If some nativist in this country had warned in 1900 that mass Italian immigration would bring us vendetta-obsessed crime clans, capable of getting their tentacles on the public life (and budgets) of major American cities while also corrupting the American labor movement for most of the coming century, he would have been dismissed, correctly, as a bigot. The oddity is that something like this happened, and, on the whole, no one seems to mind. Quite apart from the overwhelming positives of the Italian presence—the usual parade of professional eminences, from attorneys to zoologists, along with many of the best ballplayers, most of the passionate actors, all the great rhapsodic movie directors, and nearly all the (white) singers worth hearing—the existence of those bad guys, far from being seen as an excrescence, has become another positive: it has supplied our only reliable, weatherproof American mythology, one sturdy enough to sustain and resist debunking or revisionism. Cowboys turn out to be racist and settlers genocidal, and even astronauts have flaws. But mobsters come pre-disgraced, as jeans come pre-distressed; what bad thing can you say about the Mob that hasn’t been said already? So residual virtues, if any, shine bright.
You could still imagine that books debunking the Cosa Nostra, revealing a truth less glamorous if not more virtuous than what has been peddled, would be plentiful. But, where you could not get a popular historian to repeat the story of, say, Clara Barton and the American Red Cross without much close squinting and revision, a book about the Mob in New York will happily repeat the same twenty stories already known, without probing the possibility that, given the Mob’s secrecy and need for self-generated storytelling, much of what we think we know may not be remotely true. When revision does occur, it meets a stony response. David Nasaw, in “The Patriarch,” his 2012 biography of the elder Joseph Kennedy, took on one of the hardier myths of the Mob in America: that, in the nineteen-twenties, Kennedy, Sr., was a bootlegger with Mob ties, and that the ties continued into later years, playing a role in his son’s election and, perhaps, his assassination. Nasaw dismissed this as a late-arriving myth propagated by aging mobsters, one at odds with Joseph Kennedy’s single-minded goal of making his eldest son President. Kennedy, Sr., knew what would work to his advantage and what would not—and Mob involvement would not. It seems now that he was confused with another, Canadian Joseph Kennedy, who really was a bootlegger, and put his name on his bottles—with the confusion boosted by mobsters’ natural temptation to claim collaboration with the powerful. (“Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy,” Michael Corleone says to the senator from Nevada; real mobsters love being able to say that, too.) Nasaw’s conclusion, in turn, annoyed the Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, in his fine life of the singer: if the Kennedys weren’t involved with the Mob, then Sinatra’s role as a middleman with the Mafia recedes in importance, and, since Sinatra’s own Mob ties turn out to be largely ornamental, with no Kennedy connection he is merely another occasional hanger-on, a stickpin rather than a stiletto. To keep Sinatra interestingly sinister, Kaplan has to debunk Nasaw’s debunking.
We all, in other words, have a lot invested in the Mafia mythology. You can still find the rare deflationary history. Robert Lacey’s “Little Man,” a 1991 biography of the legendary Meyer Lansky, known as the Mob’s moneyman, made it plain that, while quick with numbers and a good casino manager, Lansky wasn’t a genius, or much of a mobster, or even very rich. The truly smart guys didn’t run Cuban casinos; they opened Las Vegas hotels. The average unnamed businessman who bought a strip mall outside Reno must have made more money than the legendary “genius” of the Mob.
Yet it is almost impossible to demythologize the Mob. “Wiseguy,” the oral memoir of the small-time mobster Henry Hill which Nicholas Pileggi put together, and “Goodfellas,” the Scorsese movie it became, were intended to replace the myth of melancholic men of honor with the reality of street-rat scrapping. Instead, the rats themselves became legendary, and even, in a black way, lovable. Tommy DeSimone, the original of the Joe Pesci character in “Goodfellas,” was not a cute if murderous psychopath but a murderous psychopath tout court. Yet even DeSimone has become so mythologized that you can far more easily find material about his life and death than about, say, the life of Abe Beame, a small man who was the mayor of New York around the time DeSimone was doing heists. Once a myth fills some imaginative need, it becomes infinitely adaptable: King Arthur probably began as a pan-Celtic hero, then got taken up by the people he had been fighting, then got made mystical and feminized by the French Grail romances, only to end up, in Tennyson’s hands, as a melancholic Victorian. The point of a myth is to be mythical, and no amount of archeology can shake the fairy dust from its heels.
