Cooper plays Richie DiMaso, a glib, over-eager FBI agent, given to temper tantrums, who cares as much about establishing a name for himself as he does in bringing criminals to justice. Other than his eccentricities (ie., he still lives with his "ma" and wears hair-curlers), DiMaso is, at least, on the right side of the law, as is the Italian American mayor of Camden, New Jersey (Jeremy Renner).

Joe Truth
But director Russell undercuts the seeming positivity by introducing a wholly fictitious subplot involving a fake Miami gangster, Victor Tallegio (Robert De Niro). In addition to spooking DiMaso and his cohorts via his threatening aura, Tallegio perpetuates the media inflation of Italian criminals' super-human powers by being fluent in Arabic. For the sake of a dumb joke, the film's con artist main character, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), comments off-screen: "Who'd a thought that an Italian guy from Miami could speak Arabic?"

The joke, once again, is on the audience---and on Italian Americans---as no such character named Tallegio ever existed. If anything, De Niro's character seems based on an actual real-life Miami gangster, Meyer Lansky, who spoke Yiddish, a variation of Hebrew that is much closer to being a Semitic language than Italian is to Arabic.