‘TONY SOPRANO ON MANAGEMENT’

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to audiences in Nijmegen, Leicester and then Nijmegen again, as well as Beatriz Acevedo, Peter Armstrong, René ten Bos, Jo Brewis, Stefano Harney, Gavin Jack, Tom Keenoy, Simon Lilley, Paddy Rawlinson and the referees of this journal for comments.

Notes

1. For detail on this rather condensed assertion, see chapter seven in Parker (2002). Note also that this paper is primarily concerned with the United States and Sicily. There are many other business organizations now referred to as ‘Mafias’, and many similarities and differences between their organizational structures and business practices.

2. In this sub-genre, see also The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli by the mysterious V.

3. This estimate comes from SOS Impresa in 2006, an Italian retail lobby group, and is based on government figures.

4. Though Nick Gentile, the boss of Pittsburgh from 1915 onwards, claimed that a ‘council’ arrangement existed before Luciano, as did the five families. He complained that the council was a place where eloquence was the key issue in resolving disputes, and not logic (Dickie 2004, pp. 219, 227). For organizational structures in Sicily, see Gambetta (1993, p. 100), though see Arlacchi (1988, p. 44) for a more decentralized view.

5. For an edited collection of papers that connect the Mafia, trust and economics, see Gambetta (2000[1988]).

6. It was only really after the invention of recording technologies, combined with the legally generous provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, that evidence about the Mafia could become mobile, and effective in a judicial context.

7. The Mafia is a violent organization, responsible for many deaths. The Sicilian village of Corleone, which had a population of eighteen thousand, had 153 murders between 1944 and 1948 (Lewis 1984, p. 95). Forty years later, in the first six months of 1989, 428 people were murdered in Sicily. These are big numbers, but consider some others. In Bhopal, India on 13 December 1984, about 15,000 people were killed, and ten times as many injured, by a release of chemicals from the Union Carbide plant. In the USA, in 2000, 5,915 people were killed in industrial accidents, 100,000 from alcohol-related deaths, and 350,000 from tobacco-related deaths. These are bigger numbers.

8. See also the marvellous description of Don Fabrizio in Guiseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard.

9. The opening shot of The Godfather has the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera pleading with Don Corleone for a favour. He begins ‘I believe in America …’.