A Lesson From The Movie Alto Knights and Real Life

Last night I watched Alto Knights, the new De Niro film about Frank Costello and Vito Genovese — two of New York’s most powerful organized-crime bosses, and two men who couldn’t have been more different. And as I watched it, something clicked that I’ve noticed for decades in real life: the people who walk around suspicious of everyone else are usually the people who can’t be trusted themselves.

They’re not reading the room.
They’re projecting their own behavior onto everyone around them.

And nobody embodied that better than Vito Genovese.

Genovese was the classic sociopath. He didn’t just expect betrayal — he lived by betrayal. The man woke up every morning assuming someone was out to get him, not because the world was actually that dangerous, but because he himself was dangerous. He saw hidden motives everywhere because he had hidden motives in everything he did. When you watch De Niro play him — cold, paranoid, coiled like a spring — you realize this wasn’t strategy. This was self-recognition. He saw a hostile world because he carried hostility inside his own skin.

Then you look at Frank Costello, and it’s night and day. Costello knew violence but didn’t rely on it. He negotiated. He read people. He wasn’t paranoid because he didn’t operate from the same dark impulses. He could imagine someone being honest or cooperative because that was an option in his own internal wiring. Genovese couldn’t. To him, everyone was a threat because he was a threat.

That’s when it hit me: this same dynamic plays out far outside the mafia. Most people will never run a crime family, but they’ll absolutely bring the same psychology into workplaces, neighborhoods, marriages, and families.

I’ve met people — in business, real estate, retail, and life — who automatically assume everyone is lying, hiding something, or plotting against them. And every single time, without exception, they turned out to be the ones doing the twisting, the scheming, the quiet little manipulations behind the scenes. Good people don’t walk around expecting the worst in others. That wiring just isn’t in them. But someone who would lie or cheat immediately assumes everyone else would too.

It’s like the coworker who’s always warning you about “office politics.” He’s usually the one stirring them up. Or the neighbor who thinks everyone is out to get her — meanwhile she’s the one filing complaints on everyone. Or the family member who constantly accuses others of hiding secrets while she’s keeping the biggest ones herself. These people think they’re perceptive, but really they’re just confessing how they operate.

And the more dangerous the person, the stronger that projection becomes. That’s why the most violent criminals, historically and psychologically, tend to be the most paranoid. They see the world as hostile because they only understand hostility. They can’t imagine loyalty because they don’t offer it. They misread harmless people as threats because in their own mind, every person is a potential threat — a reflection of their own impulses.

Watching the Genovese character reinforced something I’ve believed for years: suspicion often reveals more about the suspicious person than the one being judged.

If someone’s default setting is distrust, that distrust didn’t come from observation — it came from within. They expect deceit because that’s what they would do. They expect violence because they’re capable of it. They expect betrayal because it’s familiar.

Meanwhile, the honest people — the Costellos of the world — walk through life assuming others are basically decent. They’re not naïve. They’re just operating from a different set of internal rules.

So when someone treats every conversation like an interrogation, or questions every motive, or assumes there’s a hidden scheme behind every interaction… don’t be impressed by their “intuition.” Watch them closely. That suspicion is a mirror. And sometimes, as Alto Knights reminded me, the most paranoid ones are the very people you should be most cautious of.