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. The butcher wrote on a scrap of paper: “il dottor... è mio amico”, Doctor so-and-so is my friend. He signed it and told the doctor to take it to another butcher, in Caltanissetta. The doctor took it. From that day on, as a researcher quoted by Gambetta recorded, his troubles were over.

Five words and a signature. The note asked for nothing and threatened no one. It passed the butcher’s trust on to the doctor, hand to hand. Who those butchers were, the source doesn’t say. But in that town their “friend” weighed more than a diploma.

Trust is the key. The trouble is, a key doesn’t ask whose hand is holding it.

Borrowed Authority

An FBI agent in Los Angeles was working inside a gang that kept officials on kickbacks, ran games and dealt drugs. To raise his standing, he called in Donnie Brasco as a Mafia man and the envoy of an important boss. The boss was played by yet another agent.

The meeting was set up in a suite at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Four men came, dressed in the latest fashion. Pistone started with drill: he knocked one man’s feet off the coffee table and told another to sit up straight. Then he questioned them one by one: what’s your name, what are you responsible for. He was deliberately pulling more detail out of them, Pistone writes, hiding behind the demands of his “boss”. Drugs, brothels, a sheriff on the payroll. Whoever talked too fast got reined in: stop, stop, slow down. Supposedly for the boss. In fact, so that it all got on tape.

There are two keys here at once. The first is someone else’s guarantee: their own agent brought Donnie in, and they believed Donnie. The second is someone else’s authority. The man who’s been made the petitioner brings everything himself, just to be accepted. A con man does the same. Only his boss isn’t an agent, it’s nobody at all.

The Saviour

Tony Mirra met a debtor in a restaurant. The man opened his mouth and Mirra cut him short, Pistone recalls: no names, or he’d stick him right there. Then he invited the fellow out for a walk. With Mirra that could mean a knife in an alley.

Pistone volunteered to take the debtor outside himself. Out on the street he told him he’d just saved his skin. He told him to promise the money for tomorrow and to go back in as if he’d been given a good beating. The debtor ran back in and started babbling. Mirra set a meeting for the next day.

The aim was a good one: to stop a killing. The technique was a dark one. The man who’s been saved feels he owes. And a man who owes gives more than he’s asked for.

Whose Signature

The Don once did what the butcher did. The baker, Lucia’s nephew, wanted to supply bread to the hotels. Nobody there knew him. The Don vouched for him to two managers, and they took the bread. Six months later the baker overslept on the morning of a big banquet. The Don paid the penalty himself, out of his own pocket, and said nothing to the baker in front of people.

I asked why he’d paid. “They didn’t trust him. They trusted me.” Vouching for someone is a key you’ve handed to a stranger. He’ll be the one opening the door. And you’ll answer for whatever happens behind it.

When It Suddenly Feels Easy

Now look at the scenes with Pistone through the eyes of the people being opened. The four in the suite were petitioners before someone else’s authority. The debtor was saved from someone else’s threat. And Donnie was vouched for by one of their own, a man they trusted. And every one of them felt at ease that evening. Easy to talk, easy to believe, easy to let go.

In their place, that’s exactly when you stop. Not when you’re scared, but when three hours into an acquaintance you already want to tell him things you don’t tell your own people.

Pistone knew the price of a key like that too. Louise, Lefty’s girlfriend, invited him to her mother’s funeral. He hadn’t known the dead woman, but he was flattered by the invitation. It was pouring with rain. Pistone thought about how he was sharing such private grief with a woman who took him for a completely different person. Fooling the bad guys was one thing, he writes, those were the rules of the game. With ordinary people it was worse: sometimes they grew attached to you in return, and you knew it would hurt them badly when the truth came out.

A skeleton key doesn’t mend the lock it opened. The gangsters knew the rules of the game. Louise didn’t. The truth would hurt people like her, as Pistone himself understood, not the ones who set up the operation. Remember that every time you open a man up for the sake of business: who’ll be left with the open door when you’ve gone?

A Key, Not a Crowbar

British psychologists led by Laurence Alison went through recordings of interviews with suspected terrorists. More information came not to those who pressed, but to those who listened, showed respect and left a choice. Even from people who’d come in determined to stay silent.

The Don put it more simply. “Deceit gets you in once. Trust gets you twenty years. Work out which pays better.”

The Bottom Line

Lend your trust the way the butcher lent his signature: only for a man you’re ready to pay for.

And when someone’s opening you, don’t look at the key, look at the hand. Who vouched for him? Before whom did you suddenly become a petitioner? Who saved you, and from what? If two of the three answers come together in a single evening, you haven’t found a friend. You’re being worked.