Words, the Family Way

Chapter 1. What He Walks In With

Judge Giovanni Falcone knew more about Cosa Nostra than any investigator in Italy. Files, nicknames, photographs. Who was married to whom, who had done time with whom. He was missing one thing. The language.

Chapter 2. Match the Work, Not the Gestures

The books for salesmen say you have to make the other person like you, and to do that you have to mirror him. He crosses his legs, you cross yours. He talks slowly, you talk slowly. He says “in principle,” and a minute later you say “in principle.”

Chapter 3. One of Us

For the whole of 1977 Lefty never told Pistone his surname. Nor, naturally, did Pistone tell Lefty his. One was Lefty or Benny, the other was Donnie.

Chapter 4. What the Talker Is Afraid Of

In the Casa Bella, a restaurant in New York, a mafioso called Mike was explaining to the agent Tony Conte how the Milwaukee business had ended.

Chapter 5. Basic Training

Pistone wrote down a story told by a driver called Sonny. During a heist Sonny was sitting in the car across from the house, engine running, waiting for his guys. There was a church next door. A priest came up to the car, in the mood for a chat.

Chapter 6. Words and Hands

Vincenzo Marsala told investigators how Michele Greco used to talk. The family had sentenced Gigino Pizzuto. Greco, hinting at that sentence, remarked that a man who signs IOUs and doesn’t pay must settle up sooner or later. No name, no word “kill.”

Chapter 7. The Suit Gets You in the Door

I never once saw the Don in a creased shirt. He wasn’t a dandy. He simply ran three laundries, and every hotel manager he sat down at a table with could see his collar. “A laundryman in a creased shirt,” the Don used to say, “is working for the competition.”

Chapter 8. How the Other Man Thinks

The manager of the hotel on the market square was getting ready to leave us for a laundry that charged a third less. I prepared a speech. About starch, about sheets without yellow stains, about the double payment for every one we lost.

Chapter 9. The Price of Praise

Once the Don praised Anna, one of the pressers, in front of the whole shift. He said her collars were the straightest of anyone’s. He meant it, and it was true. A week later Anna was standing at her press alone.

Chapter 10. Other People's Values

The first time the Don went to Sicily to see the mill owner, I expected haggling. There was none. For two evenings they talked about everything except oil for sale. The owner walked us up and down the slope.

1. Other People’s Values

Chapter 11. How to Ruin a First Meeting

The first time the Don took me along, it was to lunch with the owner of a new restaurant by the port. The man was wondering whether to take his oil from us. Between the soup and the fish I asked how much he still owed his previous supplier.

Chapter 12. Trust as a Skeleton Key

In 1913 a doctor from Palermo set up a practice in Caltanissetta. Several months went by and not a single patient came. He went back to Palermo and complained to a friend, a senior official. The official went to see a butcher he knew.

1. Trust as a Skeleton Key
2. Code of Honour

Chapter 13. Why People Pay

Roberto Saviano was sitting in a pizzeria with some teenagers from a clan. They were between thirteen and sixteen. The waiters, boys their own age, “looked at them with admiration, not daring even to serve them”. The owner had to carry the plates himself.

Chapter 14. Feeling Before Figures

In Florida a father and son took it on themselves to sell cocaine to Donnie and his partner, Tony Rossi. They promised it was about eighty per cent pure and left a sample. The sample went to the sheriff’s lab.

Chapter 15. A Vocabulary of Feelings

Sonny Black, Pistone’s capo, once asked Donnie not to share everything with Lefty. He remembered that Lefty had helped him out in prison.

Chapter 16. How to Stir a Feeling

Once the Don and I went to a small hotel where the owner had just finished a refurbishment. He walked us along the corridors and talked about money. How much the new windows had cost. How they’d waited six months for the craftsmen.

Chapter 17. Selling with Feeling

Diego Gambetta, who looked at the Sicilian Mafia through an economist’s eyes, once compared it to an advertising department. In Sicily, the men who sell protection march through town under a saint’s banner.

1. Selling with Feeling
2. Code of Honour

Chapter 18. The Pain and the Fix

Antonino Calderone, a mafioso from Catania who turned state’s witness, told the story of a certain father. The man wanted to make his son a lawyer at any price. The son was a poor student.

