Anyone who’s familiar with the Order Sons of Italy in America, the Washington 
D.C.-based charitable, fraternal and educational organization, knows John 
Dabbene. An activist for the past 22 years, Dabbene rose through the ranks of 
his local New York lodge before “going national” in 1999, becoming the 
president of OSIA’s Commission for Social Justice, which fights media bias 
while promoting goodwill through their “Positive Image” campaign. 

There were fine spokesmen before — Vinny Romano, for one example — but 
Dabbene’s tenure coincided with a very auspicious event: the premiere of 
HBO’s mob series, “The Sopranos.” As Dabbene jokes: “Talk about a baptism 
by fire!”

Actually, Dabbene was ready for it. His extensive knowledge of Italian 
heritage, along with the bridges of friendship he’d built with people, proved 
a solid foundation. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years,” he 
says, “it’s that you can’t fight discrimination or media bias alone. You 
need a group; you need to show a united front. Otherwise, people just write 
you off.”

Dabbene and a group of fellow activists — among them, Dr. Joseph Scelsa of 
the Calandra Institute, Dona De Sanctis of the National Italian American 
Foundation (NIAF) and Manny Alfano of the Italian One Voice Committee and 
UNICO National — met with HBO executives in mid-1999, just after “The 
Sopranos” took off. Although the executives stood their ground, they did 
sympathize with the group’s concerns and promised to show more balance in 
future shows.

“A month or so after our meeting,” relates Dabbene, “they had that episode 
where Dr. Melfi and her family sit around discussing Italian stereotypes. I 
can’t claim that we specifically inspired that episode, but I do think the 
writers became more aware of the issue.”

Dabbene also praised the April 2001 lawsuit filed against HBO by the 
Chicago-based American Italian Defense Association (AIDA), which seeks to 
have “The Sopranos” declared in violation of a unique passage in the 
Illinois Constitution barring the violation against the human dignity of 
groups of Americans.

“AIDA’s lawsuit was a tremendous force for good,” says Dabbene. “That 
really woke people up. It shows that Italian Americans are getting serious 
about taking on the media.”

Dabbene confesses that, prior to taking an active interest in his heritage, 
he looked at mob movies the same way many Italian Americans continue to do in 
the 21st century.

“I shrugged them off,” he says. “I used the same old excuses: ‘It’s not us, 
it’s just entertainment.’ … ‘No one believes i.t’ … ‘Just ignore them, mob 
movies are going to die out.’ … I’d let these movies and TV shows slide off 
my back.”

But then, the Brooklyn-born Dabbene says, he had a revelation.

“I suddenly took (negative media) seriously. I thought of my father, who came 
here from Palermo. He worked on the docks; he was an honest, hard-working 
man; he never hurt a fly. It just dawned on me that people like him were 
never portrayed in films or television shows. It was always the same old 
violent stereotypes. And it occurred to me that these negative images were 
seriously damaging the reputation of all honest, hard-working Italian 
Americans, people like my father. They deserved better treatment than that in 
the media.”

Dabbene is very proud of the numerous educational initiatives of OSIA over 
the years: the “Positive Image” campaign, which gives posters and other 
materials to colleges and high schools; the “Italians and the Holocaust,” 
which supports survivors like the German-born Walter Wolff as he lectures 
across America, relating the heroism of the Italian people in saving native 
and foreign-born Jews; and, currently, a half-hour documentary on the 
numerous Italian-American soldiers who’ve won the Congressional Medal of 
Honor in past wars.

“If you take ‘The Sopranos’ out of the big picture, which is still a huge 
part of the big picture, you can feel somewhat hopeful,” he says. “The mob 
stuff does seem to be losing its luster. Still, there aren’t enough positive 
shows out there to fill in the gaps. And all it takes is another 
‘Sopranos’-type show to get the merry-go-round started again. The battles 
keep going on, but at least we’re winning a lot of them. You have to be 
vigilant, and you have to view your heritage as important and worth fighting 
for. You have to make it personal.”

For more information on the Order Sons of Italy and its programs, visit their 
Web site at www.osia.org or call their D.C. office at 202-547-2900.
 
 (Copyright 2002, Fra Noi News Service, a division of Fra Noi Inc.)