What Not to Say Out Loud

Once he’d taken Donnie on, the first thing Lefty did was forbid him to talk business on the phone. Never talk business openly on the phone, Lefty told him, they’re listening to us. Talk in hints, find a way round it. But so that Lefty would know what it was about.

Lefty, like most mafiosi, was suspicious to the point of comedy. Once, out on the street, he pointed out to Donnie the roof of a school, where ordinary television aerials stuck up. He said the agents had put them there to listen to what the guys were saying.

And a few years later the same Lefty, back from a sit-down, was telling Donnie how he’d threatened Tony Mirra there. And he admitted it himself: the club was full of bugs, but he hadn’t kept quiet. He’d said he would put a couple of bullets in Mirra and, by his own account, had even named the calibre.

Lefty was afraid of the aerials on the school. In a club full of microphones, once he got angry, he said everything. And the biggest bug of all was sitting right next to him, listening to his story: Donnie himself.

Loose Talk Comes with Anger

Here’s the first lesson of this chapter. Caution ends where feeling begins. People let their tongues run not where it’s safe but where they’re angry, drunk, hurt or happy. You can talk in hints on the phone for years and give it all away in five minutes of rage.

So the rule isn’t “watch your words in dangerous places”, it’s “watch your words when you’re getting carried away”. If you’re angry, say nothing about business. If you’ve had a drink, say nothing about business. If you’re very pleased, the same. A happy man boasts, and boasting is just more loose talk.

Code at the Table

Pistone describes how a code was agreed on in Florida. Steve Maruca told Donnie that if he ever needed a gun, he should call and say something like “bring the load”. Sally, who was sitting next to them, had his own version, along the lines of “it’s cold out, dress warm”. Maruca objected and came up with a second option: “I’m buying a car, come and take a look”, or words to that effect. They argued over which was better.

The code was being invented for an FBI agent, and he was the one who’d be using it. No code is worth anything if you don’t know who’s sitting at the table.

A Note Read Aloud

For many years Provenzano ran the organisation by notes, the pizzini, and for a long time it worked. But Dickie tells how it all turned out. One of his men, Antonino Rotolo, sentenced to life, managed to win the right to serve it at home. Next door there was an abandoned garage. There Rotolo gathered his men and read Provenzano’s notes out loud to them. The police put microphones in the garage.

The microphones picked up a great deal. Including an admission from Rotolo himself, as he weighed up a war with a rival: if they started shooting, he said, he’d be the first to go.

The note was safe until it was read aloud. The most secret letter is given away by the man who retells it. Dickie quotes another recording too, from the summer of 2000. Mafiosi were advising each other to keep the noise down and not draw attention, so as to get their hands on European programme money. The advice to “keep the noise down”, spoken on tape, was the loudest thing they ever said.

New Words, Old Ears

Saviano writes that in Secondigliano, after the clan war, the word faida, feud, had almost been forgotten. “Vietnam” took its place. Why, Saviano doesn’t say. I think it wasn’t just fashion: the old word had turned up too often in police reports.

But the carabinieri recorded “Vietnam” too. A new word hides the meaning from the neighbour. It won’t fool the man who’s been listening for months.

And sometimes the one listening isn’t the one you’re afraid of at all. Saviano has an intercept from 1982. The Caserta clans were selling weapons to Argentina, which was at war with Britain over the Falklands. On the day of the ceasefire, British intelligence intercepted a call from Argentina to San Cipriano d’Aversa. “The war’s over, what do we do now?” “Nothing, there’ll be another one…” They were hiding from the Italian police. It was the British who recorded them.

Words change. The habit of talking doesn’t.

Where Not to Talk

The Don was not a mafioso but the owner of laundries, and he wasn’t afraid of bugs. But he had rules of his own, and I’ve kept them for forty years.

Don’t talk business at home in front of the children. Children repeat everything, and always to the wrong person.

Don’t talk business in the lift, in the corridor, in a taxi, in a queue. You don’t know who’s standing next to you. Once I discussed a price with a hotel manager in the hotel lift. A week later a competitor rang us and offered five per cent less. His driver had been in the lift with us.

Don’t talk business in a bar. A bar is a place where everybody listens and pretends to drink.

Don’t say anything about people behind their backs that you wouldn’t repeat to their faces. What’s said about a man reaches him faster than what’s said to him.

And the wastepaper basket. The Don tore up his drafts and burned them. Once a presser found a note with another firm’s prices in the pocket of a jacket brought in for cleaning. The Don told her to put it back in the pocket and return the jacket to its owner with the rest of his laundry. “You don’t read other people’s papers,” he said. “And you don’t leave yours in your pockets.”

Last Words

You’ve read a book about words. About how to listen, how to understand what a man wants, how he says yes and how he’s deceived. Almost every chapter was about what to say. This one is about what not to say. It isn’t by chance that I put it last.

The strongest word in a conversation is the one you didn’t say. A secret you’ve kept weighs more than any compliment. A man known not to pass things on gets something money can’t buy: people tell him the truth. For forty years people told the Don the truth. Cooks, managers, suppliers, pressers. Not because he was kind, though he was. But because everyone knew it would go no further than him.

That’s the language of the Family. Not codes, not nicknames, not “bring the load”. A word that’s kept. And a silence that isn’t for sale.

The Bottom Line

Keep quiet about business when you’re getting carried away: in anger, in drink, in joy. Don’t say anything about people that you wouldn’t say to their faces.

And from the other side, be the man people can tell things to. Don’t pass them on. Don’t boast about what you know. Then you’ll be told what nobody else is told. That’s the whole secret I know about conversation. You can pass it on. You have my permission.