Chapter 19. The Ladder of Attention

When Pistone became Donnie Brasco, he had a list of Manhattan bars and restaurants where fences with Mafia connections hung out. He didn’t push to meet anyone. He didn’t throw money around. He came in, sat down, had a drink or a meal and left.

Chapter 20. How to Show the Goods

Every November, when the new season’s oil came in, the Don held an evening for young cooks in the back room. He sold nothing. He put tins, bread and a frying pan on the table.

Chapter 21. Selling on a Name

In forty years Don Vincenzo never gave a single interview. When people asked why, he’d say: “Only brides and dead men get photographed.” He didn’t advertise the oil either. And yet every cook in the neighbourhood knew him.

Chapter 22. The First Tin

The Don left a new restaurant one tin of oil. Free, for a week. No papers and no talk of price. To the cook he said only this: “Let it live with you a while. Then we’ll talk, if there’s anything to talk about.”

Chapter 23. A Fair Deal

The Brooklyn crew Pistone ran with had a custom of its own. They didn’t like haggling, he writes; if a would-be buyer tried to knock the price down, they rarely met him halfway. He explains why.

Chapter 24. A Picture with No Next Step

At the end of the Milwaukee trip, Lefty sat with the agent Tony Conte by the motel pool. He sipped his spritzer and summed things up. Business first: back in New York he’d tell the people there they ought to move in, and the green light was as good as given.

Chapter 25. Small Change

Pistone came out of the operation, but one habit stayed with him. Mafiosi, he writes, never book tables at restaurants. They just walk in and give a name.

Chapter 26. Free Admission

Robert Cialdini, the American psychologist, described how the Hare Krishnas raised money in airports. Someone would come up and press a flower into your hand. A gift. Awkward to refuse. Then they’d ask for a donation.

Chapter 27. The Frame Decides

On 9 May 1978 Aldo Moro was found murdered in Rome. The papers wrote about nothing else. The same day, in Cinisi, near Palermo airport, Peppino Impastato died. He was thirty, and he had been mocking the local boss on the radio. About him they wrote briefly.

Chapter 28. What He Believes

Roberto Saviano was once walking past the spot in Secondigliano where Carmela Attrice had been killed. And he heard two boys arguing. They were arguing in earnest: about the best way to die. One said: “I want to die like her.

Chapter 29. Who He Thinks He Is

When I was young, I lost the Don a restaurant with one sentence. The cook there was good. But the tablecloths came back to us in a terrible state: wine, grease, candle wax. I drove over to talk about the stains.

Chapter 30. How Minds Change

Anna, who later ran the second laundry, once wanted a new washing machine. The Don was against it. For twenty years he’d been saying the new machines chewed up the linen, and the whole neighbourhood knew it. Arguing with him was pointless. I’d tried.

Chapter 31. Other People's Thoughts in Your Head

In 1864 a Sicilian baron, Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, published a book about a “sect” that kept the countryside around Palermo in fear. Nobody was writing down the word “mafia” yet.

1. Other People’s Thoughts in Your Head
2. Code of Honour

Chapter 32. How to Talk to Your Capo

Until now I’ve mostly taught you to talk to people on the outside: the client, the supplier, the stranger. Our own people, Anna, the drivers, came up too, but only in passing.

Chapter 33. How to Give an Order

Before Thanksgiving, Lefty phoned Donnie in Florida. The order was short: meet four people, book two adjoining rooms opening onto the pool, rent a big car. Four people, and no questions.

Chapter 34. Meetings and Paper

Sonny Black once cut Tony Rossi out of a deal and told Donnie that from now on business would go through him alone. And he explained his rule: he always met one on one, because with three of you it was already a criminal conspiracy.

Chapter 35. How to Spot a Liar

One morning in Florida, Sonny Black dropped into the club and took notice of Tony Rossi’s car. He didn’t like the Pennsylvania plates. He asked Lefty, Lefty asked Donnie. Donnie explained: it was a rental. But Lefty decided to check for himself.

Chapter 36. What Not to Say Out Loud

Once he’d taken Donnie on, the first thing Lefty did was forbid him to talk business on the phone. Never talk business openly on the phone, Lefty told him, they’re listening to us. Talk in hints, find a way round it.

1. What Not to Say Out Loud
2. Code of Honour