Mad about the Mob
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BYL. KENTWOLGAMOTT
"The Godfather" is an American classic, considered one of the top three movies ever made in this country.
More than 30 books about organized crime and criminals are now on sale at local bookstores, and hundreds more can be found in libraries.
Now in its fifth season, "The Sopranos" remains a television phenomenon, generating cookbooks and viewing groups for its story about a New Jersey mob family.
So why are we so taken with the Mafia?
"It's as American as apple pie,"said Mafia expert JerryCapeci. "Americans, going back to the days of the Old West, have been interested in crime and shoot-'em-up. Organized crime and the Mafia have been been in the public for a half-century or more now."
Organized crime first came into widespread public view in the 1920s when gangsters like Chicago's Al Capone took advantage of Prohibition to establish illegal liquor sales networks along with the gambling, prostitution and other vices the mob had long controlled.
It didn't take long for Hollywood to capitalize on the gangsters' notoriety with pictures such as 1930's "Little Caesar" and 1932's "Scarface."Even television had its take on the '30s mob story with "The Untouchables," which began its four-season run in 1959.
But it was in the 1970s when the gangster myth as projected in popular culture came into its own.
It arrived via director Francis Ford Coppola's celluloid translation of Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather," first in 1972, then in "The Godfather, Part II" in 1974. The third installment came in the 1980s.
"The movies were the primary retailers of the myth," writes Pete Hamill in his foreword to Capeci's "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia." The Mafia was "possessed of a dark, ruthless glamour, full of rituals of initiation, perilous streets in American cities, and Sicilian Vespers. - According to Puzo and Coppola, there is official history and then there is hidden history, and the myth of Mafia power is hidden history. The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist."
The Mafia myth of "TheGodfather" is a myth of power, and the characters in the novel and movies gave the Corleone family a glamour and nobility that gangsters never had in real life.
By the late 1980s, Hollywood began to strip away that myth, most notably in Martin Scorsese's 1990 classic, "GoodFellas," a very accurate depiction of the life of mob soldier Henry Hill, a violent tale of a man's downward spiral.
Then, in 1999, came the HBO series that continues to be one of television's most highly regarded programs. Again, a mob family is at the center of the story. But Tony Soprano and his underlings are far from the all-powerful Corleones. Rather, they are contemporary, depicting the Mafia as it is today.
"'The Sopranos' has been successful for a couple reasons," said Capeci, who does a weekly analysis of the series for Slate Magazine. "The most important one is that it's a well-written show. And it's fairly accurate in its portrayal of gangsters as the animals they sometimes can be.But it gives some of them, Tony Soprano in particular, some more endearing qualities."
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That accuracy was reflected in the season-opening episode earlier this month.
One of the subplots of that episode involved a simmering dispute between Christopher Moltisanti (MichaelImperioli), the youngest member of the family's inner circle, and tough guy Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico).
Even though they make thousands a week, the pair was fighting over who had to pay the bill for the lavish dinners the gangsters regularly enjoy. Tradition holds that new guy Christopher had to foot the bill,but he stiffed veteran Paulie, sticking him with an $800 tab.
The next time the group gathered, Paulie got his revenge, ordering lobster and other expensive dishes that he didn't eat and sending a bottle of Kristal champagne to a nearby table full of women. Christopher pays the bill, but reluctantly. Then he and Paulie verbally spar outside the restaurant.
A waiter approaches Christopher, complaining about the $16 tip he left on a bill of $1,184. As the waiter walks away, Christopher throws a brick that hits the waiter in the head. As the man lies twitching on the ground, Paulie pulls out a gun and shoots him. The two gangsters hop in their cars and speed away.
The next day, they agree to settle their differences -while a body is left in the wake of a petty dispute.
"That is the way gangsters can act, and they very often do act," Capeci said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't glamorize them the way 'TheGodfather' movies did. But it does, by focusing on the family lives, give them a very human quality, I think."
That focus on the family this season includes a separation between Tony (James Gandolfini) and his wife Carmela (Edie Falco), the impact that split has on their children Meadow (Jamie Lynn-Discala) and Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) as well as a look at the relationship between Bobby Baccilieri (Steve R.Schirrpa) and Tony's sister Janice (Aida Turturro).
Those plot elements could take place in any family, which adds to the appeal of the show. Even Tony's visits to psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) are plausible.
In fact, the author of "TheComplete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia" and "Jerry Capeci's Gang Land" says Tony's psychiatric consultations mirror the experience of real mobsters.
"More than 50 years ago, Frank Costello, who was known as the prime minister of organized crime here in New York, saw a shrink for a couple years," Capeci said. "These people have problems just like everybody else, and 'The Sopranos' treats them honestly."
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Pop culture's emphasis on the mob has overstated the real Mafia's reach, however.In cities like Lincoln, the only place you were ever likely to see a mobster was on the movie screen.
