Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

6. Crime: La Cosa Nostra Americana

chapter 6 Crime La Cosa Nostra Americana This country . . . it’s a blend of family and entrepreneurship. —Roberto Cavalli, Columbus Day 2003 In the late 1960s, as disenchantment with U.S. involvement in Vietnam was escalating and domestic protest from various sectors was turning increasingly violent, when white ethnics were thought of as thick-necked hardhats and militarized cops who beat up scraggly or braless college kids, a long-suffering serious writer of fiction published his first mass-market novel, and the country’s understanding of itself and the role of ethnic difference within it hasn’t been the same since. That writer was, of course, Mario Puzo; the novel —a mob-thriller-as-family-romance, narrated in an insider’s voice—was The Godfather. Puzo’s calculated act of intuitive genius became, in very short order, the bestselling and, indeed, most widely read work of fiction in history. It served as the narrative basis and framing style for the young Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version (The Godfather, 1972), which, along with its immediate sequel (The Godfather Part II, 1974), constitute one of Hollywood’s transcendent achievements. And they gave rise, in turn, to seemingly endless literary and especially cinematic creativity, as dozens, now hundreds of filmmakers talk back to Puzo and Coppola. By century’s end, “The Godfather” referred less to a book or film than to a modern secular mythology of Romanesque proportions and ancestry. All over the United States, but especially in and around New York, from the inner city to the suburbs, ordinary people of all stripes 107 and colors, but especially those of Italian descent, continue to identify themselves, somehow, with the assumptions, actions, and aura of invented criminals without, of course, going criminal themselves. How did such a thing happen? What does it mean? As late as the 1960s, even after the stirrings of the new ethnic consciousness , Italian Americans were still thought to epitomize the first fundamental theory of upward mobility, exemplified in all our classic immigrant literature, that the success of a group is actually a function of its members breaking away from the group. No one doubted that the Southern Italians, relatively slow to climb the class ladder and thus “retarded” in their economic development and social “adjustment,” were victims of their own values, above all of their notorious clannishness.1 Individual opportunity was held in check among them by domestic needs and domestic focus, including domestic pleasures (the conviviality of the dinner table, the kitchen, the bridge table), a “culture of poverty.”2 The Southern Italians were marked as well by a defensive reluctance to entrust themselves to mainstream institutions, to participate in mainstream doings, and to curry the mainstream’s favor; an ancient fatalism that, however softened by the great breakthroughs into economic security and basic human dignity, still lingered in the form of relatively low expectations and a penchant for guarding the young too closely. As a result, the many instances of Italian Americans succeeding in sports and entertainment after the war were taken as just that, individual success stories proving the rule, none more so than in the case of that lonely only child, Frank Sinatra. Even among thinkers less prone to anti-Italian prejudice or socialist romanticism, the lesson of the working classes during the prosperous 1950s, when it was assumed what everyone wanted was the suburbs, seemed obvious. The Italians may have won blue-collar status by committing themselves to a cautious, stepwise , partial Americanization, but they would never really make it— that leap into the professional middle classes and the power elite, which the offspring of Jews seemed to have done in a single (generational) bound—until something was done about the family. It was Mario Puzo who did what had to be done, practically singlehandedly . I don’t mean Puzo changed a single fact, at least not at first, but he reinvented how the American dream of upward mobility was envisioned —the sociological, political, and ethical contours of the immigrant crime 108 success narrative—and in so doing he transfigured the role of Italian Americans in the national imagination.3 The Godfather replaced the Western with an updated version of the gangster film, less Horatio Alger than the Magnificent Ambersons. The Godfather transformed the scenario of the uncivilized frontier, where men were at conflict with one another in the establishment of both law and profit...