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. Only then the picture: Milwaukee, as Pistone tells it, was a fairy tale for Lefty, a town practically untouched. Conte would handle it, and everyone would envy him.
Conte played along: sure he would handle it.
Notice the order. Lefty already had his decision. The picture came after, and there was nobody left to persuade with it. It was there so Conte would carry the decision himself, and gladly. A good picture doesn’t replace the step. It helps you take a step that’s already been agreed.
The Letter
And here’s a picture with no step under it at all. Saviano quotes a letter from a boy in a juvenile prison. The boy gave it to a priest, and the letter was read out at a conference. “Everyone I know is either dead or in prison. I want to be a boss.” Then come supermarkets, warehouses, factories. “I want three cars, I want to see everyone’s respect when I walk into a shop.” And at the end he wanted to die the way real bosses die.
The dream in this letter shines. Only one thing is missing: a road. Between the cell and the shop where everyone respects him there isn’t a single deed, except a bullet. The boy isn’t making a plan. He’s watching an advert he shot for himself.
Next to him, in Saviano, is another teenager, nicknamed Kit Kat. He dictated his plan into a tape recorder: “I want to open a building renovation company, a warehouse or a shop, and the System has to give me the money for it.” Here there is a step. Only somebody else is supposed to take it.
Those are the two diseases of a picture. No step. Or somebody else’s step. Both look like a plan until you ask: what are you doing yourself tomorrow morning?
The Rehearsal
A picture has honest work to do, too. When Donnie fell under suspicion because of a man he’d brought in, Lefty prepared him for the talk with the higher-ups. He drilled him hard. Picture yourself at the sit-down, Lefty told him in Pistone’s account: I’m not your secretary or your lawyer, they’ll be asking you. Then came the questions they’d ask there: who brought him, who started it all. Answer, Lefty said, and don’t mumble; that won’t fly at a sit-down.
Here the picture serves not a dream but preparation. A man lives through a hard scene in advance, questions, awkwardness and all. Then he walks into it as if for the second time.
In 1999 the psychologists Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor tested this on students before an exam. Some spent a few minutes every day imagining themselves getting a high mark. Others imagined sitting down to study and working through the hard parts. The second group studied more and did better. The dream didn’t help the first. Dreaming about the result is pleasant. Rehearsing the road is useful.
The Notebook and the Dossier
To paint a man a picture, you have to know the man. This is where the line runs, and it’s easy to step over.
American salesmen made Harvey Mackay’s questionnaire famous: sixty-six questions about the customer. Much in questionnaires like that is ordinary work. But there’s information the law in many countries puts under special protection: health, faith, politics. And not only the law.
The Don had a notebook on cooks. What size of tin suits the kitchen. When to deliver. Who can’t stand lateness. Who has a new head chef. Not a word about wives, debts or illnesses. I asked him once why. “If I write down what he’s ill with,” the Don answered, “that means one day I’m planning to use it.”
In the Family they knew this in their own way. You don’t open a dossier on a man when you want to sell him something. You open it when you’re planning to lean on him.
Borrowed Colours
Once a man from a big bottling plant came to see the Don. He offered to bottle our oil with our label on it. He painted a fine picture. Bottles in every shop in town. The Carmuso name on the shelf next to the famous brands. The step was ready, too: an advance for the labels, today, while the price held.
The Don heard him out. Then he asked: “In which shop can I see your bottle today?” The man named shops where it would be. Shops where it was today, there were none. The Don saw him to the door and gave him a tin of oil for the road.
“He was painting my picture with his paints,” the Don told me. “And he wanted me to pay for the paints.”
A scene like that is easy to spot. The picture is painted about you, and the step pays off for him. And it has to be taken now, today, with an advance. A man who hurries you is afraid that by morning you’ll ask where those bottles are.
The Bottom Line
Paint a picture only when there’s a road under it, and show the road too.
When someone paints a picture for you, ask three things. What do I have to do? Who wins from it? Why today, of all days? If there’s no step, it’s the letter from the cell. If you take the step and he takes the gain, it’s the bottling plant. Ask to see what already exists today. A picture with nothing behind it can’t stand up to that request.