In Hollywood’s hands, mob kingpin Joey “Doves” Aiuppa’s last days would have looked something like this: The Don of Chicago Dons meets his maker while tending his garden. Suddenly, he clutches his chest, the music swelling as he falls to the ground.
Or maybe he’s gunned down in a mistress’ bed.
Either way, at the funeral, the grieving widow silently greets a parade of flatnosed wiseguys as they file past the coffin. Feds in bad suits sniff around Cadillacs, scribbling license plate numbers into little notebooks.
The reality, however, was a lot less cinematic: Aiuppa, whose 1986 conviction for being part of the Las Vegas gambling scam that partly inspired the Martin Scorsese movie “Casino,” died a far less dramatic death Feb. 22 in Elmhurst Memorial Hospital. The funeral, held two days later, was small, private and noticeably devoid of mobsters and pen-wielding cops.
If Hollywood paints a romanticized picture of mob life it’s because, well, that’s what we want to see. The fact is, when it comes to the mob, the Mafia, Cosa Nostra, goodfellas, the syndicate–whatever you want to call the breed–we can’t get enough of them up on the silver screen, on TV and in books.
“Movies serve to give us a distorted image of what the syndicate is all about,” says J. Price Foster, professor of criminology at the University of Louisville. “It’s fun to watch; it’s just not real.”
Still, we dig that unreal image. Who hasn’t puffed out his or her cheeks and mumbled “Make him an offer he can’t refuse”? Who hasn’t thrilled at the thought of rubbing out one’s enemies? And then there’s all that ill-gotten dough.
“It’s the bad guy fascination,” says Barbara Scharres, director of the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute. “(Mobsters’) lives are so exotic because they exist in this atmosphere of heightened excitement.”
It is the excitement that juices us. This is a nation held in thrall by violence, the more blood-soaked the better. Never mind that the thought of crime terrifies us in real life. Flicks such as “Scarface,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “GoodFellas” serve up fast-paced, operatic visions of the forbidden.
In other times, Shakespearean drama served to step things up another notch for those beset by the humdrum of reality. Later, Westerns and war movies filled the same need. Today, Mafia movies, and their sub-genre, gangsta flicks like “New Jack City” and “Menace II Society,” throw our demons up on the big screen. There, in the safety of a dark cineplex, we can purge ourselves of our most murderous impulses and innermost dreads while we chomp on our hold-the-butter popcorn.
“I love looking at the mindset of the criminal,” says Phil Jackson, a Chicago-area clergyman and youth counselor with a secret passion for crime flicks. “I look at these movies, and I’m like, man, that guy is really devious.”
Tough times for tough guys
Ironically, our fascination with mob culture is at full throttle at a time when the real-life Mafia itself is experiencing a breakdown in family values: The old days are dying–and the old guys are dying out.
But no matter. These days, we’re inundated with wiseguys. This month, to gratify our lust for a meaner, crueler mob, “The Godfather,” that quintessential mob movie, is being rereleased in honor of its 25th anniversary. Mario Puzo’s latest novel, “The Last Don,” will be broadcast as a CBS mini-series in May. New York mob boss John Gotti’s daughter, Victoria, recently published a novel. “Gotti’s Daughter Talks!” proclaimed a breathless commercial preview for “Dateline NBC”–even though the title of Victoria Gotti’s book is “The Senator’s Daughter.”
And then there’s the newly released “Donnie Brasco,” yet another Al Pacino mobster vehicle, which opened last week to huge lines. The nailbiting tale of a federal agent who infiltrates the New York syndicate did $11.2 million at the box office in its first weekend, second only to the $12.6 million raked in by “The Empire Strikes Back.” You’d think we’d have had our fill of bad boy flicks by now, but our thirst for honorable hitmen, gore and guns seems insatiable.
Take a trip into cyberspace and you’ll discover Web sites dedicated to the mob life, like the Mafia Page, where visitors post “COSA NOSTRA RULEZ!!!!” on the message boards. Then there’s the “Unofficial Homepage of the New York Mafia,” and even the tongue-in-cheek “John Gotti’s Tribute Page,” which analyzes the “startling similarities between John Gotti and Jesus Christ,” and features bullet holes and audio clips from old Frank Sinatra songs.
What gives? Perhaps it’s the mystery of peeking at a closed society where folks create their own rules–and their own language, like the all-purpose expression “Fuhgedaboutit” in “Donnie Brasco.”
Or maybe it’s because the mythic mob holds up a fun-house mirror to our most treasured values–love of family, the entrepreneurial spirit, loyalty and honor–juxtaposing them against a backdrop of extreme violence.
