Are the film critics currently praising Robert De Niro for his performance in the new mob film Alto Knights aware that he hates children? Read on.

In 2003, the self-proclaimed proud Italian American (though he is only 1/4 quarter Italian) announced his next project: Shark Tale. This animated cartoon, aimed at impressionable children, preached the message of tolerance. Yet who were the villains in the film? So-called “killer mafia sharks” (!!). De Niro provided the voice-over for Don Lino, head of the evil underwater empire. His hench-fish were Luca and Frankie, voiced by Sopranos actors.

Shark Tale was also financed by Dreamworks, Steven Spielberg’s film studio. Ironically, in 2004, Mr. Spielberg himself would testify before the US Congress on the “dangers of stereotyping to children.” That terrible smell wafting from your computer is called hypocrisy.

Prior to Shark Tale‘s release, our Institute mobilized to bring some media heat to the project. We achieved some modest success: For example, Chairman John Mancini was featured (with a photo!) in a lengthy USA Today article. I and Rosario Iaconis had Op-Eds printed in major New York and Chicago newspapers. Don Fiore compiled a superb website documenting the film’s content, which also featured on-line letters of support from people like the late Congressman Bill Pascrell (D-NJ). We even protested outside an early screening of the film in Tribeca, Manhattan.

Best of all: Walter Santi, retired photographer for Fra Noi newspaper in Chicago (who celebrates his 102nd birthday next month, God bless him), contacted a reporter at an Italian newspaper and urged her to confront De Niro at a press conference in Venice. After asking him why he was promoting negative images of Italians to children, De Niro, clearly taken aback, called Italians American activists “stronzi” (assholes). Classy!

Alas, our momentum against Shark Tale soon faded. The decision to form an ad hoc national organization called CARRES (Committee Against Racial, Religious and Ethnic Stereotyping) meant losing our control over the PR campaign. The results were disheartening: Shark Tale was released in 2004 and avoided major media flak, despite its obvious egregiousness.

Long story short: Twenty years later, De Niro is still denigrating the Italian American community’s media image, this time to adults again. Directed by Barry Levinson, and scripted by yet another relentless Italian American defamer, Nicolas Pileggi, Alto Knights gives us Dumb Niro (which has always been our institute’s nickname for this defamer) as not one but two Italian American gangsters: courteous Frank Costello and vicious Vito Genovese.

Double the defamation, double the fun? In an era of ‘respect for diversity,’ that these roles still aren’t considered insulting is the true insult.

As mobster films go, Alto Knights moves more swiftly than The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s wheezing 2019 faux epic. In that film, De Niro’s thug was Irish but he played him like an Italian–the usual mannerisms, vocal patterns, etc. And his Irish hitman was more of a supporting than leading role; he was surrounded (if I may invoke another water metaphor) by a sea of sleazy Italians. The characters played by Joe Pesci and Al Pacino dominated.

Yet although De Niro plays two Italian crooks in Alto Knights, a majority of viewers don’t seem to be impressed; it’s not a big hit. What astonishes, however, is how critics effortlessly find room to yet praise this one-trick-pony actor. He actually was a once-promising actor; he burned up the screen in the 70s and early 80s but has fizzled out since. His repetitive, one-dimensional performances have made him the stuff of parody. (“He gave me nutt-ting, nutt-ting!” Vito Genovese shouts at one point in the movie—the standard De Niro line in many TV spoofs of him.)

Interestingly, the film completely rushes past Vito Genovese’s fleeing to Italy during WWII (first to Nola, then to Sicily) to avoid a murder rap in New York. His time away is mentioned, but what isn’t noted is what he did while in Italy—notably, hoodwink the incoming the US forces to act as an interpreter. One of his acts was to trick them into releasing many “political prisoners” in Sicily. Those prisoners were actually thousands of mafiosi whom Cesare Mori, Mussolini’s hand-picked prefect, successfully imprisoned back in the 1920s. Grazie, USA!

The film does show the Kefauver Senate Hearings of 1951, a seminal event in Italian American history. A brand-new medium, television, caught a snapshot of Italian gangsters at a time when their ethnic group dominated organized crime, supplanting Anglos, Jews, and the Irish. (Nota bene: Chinese gangs were still around but the FBI made very little attempt to infiltrate them due to the Asians’ insularity. There also weren’t many Asian American law enforcement officials back then) The template was set: Gangsters = Italians. Mario Puzo’s 1969 trash novel The Godfather and Francis Coppola’s 1972 film of it sealed the deal.

The film also shows—as another De Niro film, Analyze This, did—the get-together of 100 Italian American crooks at a farming estate in upstate Apalachin, New York in 1957. This so-called meeting of “The Commission,” or top echelon leaders of various Italian gangs, was broken up by local enforcement. The attendees fled into the nearby woods, where 60 were soon arrested and charged with “conspiracy.” What Alto Knights doesn’t mention is that all charges were dropped a year later upon appeal. Law enforcement got “nutt-ting.”

The film also posits that the meeting was called in order to elevate Vito Genovese as a top boss; however, to this day, no one knows what actually took place or was discussed. They didn’t have cell phones or mini-cameras back then. Urban legend still passes as factual history.

And isn’t it ironic that in 2025 the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is considered hollow and suspect? Yet the ‘conspiracy theory’ of a national, omnipotent, shadowy, criminal organization called the “Mafia” or “Cosa nostra,” with alleged tentacles controlling crime in all 50 states, is never challenged as absurd. What America has, and has always had, was organized crime. The Italians were participants, not creators. Frank Costello alludes to this in the film. He says that “today (re: the 1960s) it’s just dribs and drabs. Those days are over.” He is correct.

Italian Americans, we are told, have totally assimilated into American society—politically, economically, and socially. Their kids go to college, they live in the suburbs, they continue to live the American Dream. Our fellow Americans accept us, even though crude mob and buffoon jokes abound.

Well, Hollywood doesn’t accept us. Films like Alto Knights (and The Godfather and Goodfellas and Casino and A Bronx Tale and Donnie Brasco and TV series like The Sopranos) portray us as un-American. We are the American Nightmare. We achieved our success in America through crime.

Actors like Dumb Niro (and Chazz Palminteri and Joe Pesci and Al Pacino and the “Sopranos” cast, et. al) are part of the problem, not the solution. And Alto Knights perpetuates this “alto-nate” view of our community. -BDC