When Sonny's shot, Tom faces his own weaknesses:
He had been fooled, faked out, by the Five Families and their seeming timidity. They had remained quiet, laying their terrible ambush. They had planned and waited, holding their bloody hands no matter what provocation they had been given. They had waited to land one terrible blow. And they had. Old Genco Abbandando would never have fallen for it, he would have smelled a rat, he would have smoked them out, tripled his precautions. "
I've never felt that the passage you cite makes much sense. The point was not that Sonny was given bad advice, but that he had too much of a temper to listen to anyone's advice.
Whatever Genco may have told him would have flown out the window in the heat of Sonny's anger.
And while the passage does point out a difference between Genco and Tom, I hardly see that anticipating that your enemy will eventaually attack you is some sort of uniquely Sicilian insight. Tom's failure to expect an attack says more
against him than
for Genco.
