I selected these comments from the following article:

"Italians have long held top billing in the American iconography of organized crime"
"Gangster mythology--like most mythology is only loosely related to reality." 
"The rise of the Sicilian mafia mythology not only(due) to the influence of 
"The Godfather," but also to "scholarship in the late 1960s that suggested 
Italian dominance in crime," which he believes was flawed, stemming from 
earlier congressional hearings that focused too narrowly on Italians, and 
subsequent FBI wiretap reports that did much the same. 

He even argues that Al Capone was overrated. "Capone was never a member of a 
mafia-like group, and he didn't even dominate crime in Chicago," Haller says. 
"But he did hold press conferences." 
  
"It's not a big secret that the Irish have been involved in this stuff," Self says, 
"By the 1890s, the Irish dominated gambling in the U.S., Bootlegging followed 
and blossomed during Prohibition" .  
"Irish have been underrepresented in the cinematic gangster parade." 
"It hasn't been explored because they didn't produce as many self-promoting 
charismatic figures." 
"The Irish weren't considered as colorful as the Italian mobsters of that 
era". 

Pat Burke, a leader of the Irish American community acknowledge the former 
crime boss, but are not eager to resurrect it, says, "That's why our society 
is not championing the movie." 
===================================================
Movies
THE SINS OF THE IRISH FATHERS

Just as "Perdition's" gangsters can't ignore Catholicism, 
real-life towns can't escape the mobsters' shadow.

Los Angeles Times 
Calendar Section
By Sean Mitchell
Sunday, July 7, 2002
 
The first big scene in the "The Godfather" takes place at a wedding. In "Road 
to Perdition," it's a wake. 

Therein lies a signal of how director Sam Mendes' new film, starring Tom 
Hanks as an Irish American hit man in Depression-era Illinois, will offer a 
variation on Hollywood's long fascination with gangsters. The gangsters in 
"Road to Perdition" are primarily Irish, not Italian, and their moral 
failings are dramatized in a fatalistic universe dominated by the Irish 
Catholic Church. 

"I think the Catholicism in the film is crucial," says Mendes, the 
Oscar-winning director of "American Beauty," "because it gives these people a 
structure that tells them it's still possible to be saved." 

Paul Newman is cast uncharacteristically as a vicious Irish godfather, 
Rooney, who rules a criminal empire in rural Illinois in 1931. The story 
focuses on his most trusted henchman and surrogate son, Michael Sullivan (the 
Hanks character), depicted as a once-poor immigrant who took up with Rooney 
when it was the only work he could get. But Sullivan is not proud of his 
violent job and tries to keep it a secret from his two young sons. 

>From "Public Enemy" to "GoodFellas" movies have developed their own gangster 
mythology--and like most mythology it's one that is only loosely related to 
reality. "Road to Perdition" relies upon this mythology but gives it a 
different twist, one that's rooted in a religion in which even the priests 
are part of the gang. 

Like the Mario Puzo-Francis Ford Coppola scenario for "The Godfather," "Road 
to Perdition," which opens Friday, is an immigrant's story, but one with a 
bleaker mood and perhaps more preoccupation with the wages of sin. In a scene 
between Rooney and Sullivan, set in a church, the older man tells the younger 
one, "No one in this room is going to heaven," an acknowledgment that both 
are damned for the choices they have made. 

But bad as they are, Mendes takes pains to show these two main characters 
attending Mass and observing church rituals because "their faith saves them 
from sinking into the moral chaos" represented by another hit man, a 
mercenary sociopath played by Jude Law who is hired to kill Sullivan and one 
of his sons. "How do you marry an absolute morality with personal morality?" 
is the way Mendes poses the film's thematic question. 

"There's a very strong Catholic sensibility there," says David Self, the 
screenwriter who adapted the film from a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins 
(with illustrations by Richard Piers Rayner). "Michael Sullivan is a man 
haunted by his religion." 

Whether actual hit men think this much about spiritual issues is open to 
question (and if they do, whether they are more apt to be Irish than Italians 
or Jews), but "Road to Perdition" is a reminder that based on a closer look 
at American history, the Irish have been underrepresented in the cinematic 
gangster parade. 

The films "Miller's Crossing," "State of Grace" and "The Cotton Club" all 
dealt with Irish criminals, and director Martin Scorsese will also include 
early Irish American gangs in mid-19th century New York in the upcoming 
"Gangs of New York." But Italians have long held top billing in the American 
iconography of organized crime, from "Scarface" and "The Untouchables" to 
"The Godfather" and "The Sopranos," with Jews ("Once Upon a Time in America," 
"Bugsy," "Billy Bathgate") a distant second. 

"It's not a big secret that the Irish have been involved in this stuff," Self 
says, "but it hasn't been explored because they didn't produce as many 
self-promoting charismatic figures." 

Mark Haller, a professor of history and criminal justice at Temple University 
in Philadelphia who for 30 years has been studying the rise of illegal 
enterprise in the United States, says, "By the 1890s, the Irish dominated 
gambling in the U.S.," having brought the custom of betting on horse races 
with them from the old country. Bootlegging followed and blossomed during 
Prohibition. 

"I think it's important that they're Irish," Mendes says of his main 
characters, "because something happens to a community that arrives on these 
shores with nothing, and their national identity provides them with 
sustenance." 