Generally, in Mob stories, the cute bits are not real, and the real bits are not cute. Given that grim truth, there’s something to be said for just shutting your eyes and repeating the cute bits. In the new book “Big Apple Gangsters” (Rowman & Littlefield), Jeffrey Sussman repeats the genesis myths and exempla virtutis of the New York City Mob pretty much straight, no chaser. Sussman starts off with an obvious error—he thinks that Damon Runyon’s fictional version of Arnold Rothstein is Nathan Detroit, a small-time craps dealer, when it’s really a very different character called the Brain, whose sad demise closely imitates the gambler’s—and yet his dependence on received wisdom is the best feature of his book. He offers the familiar stories in almost fossilized form, in a manner rather like the “Golden Legend,” the medieval collection of saints’ lives. So we hear once again about Rothstein as the mother wolf of the Mob, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, who suckled the organization’s Romulus and Remus, the street boys Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who in the twenties jointly created the Mob as a kind of Italian-Jewish cross-immigrant compact. We hear about that first, rom-com meet-cute of the very young Lansky with the very young Luciano:
This story has the omnipresence in the Mob literature of flood myths in the ancient Near East. The moment one scrutinizes it, though, it smells, rather like the flood, utterly fishy. The response of a teen-age gangster being told to fuck himself would be to be impressed by the other kid’s moxie? (And what did all the other kids in the gang think as Lansky dissed Lucky?) Even if there’s a shred of truth in this tale, we are in the presence of myth—meaning not simply a falsehood but some piece of reality shaped to supply a significant moral, a parable of the tenements.
The moral, in this case, is that brawn alone is not enough. Every Luciano must have his Lansky. In the magisterial 2005 history “Five Families,” Selwyn Raab, the Gibbon of the New York Mob, even quotes the Jewish Mob lawyer George Wolf remarking on the “surprisingly good harmony” between the two immigrant groups, “the Italians respecting the Jews for their financial brains, and the Jews preferring to stay quietly behind the scenes and let the Italians use the muscle needed.”
The legend continues with the emergence of the five Mob families, which New York children used to be able to recite in their sleep: Gambino, Bonanno, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese. All the famous incidents and players of the five families make their appearance in Sussman’s book in energetically neat outline form—each, one realizes, with a summary moral attached. Frank Costello, the original of Vito Corleone, narrowly misses being assassinated in the lobby of his Central Park West apartment building by Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, and wisely recedes from the fray, becoming one of the few important mobsters to die in bed, the moral being that discretion can be the better part of valor. Joey (Crazy) Gallo breaks the rules of that decorum, shooting many gangsters, and then being shot himself, at Umbertos Clam House. His life proves that crazy doesn’t pay. The Chin returns, wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe, mumbling incoherently, in what turns out to have been an impersonation of psychosis as he secretly fired off orders to his underlings: crazy can pay, if you commit to it.
The preponderance of the Mafia stories that Sussman relates, however, have the simplest and oldest of lessons: pride comes before a fall. Again and again, some mobster or another becomes infatuated with his clippings, and then gets clipped. This leads eventually to the Theban plays of Mob tales, the long John Gotti cycle, a classic story of hubris duly punished. Had Gotti been content to wait his turn (i.e., not whack his boss, Paul Castellano, the head of the Gambino family), or even, having whacked him, been content to appeal humbly for pardon to the other dons, he might have died at home. As it was, he was left largely friendless and at the mercy of the F.B.I. Like Oedipus, he had asked for it.
All of this takes place against a dubiously fact-checked background. Part of the lore that Sussman repeats is that Luciano and Lansky collaborated to form the National Crime Syndicate, established around 1929, along with a judicial commission to oversee its disputes and rigid organizational discipline. If you couldn’t get a hit authorized by the commission, you couldn’t do the hit. This organization, over the decades, came to have a whiskered history of its own, with a supposed list of past bosses, like university presidents. Yet some chroniclers reasonably wonder how real it ever was. People like Lacey don’t deny that there’s collaboration among gangsters, but they suspect it’s more implicit than highly orchestrated, rather like collaboration among book reviewers in the “New York literary mafia” (which was also sometimes called the Family) in the fifties and sixties. Lizzie loved Cal, who was protected by Bob, who was watching his back for knives from Philip—but there was never a secret yearly meeting, as those who were left out always suspected, where the editors of The New York Review of Books and Partisan Review got together to decide who was going to get whacked in their pages. Mafias act more by tacit collaboration over shared interests than by actual conspiracy.
So, just like the conspiracies that paranoid (read: all) authors imagine are rampant among book reviewers, the arguments persist over why Tommy DeSimone got whacked. Was it, as represented in book and film, because he had violated a cardinal rule by whacking a “made man,” Billy Batts? Or because John Gotti hated him? (“DeSimone whacked two of my top earners, and I let it go for a long time,” one source has Gotti telling a fellow-capo. “Now he wants to be made, and I’m not gonna sit quietly. . . . I wanna whack the bastard, and I want you to give me the green light.”) Or was it instigated by the Lucchese capo Paulie Vario, who shrewdly egged on Gotti because DeSimone had assaulted Henry Hill’s wife, with whom Vario had been having a secret romance? Or, as another source suggests, was DeSimone’s close friend Jimmy Burke—the De Niro character—behind it, intent on covering his tracks in a heist he’d masterminded? The answer may be: all of the above. As with the reviewers of Norman Mailer’s later fiction, there was no need for a conspiracy. Everyone separately decided to have him whacked.
