Saturday,
April 22,
"The God father"- Myth,
Mystery and Mania
The
ANNOTICO Report
Sex, Violence
(and Horror Movies) Sell, so the fascination of the dumbed
down public, with street criminals will continue.
Meanwhile the
Robber Barons and Wall Street, whose "take" is exponentially greater,
and throttles the "everyman's" lives on a daily basis, and
perpetuates unabated misery on the underclass, continues virtually
unnoticed.
The Godfather, was written by Mario Puzo,
an Italian-American who grew up in Hell's Kitchen but who had never met a
bona-fide mafiosi, and learned his mob folklore mainly in
Joe
Colombo Sr, whose appetite for publicity, thought of "The Godfather"
as both a way to enhance the reputation of the Mafia, and another avenue of
exacting "tribute" , and who was
"silenced" because he violated ANY criminal's FIRST Rule: Work
in the Shadows, Stay out of the Spotlight!!!!
Up until
then, The mob's financial genius Meyer Lansky (Hyman
Roth in Godfather II) had, presciently, blackmailed
A lazy
headline writer mischaracterizes
MOB
MENTALITY
Death threats, shootings,
strikes and bomb-scares ...
John Patterson explains
how - and why - the mafia tried to shut down the filming of The Godfather
John
Patterson
On
As Joe Spinell,
playing one of Michael's button-men, pumped six slugs into a fictional New York
mob boss trapped in a midtown hotel's revolving door, a for-real,
blood-on-his-hands New York mob boss called Joe Colombo Sr, was being gunned
down at an Italian-American rally in Columbus Circle, not four blocks away from
Coppola's location.
The hit was the opening
salvo in a vicious gang war declared by a newly released mafia upstart and
criminal visionary named Joey Gallo. But it was the end of the strange connection
between
As detailed in C4's
documentary The Godfather And The Mob (which borrows heavily from Harlan Lebo's
The Godfather Legacy), Colombo had insinuated himself between the producer of
The Godfather, Al Ruddy, and his own home turf of Little Italy, promising that
the mob would take tribute from the movie, or not a frame of celluloid would be
shot. Knowing that the movie would lose all its authenticity if shot on studio backlots, Ruddy had no option but to acquiesce, and once
the media got hold of the story - a sit-down, handshake deal with the devil -
they flayed him with it for months.
All this was, of course,
great grist for the movie's publicity mill, and some commentators like Carlos Clarens, in his landmark 1980 study Crime Movies, recalled
certain time-tested publicity-agent gambits: "the filmed-under-threat
routine had worked wonders back in the days of Doorway To Hell (1930: Jimmy Cagney's second movie)." If nothing else, Lebo's book
and The Godfather And The Mob prove beyond a doubt
that none of this strange tale was concocted by press agents.
The details are toothsome
and delectable. The Godfather was written by Puzo, an
Italian-American who grew up in Hell's Kitchen but who had never met a
bona-fide mafiosi. Puzo learned his mob folklore mainly from croupiers in the
golden age, 1960s Las Vegas of Moe Dalitz and the Rat
Pack. That didn't prevent him from achieving such an impressive degree of
authenticity that by the time the movie was a runaway hit, many real-life mafiosi had begun comporting themselves according to the
rituals solemnised by Puzo
and Coppola - the cheek-to-cheek kisses, the quasi-papal pledging of fealty to
the Godfather's ring.
The total-immersion
experience of the movie - achieved by the goldfish-bowl effect of keeping the
audience emotionally intimate only with mobsters, by the subterranean browns
and golds of its colour
scheme, and by its period, ethnic and socioanthropological
authenticity - traps us in 1945, and even now it is hard to imagine that a
block away from the border of the set, it was 1971 and the real New York mob
was undergoing the same upheavals as everyone else in those Martian times.
Although The Godfather And The Mob hints at much of
this, it has no real grasp of the richness and complexity of this period in
mafia history.
