Bad fellas

It's taken me a while to get to it, but right now I'm enjoying the hell out of Jimmy Breslin's brisk, droll The Good Rat, which is, among other things, a kind of summation of a lifetime of crime reporting. I was particularly tickled by this passage on the sloth of the typical gangster:

These people are not attracted to work even in illegitimate places. Sal Reale had his airline workers' union office just outside Kennedy, and it was all right, except he had to hire people highly recommended by the Gambino family. Sal had a list of employees' credentials. Typical was:

"Harry D's son-in-law—$200G"

"Harry D's wife—$150 G"

Each morning the list ruled the office, particularly when work orders started to fill the in baskets.

"The morning starts with sixty-two people in the office," Sal recalls. "By ten o'clock there were twelve people working. We had a lot of paperwork. You had to fill out insurance forms, various federal formseverything you think of that they could put down on paper. We were left with twelve people to do the work. Where did the others go? Here's a woman who gets up, picks up her purse, an walks past me without even nodding. I call after her, 'Couldn't you give us a hand?' She says, 'I was told I didn't have to do any of this work. I have to get my hair done. I'm Paul Vario's cousin.'"

As the Mafia "dissolves," Breslin continues, "you inspect if for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are either unintelligible or ignored."

It lasted longest in film and print, through the false drama of victims' being shot gloriously with machine guns but without the usual exit wounds the size of a soup plate. The great interest in the Mafia was the result of its members being so outrageously disdainful of all rules that just the sight of a mobster caused gleeful whispers. Somebody writing for a living could find it extremely difficult to ignore them

The Mafia became part of public belief because of movie stars who were Jewish. This dark fame began with Paul Muni playing Al Capone. After that came Edward G. Robinson, Tony Curtis, Lee Strasberg, Alan King, and on and on, part of an entire industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, sound men, location men, casting agents—all on the job and the payroll because of the Mafia. Finally two great actors, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, put a vowel in there.

One could cinephile-nitpick, but the core conceit is sound. What's interesting to my mind is that The Godfather doesn't turn into anything less than a great film even with the knowledge that its core assumptions as they pertain to the reality that inspired it are, as it happens, utter horseshit. And I think Breslin understands that too. And even the mob movie that comes closest to showing "grammar school dropouts who kill each other," Scorsese's Goodfellas, can't quite scrub its characters clean of the movie-star veneer of a certain glamour that they carry. Part of the glamour, of course, is embedded in the wickedness of their actions: the outrageous disdain for the rules that so appeals, in a sense, to some part of all our ids. It's refreshing that Breslin has the good sense to call the popular culture depiction of mobsters out, but not get into much of a lather over it.

Comments

[Stephen Whitty]

Oh no, obviously I read your original post at that other site, Michael. In full. That's why I referred to it, as it seemed to illustrate where you were coming from in this discussion, and why the waters here were getting both stubbornly doctrinaire and increasingly muddied.

Because my understanding of your SFBG post was that, whether or not Gus Hall was the long-time face of the Communist Party in the United States, YOU don't recognize him as someone who understood "what Communism is." So, therefore, he's not a real (the surprising upper-case choice is yours) Communist.

Which, to amplify your writing, seems to be saying that "people can call themselves what ever they want" but that other people -- i.e., YOU -- are to decide what they ACTUALLY are.

This is certainly convenient.

But -- I'm sorry -- someone who decides that he or she will unilaterally decide what words mean, no matter what other people say they mean, is someone out of Lewis Carroll, and not a suitable debating partner, in this or any other forum outside of Wonderland.

So, as Bill said, go with God. Or Trotsky. Or with the Marx of your choosing (I suggest Gummo). I'm moving on.

But seriously, thanks again for liberating this thread from LexG -- even if it meant bringing it into the sort of redder-than-thou, left-fringe fulminations I haven't seen since the days of Bob Avakian.

[Michael Worrall]

Stephen,

Nowhere in Marx is there an argument that advancing socialism requires or depends upon enlarging the privileges of a parasitic, bureaucratic caste.

Bill,

There is no evidence whatsoever that crime is inherent to human nature; however, there is every evidence that the roots of social evils lie in the division of societies into classes where a ruling class exploits the labor of an oppressed producing class.