Thursday,
April 05, 2007
Unglamorous Mobsters Also Almost Extinct
The ANNOTICO Report.
Although
the characters in the Sopranos are carefully Coifed, and wear expensive Suits,
their Dining habits were a sort of "Shove it in”, and not acceptable
in Polite Society. According to this author, The Mobsters, Not only didn't have
Manners, neither did they have the Coifs or Sartorial Splendor.
The
author also infers that The Motion Picture Industry, now dominated by Jews, is
retaliating vs Italian Americans because the Italians
literally 'Wiped out" the Jewish Mobster
who previously ruled. Or that by focusing on Italian
American Mobsters, they keep the Focus off the current Jewish Russian Mafia,
the Israeli "Kosher Nostra", and Jewish "White Collar
Crime".
Unglamorous
Mobster
As a 1988 HBO
documentary reveals, the real Sopranos were brutaland banal.
City Journal
Steven Malanga
4 April 2007
The Sopranos,
the HBO series entering its final season on Sunday night, won fame by
depicting a Mafia crew whose members had begun assimilating into middle-class
suburban lifemoving into McMansions, raising kids who
attend Ivy League schools, discovering the psychiatrists couch (or
armchair).
Interestingly, it
was HBO, nearly 20 years ago, which first gave us a look at what the real mob
was like when it started to go suburbanand the picture is nothing like The
Sopranos. The now-forgotten Confessions of an Undercover Cop, a
fascinating 1988 documentary, traced the decline and fall of the very Jersey
crew that inspired The Sopranosthe crime family of Ruggerio
Richie the Boot Boiardo, whose gang was less introspective, even more
violent, and a lot less glamorous than Tonys fictional mob.
Sopranos
creator
David Chase had learned about this
Boiardo, known
simply as the Boot around
There was little
mystery about the Boots rise. Like the fictional Vito Corleone,
he was brutal and had a knack for surviving. He earned his nickname from his
habit of stomping his enemies to death, and he consolidated his power in
In one FBI
surveillance tape, for instance, Tony Boy declares, How about the time we
hit the little Jew. An associate adds, As little as they are, they
struggle. Then Tony Boy finishes describing the scene: The Boot hit
him with a hammer. The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this
big. . . . Eight shots in the head. What do you think
he finally did to me? He spit at me. In another tape, the mobsters recall
with equal delight locking a victim in a car trunk and setting it afire.
He must have burned like a bastard, one mobster says.
As in The
Sopranos, the Boot joined the flight of Italian Americans out of
By the time Confessions
takes up this gangs story in the mid-1980s, Boiardo had recently died, as,
unexpectedly of a heart attack, had his son and heir apparent, Tony Boy,
leaving what remained of the crew to their lieutenants. Most of these hoodlums
had also by now decamped to
The investigation
at the center of Confessions begins by chance, when a retired
Russell then
contacts a friend in the state police, who asks him to begin surveillance on
the crew. Incredibly, the mobsters invite Russell to move his oil delivery
business into a storefront adjoining their
The footage
illustrates the gap between
But the real-life
evil is more banal. The Boot made his headquarters inside a candy shop on
Most of the
action that Russell investigates takes place in even less glamorous social
clubs around
Confessions makes it clear that few real
mobsters could ever score a bit part on The Sopranos or any other
gangster showthey simply look too ordinary. The Confessions crew runs
around
The investigation
recounted in Confessions resulted in 48
indictments and more than 30 convictions or guilty pleas for gambling, loan
sharking, and racketeering, which effectively broke the back of the Genovese
family in
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