Made Men

by Marcel Danesi

  Not to be outdone, Michael Cimino turned his lens on New York’s Chinatown criminal gangs with the Year of the Dragon (1985). As had the Italian American and Cuban American communities, Chinese Americans protested, but again to no avail. Like Scarface, Year of the Dragon proclaimed that it was about a “group of ruthless criminals” who should not be seen as being typical of any specific ethnic group. Even Italian director Sergio Leone joined the fray with his 1984 movie Once Upon a Time in America, portraying the rise of Jewish American gangs in New York during the first years of the twentieth century with Ennio Morricone’s haunting score.

  Significantly, The Godfather captures the fancy of real-life gangsters, who responded enthusiastically to the film. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss in the Gambino crime family, stated, “I left the movie stunned. I mean I floated out of the theatre. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt exactly the same way.”[23] The portrayal of Don Vito Corleone was scriptwriter Mario Puzo’s idea of what a Mafioso was supposed to look like and how he was expected to act. His hunch paid off handsomely and, more importantly, had a ricochet effect on Mafia culture itself. But the verisimilitude was not totally made-up, as Lunde points out, writing the following:

  Although it is sometime claimed that the Corleone character was modeled on Carlo Gambino, he is, in fact, much closer to the traditional Sicilian “godfathers” like Don Calogero Vizzini or Joe Masseria than he is to more recent dons like Carlo Gambino. Puzo summed up his feelings about latter-day dons when he said, “A guy like John Gotti wouldn’t last a day in Sicily.”[24]

  The choice of the name Corleone was also no accident. It is the name of a town of 14,000 inhabitants just south of Palermo. In his novel Il gattopardo (“The Leopard”), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa describes it as a harsh place with downtrodden people constantly facing travails. In that environment, it is little wonder that Corleone was the birthplace of one of the earliest Mafia strongholds. Likely derived from the name of an Arab fighter, Kurliyun (“Lionheart”), the town has a long tradition of exhibiting public courage and standing up to injustice. In the second half of the 1800s, Corleone became the center of the farmer uprisings against the large agricultural estate holders. The town also boasts of a warrior, sword-wielding patron saint, Saint Bernard, who, as a poor cobbler in the seventeenth century, defended the indigent and women against corrupt aristocrats before donning the hood of the Capuchin monks. It is “no coincidence,” writes John Follain, “that the townspeople called Don Michele Navarra, the founding father of the Corleonese clan [that] was to overwhelm the mafia like no other in its history, ’u patri nostru (“Our father”)—just the way they referred to God.”[25] It is also not a coincidence that Don Vito Corleone had many of the same characteristics of Don Michele Navarra: “Like a deity the doctor [Navarra], a short, corpulent figure with a bull-like neck and a broad, apparently kindly face, had the power of both life and death over every single one of them.”[26]

  The public loved the movie. The closely knit Corleone family stood out to audiences as a model of the traditional family. The movie struck a resounding chord in the American psyche. Only a Don Corleone could make things right in America, if he were given a chance. Even top Mafioso Joe Bonanno was quoted as saying, “This work of fiction is not really about organized crime or about gangsterism. The true theme has to do with family pride and personal honor. That’s what made The Godfather so popular.”[27] During his 1986 trial, Luciano Leggio took a page from the movie. Dressed elegantly in a dark suit, striped tie, and pocket handkerchief, he had with him a giant, thick cigar, which he would take out from time to time from his inside pocket, playing with it in a twirling motion, in obvious imitation of Don Vito Corleone, sniffing it continuously without ever smoking it. The theatrical performance was transparent. As Follain writes, Leggio was playing to the cameras: “The cigars were only props in Leggio’s imitation of Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone in the film The Godfather and were for the benefit of the television cameras.”[28] John Dickie describes Leggio’s performance and appearance in the following way:

