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. He told us which trees his grandfather had planted and which his father had cut down, and how his father regretted it until the day he died. I thought those evenings were wasted, and I was angry. On the third evening the Don put a one-page contract on the table.

The first line wasn’t the price. The first line said the oil would come only from his mill, never blended with anyone else’s. The owner read it, nodded and signed, barely glancing at the figures. In the car I asked the Don where that line had come from. “For two evenings he told me what he was proud of. I wrote it down.”

After that, the Don started the same way with every new supplier.

Speaking Their Language

In 2015 Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer tested this on political arguments. An argument recast in the opponent’s values persuaded better than the same argument in the speaker’s own. Conservatives heard about patriotism and purity, liberals about fairness. Same substance, different language. The funny part is something else. When people were asked to write an argument for the other side themselves, almost nobody wrote it in the other side’s language. Everyone argued in their own words and was surprised it didn’t work.

We had two hotels on the same street, the same size. In the first manager’s office hung a framed letter from a guest, thanking him for the clean sheets. In the second, a photograph with the mayor at the opening. To the first, the Don explained how we checked the linen and that for every lost sheet we paid double. To the second, which hotels in town already sent their linen to us. Same laundries, same price. Different reasons to say yes.

It isn’t a trick as long as both reasons are true. The trick starts where the language is chosen and there’s nothing behind it. And don’t judge by one frame on the wall. The last manager might have hung it.

Nothing Personal

At Carmello’s, the restaurant where Pistone spent his evenings, Patricia, the girlfriend of Nicky the bookie, kept coming over to him, more and more insistently. An affair with a mafioso’s girlfriend, Pistone writes, would have been plain suicide. When she asked him to dinner, he said no. And he went straight to Marty the bartender and told him he’d turned Patricia down only because she was Nicky’s girl, nothing personal. Marty, as Pistone tells it, said he’d done the right thing and could count it as a test passed. A week later Marty let him know that Patricia and Nicky had split up. Donnie thanked him but said he wouldn’t want to push himself on her.

Nobody had explained the rule to him. He knew it. And he said it out loud to the right man, so that knowing it became a reputation.

Pistone recorded another commandment of Lefty’s people: you could kill people, but you must never swear in front of women. In front of Louise, Lefty would calmly talk business and never curse. From where you sit, that’s absurd. In their world it’s law, and no logic will repeal it. Every office has its own: whom you don’t call after nine, in front of whom you don’t praise a competitor. Learn those rules from other people’s mistakes. Your own cost more.

Values, Not Vices

In a club in Fort Lauderdale a friend of some acquaintances shoved a vial of cocaine at Donnie and told him to have a sniff. Donnie knocked the vial away and the powder went all over the club. He was a businessman, he said, not a junkie. You have to refuse the first time, and firmly, Pistone explained. Agents who drank and snorted for the sake of their cover were, in his view, mistaken: you must never betray yourself and your own interests, seasoned mafiosi can smell that kind of thing, and a man without a mind of his own is an empty suit.

There’s a detail that’s easy to miss. According to Pistone, it was mostly the young ones who snorted and smoked. A refusal didn’t surprise the old guard: Tony Mirra, he notes, who had killed some thirty people, drank nothing stronger than soda. Whoever snorted to pass as one of them was fitting in with the juniors. The seniors made the decisions.

Saying No in Their Language

At the feast of San Gennaro, in a coffee shop on Mulberry Street, a girl stroked Donnie’s leg under the table and asked him to stay in town. Her father, a mafioso, was sitting right there. Had she lied to her papa that Donnie was the one pawing her, Donnie would have been a dead man. Pistone told her he didn’t want to lie to his girlfriend: he’d promised to come back, and she was waiting for him. The girl said to call her if he changed his mind. He promised he would, as soon as there was nobody left to lie to.

He didn’t turn her down because she was no good. He turned her down out of loyalty to his word, and her world respects that kind of loyalty. The girlfriend, as it happens, was invented. The value worked as a cover. You need to be able to spot that too.

The Bottom Line

If you want to speak someone else’s language, first listen to what the man is proud of. Two evenings are a small price. Then talk about what you really have, in his words. Say no through what he himself respects.

And if a stranger suddenly starts talking in your words, ask where he got them. Maybe he listened to you for two evenings. Maybe someone told him. Language chosen to please proves nothing. The figures underneath it do.