What the Talker Is Afraid Of
In the Casa Bella, a restaurant in New York, a mafioso called Mike was explaining to the agent Tony Conte how the Milwaukee business had ended. The local boss, Frank Balistrieri, had made a deal with Conte that he had no right to make, and then broken it off without explanation. The elders had settled the matter in Conte’s favour. Balistrieri was the one who’d made the mistake. You’d think it was all clear.
Conte shrugged and said that if a man makes a mistake, he should have the guts to own up and apologise. Lefty and Mike, Joe Pistone writes, shook their heads in unison. Mike explained that the head of a family doesn’t have to admit his mistakes. Then he stood up, pushing his chair back noisily. Conversation over.
But at the table Lefty was glowing. The first good news since December, he said. Because of Milwaukee he hadn’t been invited to a single Christmas get-together, a single wedding. Not even a wake. A man who joked about rats at the bottom of the river had spent months afraid he wouldn’t be asked to a wake.
Fear Lives One Floor Up
Pistone’s view of these men goes like this. Even the most reckless of them were afraid of the bosses, the rules and the punishments. It was, as he puts it, a fear of the system, not of particular people.
Take that with you into any negotiation. The courage of the man across from you won’t tell you much. Look for whom he answers to: the owner, the board, his wife, his own reputation. That’s where his real fear lives. That’s where his “no” lives too.
And the main fear of the man at the top is losing face. So he won’t say “I made a mistake.” He’ll quietly change the decision and act as if that was the plan all along. Don’t wait for an apology. There won’t be one. Watch what he does, and let him save face. It costs less than you’d think and pays back more.
The Yacht Story
You can test fear without a word. Lefty once told a story in front of Pistone. He’d invited some guy for a ride on the East River. The guy turned up all jumpy and wouldn’t turn his back on him: he’d decided they had him down as a rat and were going to throw him overboard. Lefty laughed at him. Why, he said, would he drag the guy onto a yacht when he could whack him right there in the club while he was playing cards?
When he’d finished, Lefty gave Pistone a searching look. Pistone wondered why he’d been told this, whether just for laughs or so that he’d take in a hidden message about rats. And he answered to the point, about the man they’d been discussing: he hoped, he said, that Paradise would keep his mouth shut.
A frightening story told in front of a witness works like an X-ray. A scared man gives himself away with his face, not his words. A straight answer about the matter in hand shows nothing. Which is exactly what you want. Pistone chose it, though he never did find out whether he was being tested.
“Don’t Worry” and “I Hope So”
In Milwaukee, too, they blew up a man in his car who was suspected of being a rat. Pistone admits that he and Conte got nervous. Lefty got through to Conte on the phone and brushed it off: the one who got blown up was the one who’d screwed up.
Conte said that now he was afraid of screwing up himself. Lefty told him not to worry, he was doing everything right. Conte answered with one word: he hoped so. Listen to that. The comfort didn’t work. So Lefty gave him a plan: for the first couple of weeks he’d be at his side, he’d fly to Chicago, set up a dinner and introduce Tony to the right people.
Then Lefty asked to have Donnie put on the line. Your pal’s really down in the dumps, he told him, more or less. Pistone corrected him: not down, nervous; he doesn’t understand what’s going on. See how fast someone else’s fear became information? It was being discussed a minute later, in front of a third man. Lucky that third man was a friend.
Fear Lies, but You Need It
Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked passengers on Chicago commuter trains to strike up a conversation with the person next to them. Beforehand people were sure it would be awkward. It turned out the opposite: they enjoyed the ride with a conversation more than the one in silence.
But you can’t live entirely without fear either. Neurologists have long been studying a woman known in the literature as S.M. Because of a rare disease her amygdalae are destroyed, and she feels almost no fear. More than once she has walked into situations that anyone else would have run from. Fear is a bad adviser and a good watchman. You don’t have to listen to it. You shouldn’t throw it out.
How the Don Cured Me
At twenty I was afraid of calling strangers. I could circle the telephone for a week. The Don noticed and said nothing. One morning he dialled the accounts office of the new hotel himself and shoved the receiver at me once they’d already picked up.
The voice at the other end was shaking worse than mine. The girl was on her first day at work and was afraid I’d ask something she didn’t know. We both stumbled over our words. Then we laughed. For a long time. When I put the phone down I understood a simple thing. The person you’re calling is, more often than not, scared too.
And if you’re still shaking, breathe. In 2023 at Stanford they compared several methods. The best was cyclic sighing: two breaths in through the nose, one after the other, and a long breath out. Five minutes a day for a month. Mood went up more noticeably than in the people who meditated.
The Bottom Line
When you want to take away someone’s fear, don’t say “it’ll all be fine.” Say who will be with him, what will happen and when. And leave the man at the top a way back that doesn’t mean admitting he was wrong.
And look at yourself this way. If someone tells you a frightening story in front of a witness and waits to see what’s on your face, keep your answer to the business in hand. And don’t go handing out confessions of fear to all and sundry. A minute later they’ll be discussed without you.