Some people believe that America was gang-free before the advent of Prohibition, but that doesn’t happen to be the case. Long before the passage of the 18th amendment, most every ethnic group had its own group of thugs who made their money off drugs, prostitution, gambling, and extortion. It was, however, with the advent of Prohibition that profits went wildly through the roof for the entrepreneurial likes of Capone, Luciano, Lansky, and Joseph Kennedy.
With the coming of sound, motion pictures began depicting these various nogootniks as glamorous, larger-than-life characters who were quick with their fists and quicker yet with the patter. The movies may have meted out justice in the final reel, but up until then, guys like Jimmy Cagney, George Raft and Eddie G. Robinson, appeared to be living the life of Riley.
By the time Mario Puzo wrote “The Godfather,” and Francis Ford Coppola put it on the screen, you’d have thought the Mafia had America’s best P.R. men on permanent retainer. Mickey Rooney and the Hardy family of Carvel, with their homespun values, had morphed into the Corleone clan with their blood oaths and offers you couldn’t refuse, if you didn’t want to wake up with the fishes or with a horse’s head sharing your pillow.
Millions of Americans saw how Papa Corleone and Sonny dealt with people who messed with the family and wished that they, too, could count on their relatives to handle problems in such a nice, straightforward manner.
Arguments in defense of organized crime generally consist of comparing it to the perils of disorganized crime. I have heard many people long for the good old days before Howard Hughes came along, when the Mafia still ran Las Vegas and made certain, dead certain, that thieves and muggers stayed away from the tourists. The Mob wanted to fleece the suckers in the casinos and wouldn’t stand for freelance punks fishing, so to speak, in their waters.
By the time the Corleones were fading from memory, along came Tony Soprano and his gang of goombahs to remind other dysfunctional Americans about the true meaning of family.
The problem, of course, is that mobsters in their camel hair coats and their pinky rings are nothing more than well-dressed apes. But America is so enthralled by their image that it’s probably too late to do anything about this tacky love affair. The brutes have even managed to make their own self-serving rule against testifying this country’s 11th commandment. We are, as a result, far more likely to break any and all of the other ten than we are to ignore Thou Shalt Not Snitch. These days, of course, most of the gangsters or gangbangers, as they have come to be known for no apparent reason, basically concentrate on supplying heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines, to millions of Americans eager to turn what few brain cells they have into absolute sludge.
Now that John Gotti has gone on to a place where he won’t have a shyster to argue his case, our modern day gangsters don’t even dress well. And unlike the gunsels of the 20s who at least mastered the use of the Tommy gun, these punks don’t even know how to handle their weaponry. Which is why they kill innocent bystanders far more often than they manage to hit their competitors.
I used to wonder why the F.B.I. and the other law enforcement agencies didn’t swoop down on these murderous louts and wipe them off the urban landscape. I would have thought that, on ecological grounds alone, a case could be made that these punks are a greater menace than smog or second-hand smoke.
It finally occurred to me that these days, with the possible exception of the motorcycle gangs involved with the manufacture and distribution of crystal meth, most of the drug trade involves blacks and Hispanics – and thus cracking down on them would bring forth charges of racism from the ACLU and their fellow travelers in the mass media.
It’s unfortunate for the rest of us that, unlike those crime-doesn’t-pay endings in the old Warner movies, there don’t appear to be any final reels in real life.

©2006 Burt Prelutsky | talk back to Burt!

Read latest article