Why low life imitates art

Last week, David Gatt was in the news again. It is impossible to read an article about the former police inspector, who is accused of directing a series of heists, without being reminded of a central allegation by a key witness: Dr Gatt, the charge goes, styled himself a Mafia boss and engaged in various practices to impress this upon the members of his gang. At this juncture, journalists usually refer to what they like to call “curious details”, practices that Dr Gatt is said to have derived from his close viewing of the six-part DVD series about the Mafia capo dei capi, Totò Riina.

It is actually quite common for mafias around the world... to imitate certain key films- Ranier Fsadni

Curious? As in odd? Think again. It is actually quite common for mafias around the world – from Italian American mobsters to their Sicilian cousins to their counterparts in Hong Kong, Japan and Russia – to imitate certain key films. The Godfather (1972), in particular, was a global hit with hitmen the world over.

Here is the wife of a member of the New York Gambino “family “Louie watched it like 6,000 times. It was like a searchlight had lit up on something he had always believed in but never seen the proof before... All our friends were watching it... the guys who came to the house were all acting like Godfather actors, kissing and hugging even more than they did before and coming out with lines from the movie... Louie thought it was close to reality but I didn’t. Back then, I laughed at all that, like it was a farce.”

An FBI agent responsible for bugging another mafioso’s home revealed the film’s impact on their social self-confidence: “The Godfather... had also given thugs a whole range of ready-made things to say when they wanted to sound tough, sincere, righteous or even wise.... It is a general truth that, outside their own circle, many wise guys are painfully insecure and even shy... they are acutely aware of their lack of education and afraid of sounding stupid. Being able to say something that Al Pacino or Robert de Niro already said helps them get started in a conversation.”

It seems that even mobsters of the Russian Balashikhino gang could recite parts of the film by heart despite the fact that the film was culturally remote from them. In Japan, the film was so successful that it led to a controversy about yakuza movies (despite the fact that mobsters’ mannerisms there had hitherto been impervious to outside influence some of them had their storylines redrafted, which resulted in a controversy between “innovators” and “traditionalists”.

All these details I am getting from a highly-respected scholar of the Mafia, Diego Gambetta. (Indeed, I even stole this column’s title from him – but, hey, I considered it an offer I couldn’t refuse). In his recent book, Codes Of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton), Mr Gambetta – who made his reputation by analysing the Mafia in economic terms, as an enterprise selling protection – goes beyond labelling certain practices “curious” to see if they have a logic enmeshed in the very nature of the criminal world.

He notes, for instance, that although the US Mafia appears to have intervened in certain aspects of the making of The Godfather (ensuring, among other things, that the word “mafia” was not used), the film is largely a romanticised portrait. The more realistic Donnie Brasco (1997) – a depiction of hard-luck mob life – was not popular. So why would mobsters want to use films as a model? Especially those living in societies very different from that depicted in the films?

The highly illuminating analysis is long and involved but it boils down to this: Mobsters have a problem advertising who they are – the reliability of their brand, so to speak – without compromising themselves with the law. But if they can invoke the kind of person they are without giving the state iron-clad evidence that can be used against them, why, they’re in business. Hence, why meetings in a bar might be accompanied by the repeated playing, on the juke box, of the Godfather theme. Or why the Russian mafia, watched American crime films. It was partly to avoid trial-and-error methods. But it also gave them a code that their victims, who had also watched the films, could readily understand.

Indeed, it gave mobsters a code that could be readily transmitted to younger generations. In 1993, in the Russian Far East, a (real) wedding feast was secretly filmed by an anti-organised crime unit. The boss made a speech in which he mentioned “our Palermo” four or five times, using terms that he must have picked up from the Italian soap opera, La Piovra, about the Mafia.

In Italy, the long-running La Piovra was marketed as a gritty anti-Mafia series but it still fed Russian mobster imagination. The Riina biography was also marketed as such, although it is based on clichés about Sicilian codes of honour and community life. Clichés are useful because they are a well-known code – perform one or two and the recipient of your message gets the picture. Likewise, the Riina biography has the advantage, in a Maltese context, of having been broadcast by Canale 5, where many Maltese are likely to have seen it.

Instantly recognisable brand and packaging: Striving for it is not a curiosity. It’s a sign of an entrepreneur who means business.

ranierfsadni@europe.com