  And with his cigar, his long, heavy jaw, and his arrogant bearing, he actually managed to pull it off; there is more than passing resemblance between the two. In fact, Leggio’s face was already infamous before The Godfather was released. The anti-Mafia commission’s analysis of Leggio, published in the same year that the movie came out, is not a document that tends to dwell on anything as frivolous as appearances. Yet, it was transfixed by Leggio’s “big, round, cold face,” his “ironic and scornful” glower. If the cinematic Don Vito was the face of the Mafia as it likes to think of itself—judicious and family-centered—then Luciano Leggio’s features, by contrast, were an emblem of capricious terror. Whereas Brando’s heavy lids gave his character an almost noble reserve, Leggio’s staring eyeballs suggested that he was as volatile as he was malevolent.[29]

  The use of cigars by gangsters actually goes back in time and can be seen in movies like Scarface, based on the life of Al Capone, who would rarely be caught without a cigar in front of the cameras. Significantly, Carmine Galante, a New York Mafia boss, was gunned down while having lunch at a restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The police found him with a cigar stuck in his mouth. Galante’s nickname was “Cigar,” and it is likely that the killers either kept it there symbolically or inserted into his mouth to make a brutal statement.

  Interestingly, the influence of the movie extended beyond the United States. It is reported that Triad enforcers, who have always couched their threats in symbolic ways before taking retributive action, used an episode from The Godfather to formulate a threat against a Hong Kong businessman. As Reynolds writes, he “was sent the severed head of a dog” by the enforcers, who were obviously “impressed with the celebrated scene, incorporating the severed head of a horse from The Godfather.”[30] A similar event occurred in Sicily in 1991, when a horse’s head, with a knife stuck in it, was found in the car of a construction company that had refused to pay the pizzo. Indeed, many Mafiosi, like Antonino Calderone (a state witness), not only saw the movie or read the book, but became indelibly influenced by it. Calderone tells of a homicide ordered by Mafia boss Totò Di Cristina after having read the book, where he tells his hit men to dress up as doctors (as in the book) to go to a hospital and murder a rival.[31]

  The movie starts with someone looking for “justice” to be carried out, because the law had failed to do its job. So, the person asks Don Vito for help, while attending his daughter’s wedding. Don Vito asks, “Why did you go to the cops, why not come to me first?” This opening scene sets the tone for the entire movie, which revolves around the role of omertà in Mafia culture, even though shady deals and vendettas occur behind the façade of honor. The Mafia’s form of justice is direct, in classic Western cowboy style; civil justice, on the other hand, is beseeched by legal entanglements and portrayed as effete, not to mention corrupt. Don Corleone expresses this sentiment, saying, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” America’s secret admiration of this form of carnal justice was a part of what made the movie a blockbuster. In the mind of many, things are made right with fists and the gun, not with endless reams of legal red tape. In a way, the movie was a treatise in what is wrong with the American system of justice, at the same time that it showed how vendetta justice cannot, in the end, really solve anything, no matter how glorified it is. As French philosopher Simone Weil so aptly phrases it, “There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime—namely, repressive justice.”[32]

  The images that came out of The Godfather have remained imprinted in everyone’s mind. Its residues can be seen in such media descendants as The Sopranos, which began airing on HBO in 1999, and subsequent crime movies. People living in the United States and other parts of the world have learned about the Mafia through movies and television. As Reynold
s observes, it is through exposure “to The Godfather movies or an episode of The Sopranos” that most of us now know that the “Italian organized gangs are as rigidly structured and tightly controlled as any corporation.”[33]

