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.

Before breakfast he announced that he’d lost his return ticket from Tampa to New York, the very one Rossi had bought him on his credit card. And he sent Rossi to look for the ticket in the club. Pistone explains Lefty’s reasoning: if Rossi was an agent, he’d have reasons to get nervous and give himself away. An agent would have to ask his bosses for money for a new ticket. And the old ticket might be found, and the credit card checked, the one registered to a government office.

Donnie managed to warn Rossi without being seen. Rossi made a show of looking, gave up with a wave and said he’d buy a new one. The test didn’t work. But it was a good one.

A Good Test Doesn’t Ask

Look at how it was built. Lefty didn’t ask, “Are you an agent?” Every liar has an answer ready for that one. He set up a small, everyday situation in which a liar is forced to act outside his cover story. And he watched not the answer but the behaviour.

That’s the main thing worth knowing about lies. Scientists have pooled more than two hundred experiments in which people tried to tell lies from the truth. The average accuracy is fifty-four per cent. Hardly better than tossing a coin. Police officers, judges and interrogators did not do much better than students. People who were sure they could “see straight through a lie” were wrong as often as everyone else.

So forget about shifty eyes, scratching your nose and hands over the mouth. These “tells” don’t work. Something else does.

The False Tell

Pistone describes how it goes. In Milwaukee, the local boss’s underboss held forth about how there were so many rats around that Castro’s whole army wouldn’t be enough, but spotting them was easy: they all, he claimed, had remote starters in their cars. Pistone adds drily that Conte had just had one put in. Conte was an agent.

But where did the “tell” come from? After a car belonging to a man suspected of being a rat was blown up in Milwaukee, the gangsters rushed to fit remote starters, all of them. So as not to get blown sky-high. The liar’s tell turned out to be a sign of fear. And honest men are afraid too.

Any “sure sign of a lie” is usually like that. A man is nervous, so he’s lying? Or is he afraid he won’t be believed? A man blushes, so he’s guilty? Or is he ashamed that he’s suspected? Judge by one sign, and you’ll catch the wrong people.

Details

What works is checking details. It’s hard for a liar to hold a made-up story in his head all at once. So you ask him about small things that can be checked against others: when, how many times, who else was there.

When Donnie fell under suspicion because of a man he’d brought into the business, this is exactly how Lefty questioned him. First a small trick question: how many times had he been to the Cecil, Tony Mirra’s bar? Donnie didn’t know which answer was safe and chose a cautious one: two or three times. What mattered to Lefty was whether this matched what Mirra had said, and when exactly it had been. Only then did he move on to the main thing, telling Donnie to think hard before he answered.

Scientists who study interrogation also look not for a tell but for the load on the mind. In 2008 Aldert Vrij and his colleagues asked people to tell a story in reverse order, from the end back to the beginning. The inventors found this harder, and police officers who watched the recordings guessed more often who was lying. More often: on average, across dozens of people. Reverse order is hard on a truthful man too: his memory isn’t a tape recorder either, and he gets muddled too. It’s the same with the technique where you first let a man tell the whole story and then show him one fact you know. A discrepancy tells you where to dig. It doesn’t tell you who’s guilty.

You May Keep Silent, but Never Lie

The Sicilian Mafia had a rule which, according to the testimony of many pentiti, counted for more than the rule of silence. Gambetta puts it like this: “The mafioso can choose to remain silent; but if he elects to speak, he must not lie.” Lying supposedly meant expulsion, even death. Gambetta notes at once that there are no records of any such punishments.

Look at what follows from that. If lying is forbidden and silence is allowed, people lie by leaving things out. They don’t say anything untrue; they just don’t say the whole truth. So ask yourself not only “Is this true?” but also “What has he kept quiet about?”

Dickie adds one more subtlety. In a world where there’s no such thing as idle talk, if a man says something, it’s either the truth or, as Dickie argues, a tactical lie, which matters just as much as the truth does. A lie is a message too. The question isn’t only whether a man is lying but why he’s lying to you, right now.

One last thing. Dickie looks at how Tommaso Buscetta denied to the end of his life that he’d made money from drugs, though he himself said there was nobody in Cosa Nostra who wasn’t mixed up in them. The lie was so obvious that Buscetta had to throw something like a cordon sanitaire around it, so the distrust wouldn’t spread to the rest of his testimony. An experienced liar lies in one place and packs that place with truth on every side.

How the Don Checked

The Don didn’t believe in a “nose for lies”. He believed in asking again. If a supplier explained why a batch was late, the Don listened, nodded, and two weeks later, in passing, asked again: “So what happened with that batch?” If the story had changed, the Don drew no conclusion. People honestly forget and honestly get muddled. He rang the port. Asking again showed him where to ring. And a story repeated word for word proved nothing either: a lie learned by heart gets repeated without a stumble.

And if the port said one thing and the supplier another, the Don made no scene. He said calmly, “Two weeks ago it was the customs’ fault, today it’s the driver’s. And the port says the batch arrived on time. Pick one of them, I need to write it down.” And watched. Most people corrected themselves on the spot. With those who kept on lying, he never worked again.

The Bottom Line

Neither a muddled story nor a smooth one proves anything. They only show you which fact to check from outside: at the port, in the papers, with a second witness.

And from the other side, don’t turn into Lefty with his tickets. A man who tests everyone will one day test the wrong one and lose an honest man. And remember: the one explaining loudest how to spot a rat is sometimes sitting next to an agent and doesn’t see him.