In Goodfellas'
famous circularshot of teenage Henry Hill's
"introduction to the world" in 1955, Hill's narration says, "It
was a glorious time, before Appalachin and before
Crazy Joe started a war with his boss ..." Appalachin
referred to a famous FBI raid of the upstate New York estate of a leading crime
boss in 1957. A mob summit was taking place and agents chased dozens of top mafiosi through the snow as they
dumped guns, jewels and thousands of dollars in cash (the incident is alluded
to in the final episode of season five of The Sopranos, as Tony escapes the
Feds, but
Joey Gallo, meanwhile, saw
drugs as the coming bonanza for organised crime and
in the teeth of stiff opposition from the abstemious old "Moustache Petes" of the Corleone/Lucky
Luciano generation, he had no compunction about
forging distribution partnerships with black criminals in
The war that ensued in the
late 1950s (obliquely alluded to in Godfather II - "Not here,
Carmine!"), tore the mob apart, grabbed headlines, and encouraged new
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to prosecute the mob unmercifully after 1960 - focusing
on such figures as Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and the mafia bosses of
Chicago, Tampa and New Orleans (who may later have helped assassinate his
brother John). So it was an exhausted, much harried
It was also a community
that had little taste for publicity. At the movies, the words "mafia"
and "cosa nostra" were rarely ever heard
before The Brotherhood in 1968 (which sank faster than Johnny Rosselli in his concrete-filled oil-drum). Even J Edgar
Hoover downplayed the importance of the mafia throughout the 1930s, 1940s and
1950s - while exaggerating the moribund red menace - probably because the mob's
financial genius Meyer Lansky (Hyman Roth in Godfather II) had, presciently,
blackmailed
Still, in an era highly
conscious of matters racial and ethnic, Italians like Joe Colombo found a way
to express their sense of ethnic grievance, too. Although the Italian community
was well served by social groups like the Knights Of
Columbus and the Order Of The Sons Of Italy,
The league demanded
consultation rights and got them from Ruddy in exchange for access to
locations. Frank Sinatra - probably not pleased at Puzo's
oblique references to the manner in which he secured his comeback role in From
Here To Eternity - headlined a league fundraiser at Madison Square Garden, and
local politicians attended the league's first rally in 1970, decrying
anti-Italian prejudice (one hears the echo of Joe Pesci's
plaintive wail in Goodfellas: "She's prejudiced
against Italians. Imagine that - a Jew broad!").
They had a point - up to a
point: Gangsters in the movies before 1970 were redolent of grotesque and
venerable stereotypes about unwashed Italian immigrants pouring off
Or consider a contemporary
figure like Anthony Imperiale, "the White Knight
of Newark", namechecked by Tony Soprano in
series four. Imperiale rose in the aftermath of the
1967
Imperiale disavowed any racist intent, indeed he merrily hijacked the language of the real
civil rights movement, despite talking of "Martin Luther Coon" and
invoking a feral, spectral "them" whenever he mentioned blacks. You
can breathe this toxic atmosphere of neighbourhood
insularity and racism throughout Robert De Niro's A
Bronx Tale, also set in those years.
A hunger for headlines and
flashbulbs seemed to be part of Joe Colombo's motivation in entangling himself
with the league and the Godfather shoot. It was to be his undoing. His
secretive, camera-phobic criminal cohorts got fed up with him. Working in
partnership with capo di tutti i
capi Carlo Gambino, Joey
Gallo, free again and no less crazy, had a black criminal associate, one Jerome
Johnson, gun Colombo down at the Italian-American League's second annual rally
at Columbus Circle.
A black triggerman in a
mob hit was then unheard of, and totally alien to the mafia's modus operandi,
but no one was fooled. Johnson was gunned down in seconds by an assailant who
immediately vanished, but everyone suspected Gallo because of his
By the time Gallo himself
was killed a year later - gunned down in a Mulberry Street clam house while
celebrating his 43rd birthday - he had acquired his own taste for publicity: he
was feted by writers (he'd read Camus and Sartre in
the can), and was pimping his own memoir, A-Block. After Joe Colombo's fatal
experience with The Godfather, you'd think Gallo might have learned his lesson.
As it turned out, he died the same way as Virgil "The Turk" Sollozo at the hands of newly-minted murderer Michael Corleone, in an explosion of blood and clam sauce - just
like in the movies.
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