Paul Basile, the Editor of "Fra Noi" (a Chicago based, Italian American 
National Monthly), has been immersed in the antidefamation movement for 
nearly two decades now, first as a reporter for a multi-ethnic news service 
in the early ’80s, then as the managing editor of Fra Noi in the mid-’80s, 
and finally as the editor of Fra Noi since 1990.

Over the course of the last several years, Mr. Basile has written several pieces 
about how we might do a better job of defending our good name. I have asked 
his permission to reprint that collection, which I will transmit in a daily series.

I do so with just a few prefacing remarks. These articles do a wonderful job 
of covering the spectrum. One may quibble with some details, but therein lies 
the basis/template/draft for a Battle Plan for a Conference of Anti Italian 
Defamationists (AID) to address and "tweak".  

I would be interested in hearing (and reprinting) any significant constructive 
remarks regarding the CONCEPT,....... NOT the details. Yes, looking to the 
Future we MUST incorporate utilization of the INTERNET!!!!  

This is a  6 Part Series. 
--------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Our Act Together- (Part 1 of 6)
ANTI-BIAS POSITION PAPER  
by Paul Basile

Last year, USA Today published an article proclaiming that the Italian mob 
was dead in America: that after decades of relentless pursuit by law 
enforcement officials, the back of “The Syndicate” has been broken, and that 
there are just over 1,000 Italian mobsters left nationwide. That’s one five 
thousandth of one percent of a total of 20 million overwhelmingly law-abiding 
Italian Americans.

And yet, when Americans were asked in a national survey if they thought that 
Italian Americans were “into a lot of organized crime in this country,” 75 
percent of them strongly agreed. No other ethnic group stirred more than a 20 
percent response rate, despite the fact that, statistically speaking, 
organized crime is now dominated by other ethnic groups.

Why is that? Mainly because the entertainment industry has relentlessly 
portrayed Italian Americans as gangsters for the last 30 years. 

Everywhere you look — in the movies, on television, in books, even in 
children’s programming —Italian Americans are portrayed almost exclusively 
as mobsters or non-mobsters fighting the mob.

At the theaters, you can find them in movies like “Jane Austen’s Mafia,” 
“Suicide Kings,” “The Big Hit,” “Analyze This,” “Mickey Blue Eyes,” 
“Brooklyn State of Mind,” “Prince of Mulberry Street,” “Gangs of New 
York,” “Peppermint Lounge” and “A Better Way to Die.”

On television, you can find them in fictional shows like “The Sopranos,” 
“Bella Mafia” and “The Last Don”; and docudramas about John Gotti, Sammy 
“The Bull” Gravano and Bill Bonanno. A&E devoted an entire week to Italian 
crime families in 1997. A year later, they ran a week-long series on family 
business empires that featured the Rockefellers, DuPonts, Kelloggs, Coors and 
… the Gambino/Gotti crime family?!

Of late, movie mafiosi have been popping up in the most gratuitous of 
cinematic places. In the paranoid thriller “Enemy of the State,” attorney 
Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) survives a government conspiracy by tricking 
his tormentors into a climactic shoot-out with Italian mobsters. And in the 
romantic comedy “One Fine Day,” reporter Jack Taylor (George Clooney) 
investigates a Mafia money-laundering scheme while romancing Michelle 
Pfeiffer.

Italian mobsters have even invaded children’s shows, albeit in a more cuddly 
form. The “Animaniacs” cartoon series features a group of mafioso pigeons 
known as the Goodfeathers, “Muppets Tonight” boasts a muppet Mafia don and 
his gorilla bodyguard, and in “Babe: Pig in the City,” the gangster bulldog 
speaks like Don Corleone.

And when we’re not being pigeon-holed as mobsters, we are being portrayed as 
ignorant savages in movies like Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” or charming but 
ethically challenged tricksters like Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny.” Women 
fare little better, being typecast either as oversexed bimbos or tyrannical 
shrews.

This saga of pervasive stereotyping is filled with galling ironies.

In the dark comedy “To Die For,” an ambitious female TV reporter seduces 
three teens and convinces them to murder her low-brow Italian-American 
husband, whose family calls upon their contacts in the mob to return the 
favor. The only Italian Americans to be found in the real-life story upon 
which the movie is loosely based are the district attorneys who bring the 
woman to justice.

