The other night I was watching Primetime on FOX News when host Jesse Watters interviewed Salvatore Gravano, the notorious mob butcher known as ‘Sammy the Bull.’ Gravano recently completed a 20-year lockup, after a plea deal for his testimony against his boss John Gotti. Gravano claims to have rubbed out nineteen victims during his career. He and Jesse were chatting about politics and current events.
So, here we are in 2024 and La Cosa Nostra thugs are sought after as political commentators and media influencers. Ex-con Michael Franzese does gigs as a motivational speaker, on stage and the internet. According to a 2022 RollingStone article, mob guys have developed a get-rich platform nicknamed ‘Mafia YouTube’ where they reminisce about past rub-outs and their newfound redemption. Anthony Arillotta, a Massachusetts hitman, claims 60,000 YouTube viewers. Franzese claims almost one million. Gravano has parlayed his YouTube series into talks with Hollywood on a film biography, not to mention notice by FOX’s Jesse Watters.
YouTube is the new racket for born-again gangsters “What is the best approach for me to give me the [good] life I had before in my past?” asks Anthony Arillotta in his RollingStone interview “… capitalizing on it.” And America is eating it up.
This year is the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos debut on HBO. The fashion industry is already touting “mob” hairstyles and clothing. The vast majority of the media considers the whole history of Italian American “mafia” as fascinating, not evil. And it seems to be that way for 99% of the Italian American population, judging by our Institute interactions with the community.
In 1987, we thought the time was right to offer 17 million Americans who claimed Italian roots an alternative to a heritage that Hollywood had mobbed up and academia had frozen in immigrant time. We called it the “Classical Italian heritage” – deeper than never-ending immigrant memories, while treating the “mafia” as the aberration it was. Suffice it to say, after 37 years the ex-mob thugs command a bigger audience than us.
The other night I watched a 1952 gangster movie on TCM. While most pre-Godfather movies did not often feature Italo thugs (organized crime was, and is, multi-ethnic), this one did. Then, I recalled that 1951 was the year of the Kefauver Hearings in Congress. These were the first organized crime hearings. Illegal gambling was the big issue and Kefauver held his hearings in various crime-ridden cities. To multiply his audience, Sen. Kefauver (D-TN) had the hearings televised across the nation. At that time television networks were hungry for programming to fill the hours. The hearings were a sensation and Hollywood found a new angle when New York City mobster Frank Costello testified for eight days. The dapper don brought his lawyer, occasionally ‘took the Fifth,’ and famously responded “I pay my taxes” to the question ‘what good have you done the country since becoming a citizen?’
Although Jewish and Irish gangsters, as well as crooked Anglo politicians were featured, it was Costello and Kefauver’s misnomer ‘Mafia’ in his final report that stuck in popular memory. Just as Al Capone had captured the criminal crown in the 1930s, Costello and his compatriot Charles “Lucky” Luciano paved the way to media image hell, now with the tag Mafia. With the televised Valachi Hearings in 1964 the ‘mafia’ spin-off La Cosa Nostra made its debut.
Neither Italians nor Italian Americans have been able to blot out the image of organized crime, as it has become a magnet for storytelling – both fiction and sensational news. Time has not buried it or lessened it. Like a chronic disability, we have learned to live with it, making it a source of humor or like the ex-mob guys above and our wealthy filmmakers to exploit it for profit.
Geraldine Ferraro had to campaign for Vice President in 1984 while dodging inane questions about her family ties to organized crime. Gov. Ron DeSantis has been spared that experience, but his nemesis Donald Trump is fond of another ethnic putdown of DeSantis. Trump has claimed on a number of occasions that he made DeSantis’s political career, otherwise the governor “would be working in a pizza shop.”
With a media reputation as either ‘cooks or crooks,’ the Classical Italian is an image too far. -JLM
One has to remember that Tony Soprano was exonerated to a pathetic zhlub because he saw a psychiatrist. America with respect to Mafia images has completely lost its moral compass, but that goes along with a general moral sloth in other arenas as well.
It will not end, until we educate more of the American population what the facts are.
I am sorry to say too many Italian Americans just don’t care and often enjoy those images. Those images do a great deal of harm. I am doing my best to educate those around with facts.
Let’s not forget the Italian-American directors and actors who have made a good living out of portraying their ethnic group as foul mouthed thugs and murderers. The likes of Martin Scorcese, Joe Pesci, Robert DiNiro, Michael Imperioli, and the late “Tony Soprano” come to mind.
I would add to my above list of Italian-American directors and actors who stereotype their own ethnic group as gangsters David Chase, Edie Falco, Tony Sirica and Frank Vincent, among many others.
Sadly, it is now a part of American lore. I label it the ‘Jessie James Syndrome.’ Since I am currently in the trenches trying to do an all-Italian symphonic concert soon, it is challenging to get decent PR for these paradigm changers, even among the Italian American community. Sometimes it’s even easier to work with mainstream media. Yet let one new upscale Italian restaurant come on the block and articles and social media abound.
There is a funny movie out this year about an African American author who after many rejected books as not being authentically Black enough, in anger writes a stereotypical novel that becomes a best seller. Then he was stuck with living with the consequences of the novel. In many ways, we are all in similar boats. How willing is a creative person willing to sacrifice one’s integrity for so-called success by the media’s perception of our personal truths?
The bottom line is you just keep chipping at the assumptions, unfortunately as noted by the comments above, we have a lot more to do in our own homes–and that ain’t no easy task!