  The movies create reality by simulating it. The world on the screen is a fantasyland that feeds our need for escape from the triviality of everyday life. By seeing the Mafia and other criminal organizations as vehicles of this escape, they gain in significance, making it harder to combat the organizations politically and legally. The movies bring their own reality into the world. Consider the emergence of motorcycle gangs. While gangs have always existed in the United States, as elsewhere, motorcycle gangs surfaced in considerable numbers only in the mid-1950s. It is no coincidence that this occurred simultaneously with the popularity of The Wild One, a 1953 movie starring a young Marlon Brando as an outlaw biker. The image of the biker as a sexually attractive outlaw, fearing no one, caught America’s fancy, leading to the growth of bike gangs shortly thereafter. The motorcycle replaced the cowboy’s horse, offering escape from ordinariness and dullness—a lure that many young people were incapable of resisting. The first motorcycle gang was the Hells Angels, which was founded only a few years earlier than the Brando movie, on Independence Day 1947, in Fontana, a steel town close to Los Angeles, when, to quote Lunde, “4,000 bikers rode into town on a spree that left 500 injured and, following the call-out of the Highway Patrol, 100 bikers in prison.”[34] From this, a spirit of friendship was born among the imprisoned bikers. Others also supported their “cause” to ride the bikes freely on the highways of America. The term Hells Angels, an appropriate metaphor, was first adopted by the San Bernardino chapter of the club in 1948. The name may have been taken from the prewar film written with an apostrophe, Hell’s Angels (1930), directed by Howard Hughes, or it may be an invention. The gang borrowed the deathbed insignia worn by World War II fighters for their emblem. Significantly, the Hells Angels came to broad public attention only after the Brando movie.

  There is also little doubt in our mind that popular conceptualizations of the Russian Mafia also come from the movies. The existence of a Russian Mafia came to general public awareness after The Mark of Cain and Eastern Promises, which, as previously discussed, brought to the screen tattooing and initiation practices of the gang. As Lunde points out, the Russian Mafia grew up in prisons during the Soviet era, when a criminal code was created to give the prisoners a sense of organization: “Those who followed the code had to swear, among other things, never to work legitimately; to support other criminals; and to have nothing to do with the state.”[35] They came to be called “thieves in law,” suggesting that they were bound together by the code. The visibility of the group remained obscure, however, until the movies stepped in to put the spotlight on it. “The term Mafiya,” writes Lunde, “was first used by the Soviet defense attorney Konstantin Simis in the 1970s,” having obviously been under the spell of Hollywood Mafia iconography.[36] He was referring not to the prison gang, but to the bribes and corruption present in the Communist Party.

  It was in the late 1980s, at the end of the Soviet era, that the ranks of the Russian Mafia started proliferating. In that decade, the first movies dealing with “other Mafias” started hitting the screen, and, by the time of Eastern Promises, they were part of pop culture’s expanding world of criminal celebrities. In a similar fashion, the movie The Yakuza (1974) brought awareness of the Japanese organization to American popular culture, rebounding back to Japan, where it enabled the real Yakuza to grow even more in size and prestige. The image of a brutal but honorable bunch of modern-day criminal samurai was bolstered by subsequent movies, including Black Rain (1989). The Triads made it to the silver screen through the movies of the first legendary martial arts hero, Bruce Lee. Films like Enter the Dragon (1973) featured Triad fighters, enhancing the appeal of both the martial arts and the criminal lifestyle of these “noble warriors” in the west, where recreational karate classes grew immensely in popularity in the 1970s because of the movies.

  It should not come as a surprise that the movies not only helped construct the image of the made man, but that the Mafia also became involved in the movie business. During the Capone era, the movie business was the fourth-largest industry in the United States. Many of the crime movies in the early 1930s were shot in Chicago, and the Chicago Mafia saw its opportunity to get a cut of the movie pie by taking over movie trade unions, while running extortion rackets on movie theater chains. “By controlling the unions,” Lunde observes, “they could cripple any studio that refused to pay protection against strikes,” and they could “close down all the theaters in the country with a single telephone call.”[37] This came to an end in 1943, however, when three Mafiosi, Johnny Roselli, Frank Nitti, and Paul Ricca, were indicted for extortion. At their trial, the involvement of the Mafia in Hollywood came out, and the Mafia’s dream to control movies came to an end.

