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By Root 828 0

which a simpler, more violent justice reigned—hence the fascination with the cowboy, which has been going on for nearly a century and a half. That the real cowboys were “saddle tramps,” underpaid, lawless, lousy, and generally despised and that most people who lived on the frontier yearned to duplicate the settled comforts of the East and replaced saloons with churches and schools as soon as they could, has been overlooked in the pursuit of a national myth. The Mafia, too, provides a myth in the national consciousness: a place where loyalties are absolute, where respect matters, and where problems are settled with a gun. Thanks largely to The Godfather, the phrase “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” became a part of the language, and part of the enduring popularity of the movie (or movies) based on Mario Puzo’s book comes from the suggestion that “the don” metes out rough justice to street punks and enforces his own morality with an iron hand.

Until the publication of The Godfather, most people were inclined to view the members of organized crime families as a dangerous nuisance, but, to the great surprise of the wiseguys themselves, they suddenly found themselves being taken seriously and even treated with guarded respect by ordinary citizens—or at least those ordinary citizens who didn’t have to deal with them directly in their day-to-day business affairs. There had been hints of this before, as early as World War Two, when the government went to Luciano, then in prison, to secure the services of the Mafia in Sicily to prepare the way for the Allied landings, or during the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, when some of Mr. B.’s colleagues made their first appearances on national television, and thereby made the phrase “taking the fifth” part of the language.

After The Godfather, hoods grew used to being celebrities, and not a few of them, like Joe Colombo, actually went so far as to campaign publicly for more respect (a campaign that attracted so much attention in the media that Colombo’s fellow dons had him shot while he was making a speech). Since the members of the mob were just as much against street crime as the ordinary citizen was, and since they mostly killed each other, it was not hard for them to achieve a kind of respectability, so long as they kept saying loudly enough that they were against narcotics and would kill anyone who sold drugs to children.

The truth, of course, was that they were only against selling narcotics to their children, not other people’s. No matter how many times the big bosses like Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, claimed that anybody who dealt in drugs would be killed, drug dealing remained the most profitable business of organized crime—fast, easy money that no mobster was about to give up, whatever the boss said in public. Paul Castellano never tried all that hard to enforce a ban on drug dealing in the Gambino family, but such efforts as he made were enough to get him killed outside Sparks Steak House, in Manhattan.

The newfound fascination of Americans for the mob was, in its own way, as unrealistic as the transformation of Western gunfighters into national heroes. After all, Billy the Kid, a nasty little psychopathic killer in real life, was transformed into a national hero while he was still alive and killing, and that was back before television and the movies. Given this, it is hardly surprising that there exists such continuing interest in glamorizing the affairs of a bunch of people who specialize in breaking heads, committing usury and extortion, selling cigarettes without tax stamps, and beating up tavern owners who don’t want to pay exorbitant fees for a jukebox.

I suppose I’m as guilty as anyone. My second venture in organized crime publishing was Wiseguy, a big best-seller by Nick Pileggi, which told the story of Henry Hill’s rise and fall in the Brooklyn mob and was later made into the movie Goodfellas. This, as it happened, was something of a milestone in publishing, since New York State tried to prevent S&S or Pileggi from paying