In the romantic drama “A Walk in the Clouds,” Keanu Reeves plays a young 
G.I. who falls in love with the daughter of a California wine grower of 
Mexican descent, even though the industry has long been dominated by Italian 
Americans. I suppose we should take solace in the fact that the part of the 
patriarch went to an Italian, Giancarlo Giannini.

The opposite is true in “Lorenzo’s Oil,” the story of an Italian couple in 
America who find a miracle cure for their son’s fatal illness. The parts of 
the family members were played by Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon and Zack 
O’Malley Greenburg, who only have a single real-life Italian-American parent 
among them. (It’s a little known fact that Susan Sarandon’s mom is of 
Italian descent.)

In the television series “NYPD Blue,” Italian mobsters make frequent cameo 
appearances, but there isn’t a single Italian-American officer on the 
fictional police force that is otherwise commendable for its ethnic 
diversity. The lone Hispanic officer is played by Italian-American actor John 
Turturro.

In those rare instances when we are cast as good guys, it’s almost always in 
a setting dominated by organized crime. Robert DeNiro plays an 
Italian-American dad battling to free his son from the influence of a 
neighborhood thug in “A Bronx Tale,” Lorraine Bracco is the down-to-earth 
Italian-American therapist who counsels the main character in “The 
Sopranos,” and Johnny Depp plays an Italian-American officer who infiltrates 
the Italian mob in “Donny Brasco.”

In general, when Italian-American actors are permitted to play heroes, they 
are almost never allowed to play Italian-American heroes. As a small sampler, 
Robert DeNiro plays family man Frank Raftis, who resists the temptation to 
have an affair in “Falling in Love”; Al Pacino plays crusading attorney 
Arthur Kirkland in “Justice for All”; Stanley Tucci plays legendary reporter 
Walter Winchell in “Winchell”; John Travolta plays doomed genius George 
Malloy in “Phenomenon”; Joe Mantegna plays the doting father of chess 
prodigy Josh Waitzkin in “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and Renee Russo plays 
save-the-day scientist Robby Keough in “Outbreak.”

As a rule, when Hollywood conjures up a character to take the beach, halt the 
lava flow, stop the speeding bus, save the rain forest or blowup the asteroid 
before it hits, it turns to every other ethnic group other than Italian 
America for inspiration.

You have to go as far back as Al Pacino’s Officer Frank Serpico in the movie 
“Serpico” and Daniel J. Travanti’s Captain Frank Furillo in the TV series 
“Hill Street Blues” to find an Italian-American actor who plays an 
unequivocally heroic Italian-American character who isn’t battling the 
Italian mob tooth-and-nail.

Sure there are exceptions to the stereotype today. On TV, it’s “Everybody 
Loves Raymond,” a sitcom created by comedian Ray Romano that tells the story 
of a charmingly wacky Italian-American family. In the movie theaters, it’s 
“The Big Night,” a comedy-drama created by Stanley Tucci in which two 
Italian brothers struggle to keep their restaurant afloat in an America that 
hasn’t yet discovered the joys of risotto and timbale. In both cases, Italian 
mobsters are conspicuous by their absence. But these are exceptions that 
prove the rule. 

Why do we find this state of affairs so offensive?

For the answer to that question, first look in the history books. We hail 
from a country that almost single-handedly created Western Civilization. We 
gave the modern world many of the basic principles of justice, government, 
higher education, music, accounting, astronomy, medicine, mathematics and 
architecture, and we helped blaze most of the trails to the New World.

Now look at Italy today. It is the fifth strongest economy on the planet, 
boasting mastery in the diverse worlds of fashion, cuisine and industrial 
design, and it contains most of the world’s artistic treasures within its 
relatively narrow borders. 