  We agree with Lunde that the rise of the gangster movie in the era was the result of social conditions. He explains the following:

  The popularity of the gangster films of the 1930s is understandable. The movies were made when the Depression was at its worst, and depicted the hopelessness of the time, the sense that the American Dream had ended, and that the world was, in reality, a cold, lonely place where the only law that counted was the gun.[38]

  But beyond social conditions, the appeal of the gangster movie has, in our view, deeper psychological roots, tapping into a sense of fear and awe for the outlaw figure and the secrecy of criminal lifestyles. As French author Georges Bataille so fittingly puts it, “Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those [that] elude us.”[39] In effect, the boundary line between fiction and truth, theater and reality, is often blurred because we seek the messages that are found in fiction.[40]

  Mafia culture has always understood the power of fiction. They took advantage of the popularity of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana to imprint an image of themselves as bandit knights indelibly into Sicilian and, later, Italian culture. The Mafia wanted to “systematically confuse Sicilians and the Mafia,” as Dickie remarks.[41] That mistaken association persists to this day, in part because of the movies and, in larger part, because it is convenient for the Mafia to forge the link even more so. As Dickie goes on to comment, “Sicilian culture was for too long confused with mafiosità (‘mafia-ness’), and that confusion served the interests of organized crime.”[42] It was only after the testimonies of the first informants that the veil of secrecy surrounding the Mafia was removed. In a world of total silence, the Mafia thrived. In the spotlight of real cameras, it had to adapt. And it did, taking convenient tips from such movies as Little Caesar and The Godfather. The myth of rustic chivalry was deconstructed with trials revealing how vile and heinous the gangs were. We mention here the valiant crusade of Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone, who eventually died at the hands of the Mafia, along with his wife and three bodyguards, on his way into Palermo on May 23, 1992, but his fearless legacy continues to influence everyone who believes in real, not trumped-up, models of chivalry, inspiring anti-Mafia movements in Sicily and elsewhere. By demystifying the forms of fiction behind the Mafia and other criminal groups, we will be able to go a long way toward defeating them. Dickie aptly concludes the following:

  If Cosa Nostra exists, then it has a history, and if it has a history then, as Falcone often said, it had a beginning and it will have an end. Because of the work of Falcone, Borsellino, and their colleagues, as well as the collapse of the cluster of untruths surrounding the notion of “rustic chivalry,” historians can now research the history of the Mafia with more confidence and insight than has ever been the case.[43]

  What is truly surprising is that despite the movies and the trials that have put the Mafia into a global spotlight, the Mafia has changed very little. It is a secret society that c
ontinues to seek power and gain through the art of murder.

  1. Jean Cocteau, “A Film Is a Petrified Fountain of Thought,” Esquire, February 1961, 25.

  2. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).

  3. Lillian Glass, He Says, She Says (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992), 46–48.

  4. Ray L. Birdwhistell, Introduction to Kinesics: An Annotation System for Analysis of Body Motion and Gesture (Louisville, KY: University of Louisville Press, 1952), 157.

  5. John Lawrence Reynolds, Shadow People: Inside History’s Most Notorious Secret Societies (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 192.

  6. Peter Edwards and Antonio Nicaso, Deadly Silence (Toronto: Macmillan, 1993), 17.

  7. Reynolds, Shadow People, 204.

  8. The Illustrated London News, October 1987, cited in Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 188.

  9. Teresa Green, The Tattoo Encyclopedia (New York: Fireside, 2003), x–xi. In Spiritual Tattoo: A Cultural History of Tattooing, Piercing, Scarification, Branding, and Implants (Berkeley, CA: Frog, 2005), John A. Rush suggests that tattooing may go even farther back in time to 200,000 BCE.

  10. Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004), 90.

  11. Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-

  Terrorists: The Rising Menace of Global Criminal Empires (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 110.