"There's a good reason for the fact you don't see Bonnano family soldiers walking around Lincoln, Nebraska," Capeci said. "It has to do with the immigration patterns of the last 100 years.The Mafia grew out of Italian immigrant communities in the major cities, just like today's Chinese mob and Russian mob have grown out of those new immigrant communities."
There was, however, a considerable organized crime presence in Omaha, even though famed Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi replied, "Where in hell is Omaha?" when questioned about La Cosa Nostra's influence there by Sen. Carl T.Curtis when Valachi testified before Congress in 1963.
"By mid-century, Omaha had a reputation for more illicit gambling (and more bars and taverns) per capita than any other city in the nation," researcher Brian James Beerman writes on the American Mafia.com Website. "In fact, the city's significance in the national organized crime picture appears to be as a regional - and at times national - layoff center, a place where bookies in other cities could place bets they had taken to help balance their action and reduce the risk of a heavy loss."
It's also of note that Meyer Lansky, known as the brains behind the Syndicate who created a thriving international crime organization, ran a dog track in Council Bluffs in the 1940s.
In 1972, Sam Ziegman, one of the heads of Omaha's gambling syndicate in the '30s and '40s, was indicted along with Lansky for skimming profits from Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel, in which Ziegman was a shareholder.
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Not surprisingly, Hollywood's depictions of the Mafia are must-see TVin mobsters' homes.
"They watch what they're familiar with,"said Capeci, who has extensive contacts on both sides of the law. "They've obviously watched gangster movies going back to EdwardG.Robinson and JimmyCagney and picked up some of their gangster mannerism.There's definitely been a lot of cases of life imitating art."
That blurring of the boundaries between life and art continues today.
"There's no question that gangsters watch 'The Sopranos,'" he said. "Here in the New York area, members of the DeCavalcante crime family were caught on an FBI recording discussing how it's probably based on them."
The wiseguys were probably onto something.
The DeCavalcante crime family has operated in northern New Jersey for more than 70 years, where it had a grip on the state's construction industry. "Sopranos" fans will note that a construction project is at the center of a dispute that threatened to explode into mob war last season.
Some of the television show is filmed in Elizabeth, N.J., the DeCavalcante family's home base. According to the Asbury Park Press, the scenes which take place outside the fictional Satriale's Pork Store were filmed just a few blocks away from a real pork store, Sacco's, that is a regular meeting place for DeCavalcante family members.
At one point, the DeCavalcante family was headed by Giovanni "Uncle John" Riggi, who happened to be in prison while he was running the family - which remains a possibility for "Uncle Junior" Soprano.
If "The Sopranos" creator David Chase and his writers stick to the basic DeCavalcante history, things aren't looking good for Tony and company. Most of the DeCavalcante leadership and many of the family's soldiers were indicted on federal racketeering and murder conspiracy charges in 2003.
In October, Girolamo "Jimmy Gumps" Palermo, the last member of the family's three-man ruling panel was convicted in federal court in Manhattan. At least 30 of the 50 sworn members of the DeCavalcante family are either in prison or in the federal witness protection program, according to an Asbury Park Press report.
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Rolling up the Soprano family would be in keeping with the last 20 years of Mafia history. Capeci has chronicled the decline of the mob in the columns he has written for the New York Daily News and New York Sun that can be found on his Website, www.ganglandnews.com, and are collected in his "Gang Land" book.
"In the last 15 to 20 years, the federal government has really done a good job of reducing the influence of gangsters in the areas where they were strong before,"Capeci said. "What they've done is used the RICOstatutes - the racketeering statutes put into law in the late '60s and early '70s where you can prosecute an entire group for the crimes. It just took them 10 to 12 years to figure out how to use them."
The first real use of the RICOstatutes came in 1982 after FBI agent Joseph Pistone infiltrated the Bonnano crime family, Capeci said.
It took Hollywood a few years to get that story on film.But it did so with effectiveness in 1997's "Donnie Brasco,"in which Johnny Depp convincingly portrayed Pistone opposite AlPacino, who plays a mid-level gangster who brings Pistone into the family, deglamourizing his performance as Michael Corleone in "The Godfather" movies.
The FBIis closing in on the fictional Sopranos, just as it did in real life with a series of successful prosecutions that brought down high-profile gangsters across the country, from New York to Los Angeles, Milwaukee to New Orleans and, regionally, Kansas City and Denver.
"That is not to say in my view the Mafia's dead," Capeci said. "In some of the smaller places, they have largely eliminated it.But in the big cities around the northeast, including New York, in Chicago, New England and New Jersey, there's still viable organized crime. The Mafia still exists, although with reduced influence. It's going to be some time before they're reduced to the level of a street gang."
Until that happens, and very likely long after the Mafia is history, we'll be seeing the gangsters on the big and small screens and reading their stories.
Reach L.Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or at kwolgamott@;journalstar.com.
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