Although "Road to Perdition" is only loosely based on real events, the idea 
that a crime syndicate in western Illinois during the Depression was run by 
an Irish gang "would not be surprising to anyone familiar with the underworld 
at that time," Haller says, pointing to the prominence of the Irish in 20th 
century Chicago politics. "It was common for a guy who was the major 
bookmaker in an area to run for city council." 

Haller meanwhile attributes the rise of the Sicilian mafia mythology not only 
to the influence of "The Godfather," but also to "scholarship in the late 
1960s that suggested Italian dominance in crime," which he believes was 
flawed, stemming from earlier congressional hearings that focused too 
narrowly on Italians and subsequent FBI wiretap reports that did much the 
same. He even argues that Al Capone was overrated. 

"Capone was never a member of a mafia-like group, and he didn't even dominate 
crime in Chicago," Haller says. "But he did hold press conferences." 

Collins, the author who has made a career out of writing fact-based graphic 
crime novels set in the 1930s and '40s Midwest, believes the Irish weren't 
considered as colorful as the Italian mobsters of that era. "Maybe the Irish 
assimilated sooner," he says. 

Collins was doing research for one of his Nate Heller detective books when he 
came across the story of a real Irish godfather named John Looney whose base 
of operations was Rock Island, Ill., 20 miles east of Collins' home in 
Muscatine, Iowa. 

"Road to Perdition" is the Looney legend writ large as the framework that 
holds the tale of Michael Sullivan, whom Collins says he largely invented. 

"Having written a lot about Italian gangsters, I thought, why not write about 
this other slice of society?" Collins says. "But the bottom line is that it's 
a dark side of the American dream story: immigrants being denied the American 
dream but going after it anyway. And I wanted to explore the notion Americans 
have that you can be a bad man at work and a good man at home." 

Current leaders of the Irish American community in the so-called Quad Cities 
area of eastern Iowa and western Illinois, where Looney once roamed, 
acknowledge the legend of the former crime boss but are not eager to 
resurrect it. Pat Burke, president of the St. Patrck's Society of Quad Cities 
U.S.A. says, "That's why our society is not championing the movie." 

The exact location of the town where the Looney-turned-Rooney character lives 
is not specified in the film, only shown to be many miles of farmland removed 
from Chicago, where Sullivan travels to seek help from Capone lieutenant 
Frank Nitti, played by Stanley Tucci. "Looney was a real bad character," says 
Bill Fisher, a retired captain in the Moline, Iowa, Police Department and 
chairman of Irish Heritage Day in nearby Davenport, "but as far as I know, he 
was the only one," meaning the only prominent Irish gangster from the area 
that anyone can remember. 

Told from the point of view of Sullivan's 12-year-son (played by Tyler 
Hoechlin) remembering a six-week period when he went on the lam with his 
gangland father, "Road to Perdition" is "an Irish tragedy," in the words of 
screenwriter Self, "with elements of redemption and confession" blended with 
the violent acts that unfold. 

"I'm an Irish Catholic guy myself," says Self, who adds that he wanted to 
tell "an everyman story about organized crime, rather than the story of the 
top family guy." Hence the focus on the henchman rather than the king. 

Hanks and Newman both portray killers who have made pacts with the devil, but 
the henchman's heartfelt struggle to save his son from a life like his own 
becomes the movie's narrative thrust. 

In the process, some of the darkness that hangs over Hanks' character is 
lifted. "You make the good bad guy the best man in his world" is how Collins 
looks at the redeeming qualities in his Catholic antihero. 

This view is unlikely to assuage Lynn Cutter-Gronke, the great-granddaughter 
of a Looney lieutenant named Anthony Billburg, whom she believes to be the 
role model for Michael Sullivan. Cutter-Gronke, who grew up partially in Rock 
Island and now lives in Torrance, has not seen "Road to Perdition" but 
through the years has taken a dim view of Hollywood's tendency to glamorize 
gangsters. 

"They were horrible people!" Cutter-Gronke says about Looney and his gang. 
"There's a difference between victims in Hollywood movies and victims in real 
life. People can talk about stuff like this who haven't lived through it, but 
we lived it, we know it, it affected our whole family for generations--the 
shame, the fear, the alcoholism. The town never really recovered." 

Her great-grandfather, who ran afoul of Looney, she says, when he tried to 
leave the gang and form his own empire, staged an ambush in an alley in 1922 
in an effort to kill Looney. It failed, killing Looney's son Connor instead. 
Billburg went to prison for 12 years and later died of tuberculosis, as did 
Looney. 

Collins says he is unaware of Billburg or his great-granddaughter. 

"There were several lieutenants that Looney betrayed," the author says. "But 
there was no one like Sullivan. I don't like to use real historical figures 
in a dishonest fashion. I was infuriated by 'The Untouchables' movie where 
[screenwriter] David Mamet had Frank Nitti thrown off a building by Elliot 
Ness--something that never happened." 

Even if Collins had used the real Billburg as a role model, it would have 
posed an additional problem for Sam Mendes and company: Billburg was Swedish, 
not Irish. Which might be welcome news at the St. Patrick's Society of the 
Quad Cities U.S.A., but not anywhere that stories are told and movies are 
made. 
* * *
Sean Mitchell is a regular contributor to Calendar. 
* * * 
Tom Hanks in "Road to Perdition." His faith means "it's still possible to be 
saved," the director says. (Photo)