someone in the family, and I won’t argue over every one of them. But a saying about three generations—shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves—exists in almost every language. Hardly by chance.
What Can’t Be Inherited
Gambetta shows why in the Mafia the rule is even harsher. You can leave your son money. Not your reputation.
The Mafia business is passed on by inheritance, he writes, but not strictly within the family. In 1943 Calogero Lo Bue, the dying boss of Corleone, announced that once his eyes were closed he would see through the eyes of Michele Navarra. Navarra wasn’t his son. He was his heir. In the early sixties the young Stefano Bontate took over from his diabetic father—but only because he managed to show he was every bit as good. A successor has to prove he’s worth the inheritance before he takes it. Otherwise it all collapses overnight. Clients paid the father for his name. They won’t pay the son for his surname.
The legitimate world solves this differently. It separates capital from management: the heir gets the shares, and a hired director runs the company. Let the heir be good for nothing but carnations—he’ll get his dividends all the same. The Florios didn’t do that. They kept both the money and the wheel in their own hands. And lost both.
The Myth of Mafia Millions
And what about new money in our world? People like to think mafiosi sit on sacks of gold and hide secret accounts in Switzerland. One American author even wrote that organised crime had made more millionaires than the Harvard Business School.
Critchley, who spent his life checking claims like that against the documents, doesn’t believe it. Leaving aside the drug trade, he writes, he knows of not a single confirmed case of mafiosi moving from cash to multimillion portfolios in Swiss banks. John Gotti, who headed the biggest family in the country, lived like the middle class. No richer.
He cites Vito Genovese’s divorce. In 1953 his ex-wife Anna demanded three hundred and fifty dollars a week in alimony and claimed Vito had deposits in New York, New Jersey, Naples and Switzerland. Vito replied that his entire income was a hundred and seven dollars a week from a trading company. Under cross-examination Anna admitted she had lied under oath before. The court awarded her eight hundred dollars from the sale of the house, and the tax authorities later checked her claims. And found nothing. And when the wills of dead mafiosi in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were studied, it turned out they usually left little or nothing behind.
Were mafiosi good at hiding money? Other authors argue about it. But for us the conclusion is the same. If new money isn’t turned into an institution—a company, a foundation, sensibly spread-out capital—it won’t become old money. It’ll just run out.
In The Godfather—mind you, this is a film—there’s a scene in the garden. Old Don Vito tells Michael he never wanted this life for him: he thought Michael would become Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone. Don Vito wanted to turn new money into old, and power into standing. It didn’t work out. In films it almost never does. In life it works for those who get down to it while the money is still there.
The Don and the Countess
Among Don Vincenzo’s clients was an old Countess who owned half the neighbourhood. She always paid late, but always in full, and she never haggled. The Don respected her greatly. “The best client,” he used to say, “is the one who’s too embarrassed to ask the price.”
The Countess died, and the houses went to her nephew. Four years later he sold the last one. In all that time the Don never once tried to sell him anything he didn’t need, though he could have. I asked him why. “Because he’ll soon be poor,” said the Don, “and a poor man remembers who didn’t fleece him when he was rich.”