Why Chip In

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. For men who called themselves labourers, Dash writes, the Sicilians hired suspiciously good lawyers. Morello and Lupo took on one of the most famous defence attorneys in Manhattan. The rest were defended by five lawyers from his firm.

Who paid? Not Morello. The police believed the costs had been covered by a compulsory levy on Little Italy. Ten thousand dollars was collected. And a few weeks later, in Boston, seven Sicilians walked into a police station and asked for protection: they had been getting letters from New York demanding a contribution to the defence fund in the barrel case.

Seven years later Morello got twenty-five years for counterfeiting. It all happened again, only bigger. For the appeal they hired Bourke Cockran, one of the most expensive lawyers in the country. Once more the money was squeezed out of the pedlars, shopkeepers and small bankers of East Harlem, and other Mafia families chipped in on top, some from as far off as Tunis. It came to fifty thousand dollars. In June 1911 the appeal was turned down. Cockran, Dash writes, had charged so much that there was nothing left for a second try.

The fund ran dry before the job was done.

Spreading the Trouble

Forget for a moment how that money was collected. Look at how the thing works.

A trial doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it ruins you. One gang member can’t afford a lawyer like that. Spread the trouble over hundreds of payers, though, and each one gives a little. Every insurance policy and every mutual aid fund stands on this: many pay a little so that the one it happens to doesn’t pay a lot.

The second half of the story the insurers learned the hard way. A fund runs out. One big case drains it to the bottom, and there’s nothing left for the next. Morello blew his fund on a single appeal. That’s why real insurers cap what they pay on any one case, keep a reserve and insure themselves with others. It’s called reinsurance. They invented it precisely so that one Cockran couldn’t eat the whole fund.

Where the comparison breaks down, you can see for yourself. The Harlem shopkeepers weren’t paying for themselves but for Morello, and they paid under threat. That’s a tax, not insurance. But the pool works all the same.

The Thirteenth Month’s Pay

A hundred years go by, and the same idea looks almost corporate.

Saviano tells of the La Torre clan from Mondragone. The clan reached as far as Scotland and England and even took Englishmen into its ranks. One of them, Brendan Quinn, was arrested in England, and yet, Saviano writes, he went on receiving his monthly salary from Mondragone, regular as clockwork, thirteenth month’s pay included. A court ruling from 2002 put it on record: his name was entered in the clan’s payroll book month after month, because the boss had ordered it personally. Clan members weren’t only protected physically; they were usually guaranteed a salary, legal help and a place to hide. The boss himself made sure all the insurance obligations were met.

Saviano calls them insurance obligations himself. And he’s right. Anyone can be arrested, but not everyone at once. Pool the money, and those walking free feed those inside. Pension, sick pay and the lawyer all go in one envelope.

One caveat. In Mondragone the whole thing rests on the boss’s orders, and the same money buys silence. Will a man start talking when they bring his thirteenth month’s pay to him in prison? Hardly. Here you get insurance and payment for loyalty in one go. A legitimate pension wants just one thing from you: that you live long enough.

Tables That Don’t Make Mistakes

The legitimate world learned to calculate funds like these with astonishing precision.

In 1693 the astronomer Edmond Halley, yes, the one with the comet, took the records of births and burials in the Silesian city of Breslau and published a table of mortality. The title said what it was for: an attempt to establish the price of annuities on lives. For the first time you could work out what a promise to pay a man until he died was worth.

Fifty years later two Scottish ministers, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, came up with a fund for the widows and orphans of their fellow clergy. The ministers pay in, the fund invests, the widows draw a pension. To set the contributions, they found out how many ministers died each year, how many widows were left and how long those widows lived. And they forecast how much money the fund would hold in twenty years. Historians love to repeat that by 1765 the forecast was out by one pound. Maybe they’re stretching it. The fund lived on and paid out, and later grew into one of Britain’s big insurance companies.

See the difference? Morello ran his fund on fear, and it ran out on the first big case. The ministers ran theirs on tables. Their fund lasted for centuries.

The Pressers’ Fund

In Don Vincenzo’s laundries there was a fund of their own. The pressers started it themselves: each one put in a little every week to help whoever fell ill. The Don found out and began adding as much as all of them put together. But he set two conditions.

First: no more than three months of payments for any one case. The pressers took offence. What if you’re ill for six months? The Don explained: one illness would drain the fund to the bottom, and there would be nothing left for the next woman. Cases like that he paid for separately, out of his own pocket. The fund stayed whole.

Second: the fund’s book is not kept by the woman who collects the money. Signora Lucia wrote it up; the shift supervisor collected.

The fund outlived the Don. I can’t remember a single time it ran short.

The Bottom Line

A fund held together by an order gets buried along with the man who gave it. A fund held together by rules and tables has no one to bury it.