In essence, these films offer a twisted take on the Horatio Alger saga: the immigrant making it big in America. This is a nation of outsiders. Whether we came in chains, on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island, none of us–save for the American Indian–can really claim to be “Native Americans.” And our ethnicity runs deep.
The myth, with all its rags-to-riches melodrama, entices us with an almost addictive power. The reality is an unwanted distraction. Most of us can only speculate on what life in the mob is really like. Few really know. Even the movies that claim to tell the true story are simply an informant’s version. Most likely, the facts are part-truth, part-fiction, a bowdlerized concoction designed to appease the FBI and save the informant’s hide–and later, to earn millions from publishers and movie studios.
“We like to be entertained more than we like to be informed. Movies give people like John Gotti and Al Capone an almost Robin Hood characterization,” Foster says. “They’ve beaten the system. There’s a feeling that power makes right. These men have control. It’s a John Wayne mentality. And people who cross them pay for it dearly.”
Almost an insider
That’s just what drew Dr. Howard Pitts, an 89-year-old retired optometrist, to the mob in his younger days, when he hung out with the likes of Sam Giancana and “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn. Ralph Capone, brother of Al, was one of his patients.
“I was never involved with the nefarious activities, unfortunately,” says Pitts, who claims that he turned down several mob job offers in favor of going to college. “I miss those days. Oh, yeah, I do. I miss that life now, more than when I was younger. I’ve often regretted that I didn’t join up with them. If I did, today I might be a wealthy man. Or a dead one. Who knows.”
Back then, says Pitts, mobsters loved going to the movies to see Hollywood’s take on their lives. From the very beginning, we loved seeing them too. “Underworld” the first gangster movie, was a runaway hit in 1927. A flurry of others followed, from “Scarface” to “Little Caesar” and “Public Enemy.” Some ex-journalists-turned-screenwriters made big money in the 1930s capitalizing on their crime-reporting pasts. Actors like Edward G. Robinson and Richard Widmark, meanwhile, made careers out of playing gangsters, seducing Americans with tales of hoodlums who nearly get away with murder before being punished in the end. Remember Jimmy Cagney’s “top of the world, Ma!” sendoff as he rode an exploding oil tank to oblivion at the end of “White Heat”?
The public’s fascination with the mob–and the mob’s own fascination with the movies–led to a weird marriage of sorts, where life often imitated art–and vice versa. The original “Scarface” (released in 1932), of course, was patterned after Al Capone’s life. On the other hand, mobster Joey Gallo was so taken with 1947’s “Kiss of Death” that he fashioned his real-life mobster persona after Widmark’s character, the pathologically evil Tommy Udo.
The ties got even more convoluted as gangsters started mixing with Hollywood types. Bugsy Siegel dabbled in pictures, as did Joey Roselli, who actually produced a couple of low budget flicks. And then there’s the notorious Sinatra/Giancana alliance that showed up in a thinly veiled way in “The Godfather.”
In the early 1940s, the popularity of mobster movies began to wane. By that time, Italian-Americans had started protesting the entertainment world’s stereotypical portrayal of the gangster life as being the sole province of transplanted Sicilians. In fact, their protests may have driven the ’60s TV hit, “The Untouchables,” off the air.
It wasn’t until 1972, with the colossal success of Puzo’s “The Godfather,” that gangsters once again began to capture the imagination of the American public. Suddenly, the mob was hot again.
The `new’ mob
The mania shows no signs of letting up, even as the mob itself undergoes its own version of corporate downsizing.
Indeed, last month’s passing of Aiuppa marked the end of an era. He was the last living link between today’s mob leadership and the storied days of Al Capone. The modern mob is a scaled-back affair, cautious, less flamboyant. Its executives are corporate clones who rarely resort to whacking their enemies or beheading horses. The FBI, with its high-tech surveillance, has wannabe wiseguys scurrying for cover, and many of them have been ratting each other out as fast as you can say witness protection program.
And if the mob is changing, there are at least signs that the movies may be too. “Donnie Brasco,” starring Pacino and Johnny Depp, provides us with a rather claustrophobic view of life among mob middle-management. Pacino, in a vast departure from his earlier role as the elegantly sinister Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” plays a cheesy, good-hearted wiseguy schlump who’s down on his luck, forever short on cash–and always looking over his shoulder.
His world is one in which life is dark, dank and paranoid. It’s a `90s-style morality tale as we limp toward the end of the century.
Still, Donny Brasco doesn’t scrimp on the one thing shared by all mob movies: It’s drenched with violence and gore.
