Francesco Landolfi (University of Milan)

The famous line “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” pronounced by Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), came to represent the prejudice towards Italian Americans, whose reputation is still stained today for their fellow countrymen’s establishment of the most important and powerful criminal organization on US territory.

Although by the early 1970s ethnic Italian Americans had long been culturally assimilated into US society and institutions, they continued to fight against a stereotype cast upon them a century earlier. In 1872, anthropologist Charles Loring Brace described Italian immigrants as the “dirtiest population” he met amongst all of New York’s “dangerous classes.” Several years later, in 1890, the murder of the police chief of New Orleans, David Hennessy made national headlines and contributed to strengthening the association between criminality and Italians in the United States. However, the number of Italian migrants involved in organized crimes was only an infinitesimal amount compared to the four million honest Italians who entered the country between 1880 and 1924. The extent of the prejudices against Southern Italians is exemplified by the events that occurred in the aftermath of the Hennessy murder trial, when the xenophobia of the New Orleans citizenry towards the acquittal of the defendants broke out in a ruthless lynching, resulting in the deaths of eleven innocent Italians.

Since the 1860s, the Sicilian Mafia had tried to build criminal power in North America to assert its own power in the urban Little Italies, by using the local first- and second-generation population as a metaphorical human shield for perpetuating its illicit businesses, starting with the counterfeiting of US notes. In the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, counterfeiting subsided in favor of extortion (often perpetuated through threats, kidnapping, and bombing) against Italian commercial activities by Giuseppe Morello’s and Ignazio Lupo’s so-called Black Hand and later at the hands of a loose group of petty criminals. In those years, the Italian public image was gravely affected by such an escalation of fear and collective hysteria that such cases bred in the media, as testified by the 1906 silent film The Black Hand. The establishment of the NYPD Italian Squad, conceived and headed by Detective Lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino to counter the Black Hand, eventually led to his murder in Palermo in 1909 during a secret mission and further contributed to the development of the mystique of the so-called Mano Nera. Alongside the making, both mythological and factual, of the Black Hand, inter-ethnic neighborhood gangs also sprang up in parallel, such as Francesco “Dago Frank” Cirofisi’s Lenox Avenue Gang in East Harlem or Paul Antonio Vaccarelli’s (aka Paul Kelly) Five Points Gang on the Lower East Side. In the early 1910s, these criminal groups began to “Americanize” themselves, as they shifted from openly violent acts in ethnic quarters to bribing and infiltrating sections of local politics and authorities.

The so-called “Jazz Age” (1918-1929) created the economic conditions of possibility for bringing together these two kinds of criminal organizations—ethnic and inter-ethnic—through alcohol bootlegging and the ownership of nightclubs and speakeasies. What President Herbert Hoover called the “Noble Experiment” of prohibition (1920-1933) vis-à-vis the large demand for liquor by the American people contributed to the emergence of a new social figure, the racketeer, who posed as a key trait d’union between the honest citizen and the underworld. 1931, a year after Warner Bros offered Al Capone a payment of $200,000 to star as himself in the film Public Enemy, marks the beginning of the age of the gangster movie, a new and hitherto unheard-of film genre focused on individuals living on the wrong side of the law. The same year saw the release of Little Caesar, whose fictional main character, racketeer Caesar Enrico Bandello, promoted self-determination and individualism as the only rule for achieving the long-awaited American way of life, regardless of any moral or legal principle.

Between the early 1950s and the early 1960s, two Committees chaired by US Senators Estes Kefauver and John McClellan respectively removed the shroud of mystery covering the existence of an Italian American criminal organization that extended throughout the United States. Especially key was the 1963 testimony of Joe Valachi, which revealed the secret ritual of affiliation to join the organization he first defined as La Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”). However, the anti-mafia efforts that began with John and Robert Kennedy did not fully materialize until the Nixon presidency, when the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was enacted in 1970. For the first time in the history of Western criminal law, an act criminalized the offense of racketeering not only for those who perpetrated the crime but for all those affiliated and associated with Mafia families. The government’s move came at an especially important moment, since just a few months earlier, the Italian American mob gave proof of its influence on US society and the mass media when Joseph Colombo (boss of New York City-based eponymous family) founded the Italian American Civil Rights League. In doing so, he publicly denounced the federal investigation against his son Joseph Jr., using the trope of archaic prejudice against the Italian minority to accuse the FBI of harassment and discrimination.

By the 1980s, the Italian underworld, consisting still of a small number of Italian Americans, was no longer a mystery but an acknowledged problem spread throughout the country. The FBI’s criminal investigations against the Boston Patriarca Family led to the confirmation of Valachi’s testimony before the McClellan Committee regarding affiliation rituals. As shown by the 2008 FBI’s Operation Old Bridge against the New York Gambino Family—leading to the arrest of dozens of affiliates between Italy and the United States for racketeering and international drug trafficking—the transatlantic criminal connection between Italian American and Sicilian criminal organizations continues to be perpetuated.

In US literature, the topic of the Italian mob especially came to national prominence in 1969, with the publication of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, followed by its adaptation into three movies between 1972 and 1990. The success of the franchise allowed the sensitive social issue of the Italian American mob to exceed the political or judicial realms and to affirm itself also in the domain of popular culture. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990) pose as the beginning and end of the two-decade-long golden era of mob mythology, in which the awkward thugs of Little Italy turned into arrogant and successful gangsters. The trope of the Italian American gangster was fully revived a decade later when The Sopranos (1999-2007) detailed the daily life and conflicted subjectivity of New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano.

Historically, the spectacularizing of the Italian American mafia on national media outlets went hand in hand with its fictional depiction, as testified by the national frenzy caused by the murder of Gambino Family boss Paul Castellano in 1985 in front of a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan by later boss John Gotti, as well as the recent murder of Frank Cali in 2019 in front of his Staten Island home.

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