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Mobster Image in Media Defames Italian Culture, Italian
Americans
Published in the Norridge-Harwood Heights IL News, July
20, 2006.
The only accurate bit of information in your recent article on Bob
Blackwood's gangster book (July 6 issue) was the headline: "Mob Throb."
America certainly is in love with defaming Italian culture.
To wit: Although author Blackwood honestly admits that his book is aimed at
film buffs, not scholars, this doesn't stop him from engaging in
armchair sociology: "There have been mobsters from every ethnic group
in every urban area of our country," he says, "but the Italians were
the most organized and so gained the control."
The first part of his statement is true; the second is absurdly,
utterly false. And yet, it's this second statement that is accepted
as common knowledge based on nothing more than Hollywood and media
hype. Facts are discarded like so many empty bullet shells.
Professor Mark Haller of Temple University in Philadelphia, who's been studying
organized crime for the past 35 years, not only pooh-poohs the likes
of Al Capone ("America's most overrated gangster") but has identified
what he calls "the interlocking network structure" of racketeering.
Haller defines organized crime as an outgrowth of American entrepreneurialism,
comprised of mutually beneficial (often illegal) working relationships.
Al Capone's alleged "power" was derived from equally crooked--mostly
non-Italian--politicians, judges, police officers and businessmen,
all of whom joined forces with him in exploiting the constraints
of Prohibition.
And, sadly, the media also engaged in exploitation; they borrowed Capone's image and made Italian criminals (despite their equal status with Jewish, Irish and Anglo crime bosses) the archetypal symbol of the "American" gangster. It has been an image promoted endlessly ever since, both by Hollywood and the mainstream media. A sad irony: Your article on the gangster book was printed around the Fourth of July. How many of your readers know, for example, that Thomas Jefferson's best friend and neighbor in Virginia was Filippo Mazzei, the Italian political thinker who helped Jefferson with his drafts of the Declaration of Independence? And how many of your readers have ever seriously thought about how America borrowed its very core from the examples of classical Italy? We have a republic ("res publica"), a Senate, a symbolic eagle, a tripartite form of government, Latin mottoes, a concept of citizens' rights and domed architecture. Yes, we live in a "free country," or so they say. This certainly doesn't apply to the subject of organized crime. Such constant focusing on Italian criminals--at the expense of an honest assessment of what Italian Americans have contributed to our nation--is worthy of authoritarian regimes, seeking an ethnic scapegoat for all of their social ills. Organized crime is not the exclusive province of one particular group, as the birth of Las Vegas, the Enron crash, the current Chicago job scandals and the threats of Al-Qaeda so blatantly illustrate. It's time to stop using Hollywood, or even books about Hollywood, as a substitute for the truth.
Bill Dal Cerro
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