Now look around you. Italian Americans have achieved the pinnacle of success 
in almost every field. We are supreme court justices, presidential chiefs of 
staff, legislators and big city mayors. We are captains of industry, heads of 
universities, legends of the sports world and trendsetters in the arts. We 
discover cures for diseases, save families from burning buildings, bring 
criminals to justice, rescue innocent people from death row, perform pro bono 
surgery on destitute children in Third World countries, fight for veterans 
rights and battle injustice in totalitarian regimes. We are honest, 
law-abiding citizens whose work ethic, family ties, passion for life and 
creative spirit are the envy of the nation. We are among the most affluent 
ethnic groups in the country, and only five thousandths of one percent of us 
are involved in organized crime.

Now look at your TV and movie-theater screens and what do you see? Mafia, 
Mafia everywhere, and hardly an Italian-American hero to be found.

At heart, the offense committed by mob movies and TV shows is that they take 
the best our community has to offer — the passion, the loyalty, the love of 
family, the glorious cuisine — and they graft it onto the worst our community 
has produced. In effect, they debase everything our community holds dear 
while glamorizing bad people who have all but disappeared from American 
society.

Apologists for “The Sopranos” and other shows of its ilk will argue that 
these shows are a fantasy, that nobody believes they are real. If that’s so, 
then why do 75 percent of Americans intimately link Italian Americans with 
organized crime at a time when U.S. government figures show that there are 
only 1,000 Italian-American mobsters left on the streets out of a total 
population of 20 million Italian Americans?

Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that a lot of Italian Americans 
enjoy the show, but then again, a lot of us don’t, including every major 
Italian-American organization in the country, representing hundreds of 
thousands of Italian-American families. Stereotypic portrayals of ethnic 
groups have always been enjoyed by segments within the group being 
stereotyped, but that doesn’t negate the views of those within the group who 
are offended.

Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that the show is written, produced, 
directed and acted in by Italian Americans, but the same can be said of the 
“blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, which were written, produced, directed 
and acted in by African Americans until the African-American community rose 
up and said, “enough is enough.” (I’m fairly certain that the main audience 
for these films were African Americans. And yet, nobody looks back on that 
sorry era in our cinematic history and uses the audience’s makeup and 
reaction to justify the stereotype.)

Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that the show is well done, but in 
my estimation, that makes it all the more reprehensible. A destructive 
message presented in a well-crafted package makes that message all the more 
seductive and potent. The films of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl are 
considered by many critics to be cinematic masterpieces, but she will never 
be allowed to enter the pantheon of film gods because she used her talents to 
foist Adolph Hitler on the German people.

Apologists for “The Sopranos” will hide behind the Constitution, claiming 
that it is protected by the First Amendment, but that debases one of our most 
precious rights. The Nazis are allowed to march in Skokie and the Klan to 
rally in Georgia thanks to the First Amendment. But the First Amendment 
doesn’t make what they have to say good or decent or true, it only protects 
their right to say it. Personally, I’d rather hold myself to a higher 
standard.

Why do so many Italian Americans love “The Sopranos”? For the same reason 
that non-Italian Americans love it. Americans have long adored their outlaws, 
from the days of Jesse James to the present. And when you combine that 
enduring national obsession with a walloping dose of Italian passion, the 
result is almost narcotic. 

Quite honestly, if “The Sopranos” were the only show in town to traffic in 
such dangerous substance, I’d be more sanguine. But the fact is that just 
about every time you see Italian-American characters on the big or small 
screen, they’re either fighting the mob, fleeing the mob, or being the mob.

And don’t think for a moment that this is a harmless association. Sam 
Donaldson once said that he would automatically investigate any Italian 
American running for higher office for ties to organized crime, without 
making a similar assertion about any other ethnic group. And if you were to 
be honest, you’d have to admit that you, too, make the same assumption 
whenever an Italian American rises to a position of power and influence. 

Forget about the relentless Mafia jokes that Italian Americans in all walks 
of life have to endure as a result of this relentless pattern of portrayal. 
Prejudice of this magnitude invariably blossoms into discrimination, with 
jobs, contracts and advancement hanging in the balance.

Apologists for “The Sopranos” argue the show’s detractors should relax. To 
them, I say, “Do the math.” A mere one in 20,000 Italian Americans is 
currently involved in organized crime. When Hollywood gives me 19,999 
decent-to-heroic Italian Americans for every Mafioso it serves up, that’s 
when I’ll relax.