In talking about the Mob, we airily use words like “mythological,” but there’s a sense in which the allegorical, rather than the strictly mythological, level of meaning is what makes the Mob irresistible. The Jewish-Italian connection is so central to the Mafia legend that one senses it must be operating on a kind of meta-level, where a larger conversation about Jews and Italians in American culture can get dramatized. We can readily convince ourselves that what might or might not be true about the Mob in New York—that the Italians have the passion and the Jews the production savvy—is true about movies in Hollywood, and we use the New York myth to heighten our understanding of the wider world.
It is certainly true of the masterpieces of the modern gangster movie—“The Godfather” and “Once Upon a Time in America” and “Goodfellas”—that the directors are all Italian while the producers are all Jewish, as if the New York Mob had replicated its ethnic synthesis in Hollywood. We use gangster mythology not just to tell stories about the mafiosi but to tell stories about ourselves. We want the Jewish-Italian axis to be true of the streets because it gives a dramatic form to the corresponding, if much less epic, reality of our entertainments.
Indeed, one of the best ways to understand the “Godfather” movies is as an extended allegory of the rise and corruption of the Actors Studio, in New York, with Brando, the fading but formidable don, teaching the Method to Pacino and De Niro. Here, the general moral narrative is that of the sellout of East Coast to West Coast—symbolically, of theatre to the movies. So the elderly Brando weeps, really, at the surrender of his theatrical career, while Pacino had only a partial one, and De Niro never really had one at all. The tale of corruption and idealism, with the Western half of the country (Las Vegas, Hollywood) luring authentic New Yorkers for what turns out to be meaningless dollars, is a perpetual one. This process arrived at an inevitable twist in the television series “Happy Days,” where Fonzie, the Italian tough, is played by a Jewish actor, and the creator, Garry Marshall, is an Italian.
Beneath mythology and allegory is the shabby and sordid truth: the price truly paid by America for the Mob was the price paid by organized labor. As all the books demonstrate, in the nineteen-twenties, the unions in New York made a kind of deal with the Devil, with the result of all deals with the Devil: the Devil takes the last trick. The unions, turning to gangsters to protect themselves from strikebreakers, quickly discovered that the gangsters were just as willing to play the other side of the street for a better offer. In short order, the gangsters controlled both sides. The few brave union souls who continued to resist the Mob get a surprisingly cursory look in the mythologies. Several movies have been made about Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, with the mobbed-up Hoffa still presented as a kind of working-class hero; in fact, the American labor movement did have working-class heroes, and Hoffa was not among them. Hoffa has been played by Pacino and Jack Nicholson. Walter Reuther, of the U.A.W., a genuine hero, has never been played by a star. A better moral than usual might be found in a movie about the struggle, largely successful, to keep the Mob out of a key New York City union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’. We hear too little about, say, Min Matheson, the heroic woman union organizer who, in northern Pennsylvania, faced down thugs organized by the Mob boss Russell Bufalino—the mostly sympathetic character played by Joe Pesci in “The Irishman”—and maintained the integrity of the I.L.G.W.U. in the region.
What ended the power of the Mob in New York? The standard answer, replicated in Sussman’s book, is the prosecution of the Mob bosses by Rudolph Giuliani and other Feds in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. The F.B.I. got a bug into an apartment above the Gotti headquarters, at the Ravenite Social Club, and produced an incriminating series of tapes of the crew at work. Add to this the creation of the RICO statutes that, with perhaps dubious constitutionality, made it possible to send a crime boss to prison for life for a pattern of racketeering, instead of having to nickel-and-dime the smaller charges.
A persuasive alternative account makes less of RICO and more of porno. The former Mafia prosecutor John Kroger, in his 2008 book, “Convictions,” details his team’s victories against the Mob but admits, with some chagrin, that the Mob was really defeated not by charges but by changes. Crime battens on prohibition. The lotteries stripped the numbers racket of its appeal; Internet porn took a toll on the prostitution and smut business; easily obtained credit cards robbed the loan sharks of their monopoly. A more permissive society—with gambling, sex, and debt regularized—was a less Mafia-friendly one. Being a criminal is always a bad career choice; the risks are too high and the hours too long. It has now become a ridiculous one. You’re better off actually being in waste management than using it as a cover.
According to a new foreword to Selwyn Raab’s big book, however, the story of the Mob’s vanishing in New York may itself be another, newer myth. There are signs that the Mob is holding on to life. A new generation of mobsters stay well below the radar and pursue their little scams away from the headlines, with minimal attention. The final irony there is that Donald Trump, who idolized the Mob bosses of the eighties, modelled his own behavior on theirs without actually being sharp enough to play in their league. National politics proved easier to con than the concrete Mob in New York. He learned the tabloid truths without having the tough-guy stones.
If the old Italian Mob of New York fame is passing, one of its oddest legacies is the word itself. Though the term is Sicilian in origin, everyone has a “mafia” now, including Russians, Colombians, Chechens, and Corsicans, not to mention those book reviewers. When moviemakers want to indicate pure evil now, they employ the Albanian mafia, as in the Liam Neeson movies—Albanians presumably being judged less likely to be offended than other nationalities, or at least less well organized in their offense. Had the Mafia never left rural Italy for fame in New York, the world would have been deprived of the winning name for a universal concept. It’s a peculiar American triumph. ♦
