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. Dickie quotes the headline of the piece in Corriere della Sera: a left-wing fanatic, blown to pieces by his own bomb.

Impastato was killed by the Cinisi Mafia. But, as Dickie writes, it took fifteen years to establish this, and many appeals by his friends and family. And in 2000 a parliamentary commission concluded that the investigation had been carried out hastily and carelessly. The police recorded the death the way the killers wanted: careless handling of explosives.

The first word was said in a day. Undoing it took years. That’s what this is about. Whoever names an event first decides how people will look at it.

How a Martyr Is Rewritten

The Camorra knew this just as well. On 19 March 1994, in Casal di Principe, Father Giuseppe “Peppe” Diana was shot dead right inside his church. The priest had spoken out openly against the clans. If he was killed for that, he’s a martyr. And martyrs get imitated.

So they set about changing the frame at once. Giuseppe Quadrano, a camorrista who had begun cooperating with investigators, made up motives. That the priest had been moving guns. That he’d dishonoured a boss’s cousin. Saviano puts it this way: “Implausible, ridiculous motives, invented to destroy the image of a martyr.” A local paper printed “Don Peppe was a camorrista,” and a few days later “Don Peppe in bed with two women.”

The dead man stayed the same. The frame changed: from victim he became “one of them.” And nobody takes to the streets for “one of them.” In 2003 a court established that the shooter was Quadrano himself. The very same storyteller.

The Shirt We Owned Up To First

The Don did the same thing, only honestly and on his own scale. Once the pressers tried a new detergent, and a christening gown turned yellow. Old, lace, three generations of one family had been christened in it. The owner didn’t know yet. The gown hung there waiting to be collected.

The pressers had various ideas. Bleach it. Sew something over it. Keep quiet: maybe she won’t notice. The Don took the gown off its hanger and drove to the owner himself. On the doorstep he said: “We’ve ruined your gown. I wanted you to hear it from me, not see it for yourself.” Then he told her what would happen next: the best lacemaker in the neighbourhood, at his expense.

That family stayed with us another twenty years. The Don explained it to me later: “If she finds the stain herself, she finds a cheat. If she hears it from me, she hears an apology. And it’s the same stain.”

The Same Problem

Psychologists have been weighing the frame for a long time. In 1981 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave people a problem: a disease has broken out, and six hundred people may die. To some, the plan was described like this: two hundred will be saved. To others: four hundred will die. It’s the same thing. But in the first case most people chose the plan; in the second, a minority.

Sometimes a single label is enough. In 1950 Harold Kelley handed students a note about a new instructor who was to take one of their classes. The notes differed in one phrase: “rather cold” or “very warm.” There was one class. But those who’d got “warm” rated him higher and were readier to talk to him.

Rescued for Ten Million

Gambetta tells a story from Catania. The owner of a firm got a call from extortionists. An employee of the firm belonged to the local family and brought its consigliere, Carletto Campanella, to see the owner. Campanella told him to give the extortionists another number, answered the call himself and met them. Then the firm was told it had to pay “only” ten million lire. And Campanella, as Calderone explained, split that money with the extortionists down the middle.

Gambetta sums it up in one sentence: “The victims believed they had been let off lightly, and both extortionists and protectors got their share.” They thought they’d got off cheap. The threat and the rescue were sold to them by the same people. The word “only” was worth ten million.

Your Own Name

Even the name you take for yourself is a frame. Calderone remembered being initiated. The family’s representative raised his voice, as if reading out a decree, and said it several times: “It is Cosa Nostra, not mafia. Only cops and newspapers call it the mafia.” The Mafia is what the police and the papers call us. We are “our thing.”

Renaming yourself means stepping out of someone else’s frame. The Mafia is written up in police reports. “Our thing” sounds almost like a family shop.

The Bottom Line

Here’s how you use a frame honestly. Carry bad news yourself, and first, like the Don with the gown. The one who reports the trouble can still fix it. The one who gets caught is listened to as a defendant. A label stuck on first takes years to peel off, as with Impastato.

And to see someone else’s frame, pull the adjectives out of the sentence. “Left-wing fanatic.” “Camorrista.” “Only ten million.” What’s left without them? A murdered man. A sum of money. Then ask who named it first and what he got out of it. And when you hear “only,” ask: compared with what? A frame you’ve spotted can be taken down. The only one that works is the one you can’t see.