The Everything Mafia Book (42 page)

The mob bosses in Casino’s courthouse scenes are never named; nor is it made clear what cities they represent. In real life, the bosses who were indicted for skimming the casinos in Vegas included: Nick Civella, boss of Kansas City; Joe Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone, boss and underboss of the Chicago Outfit; and Frank Balistrieri, boss of Milwaukee.

International Gangster Flicks

While Hollywood may have given the world the works of Coppola and Scorcese, there have been many memorable gangster films from across the globe, in particular England. The Mafia’s homeland Italy contributed movies about their homegrown criminals. Asian cinema has taken gangsters and combined them with explosive action to create memorable movies about the triads and yakuza.

Brit Flicks

One of the best gangster movies ever, and certainly the best portrayal of a gangster on the edge, was the movie
The Long Good Friday
. Bob Hoskins plays Harold Shand, a London crime boss who wants to partner with an American Mafioso in some real estate deals. Harold wants to go straight but in one day his world falls apart as murders and bombs rock his world. He thinks it’s a rival but it turns out to be the IRA, who one of Harold’s underlings crossed. The final scene, with Hoskins not uttering a single word, is simply amazing.

In the movie Get Carter, versatile actor Michael Caine virtually invented the British gangland movie persona with his visceral portrayal of a gangster looking into his brother’s murder. Unfortunately Sylvester Stallone did a remake and failed to capture any of the screen magic of the original. Caine went on to star as a crime boss in another classic British gangster pic, 1986’s Mona Lisa, also starring Bob Hoskins.

A modern Brit gangster classic is
Sexy Beast
. Ben Kingsley plays a feared London hit man who is called in to recruit a retired mobster, played by Ray Winstone, to do a bank job. Crime boss Teddy Bass (the always impressive Ian McShane) is the mastermind behind the heist. But while most gangster movies focuse on the business of crime,
Beast
focuses on the personalities. Kingsley is out of control as he psychologically tortures Winstone at his Spanish estate, badgering him and his wife incessantly until Winstone snaps.

Asian Crime Cinema

Hong Kong is the headquarters of the Asian film industry. And because the territory is inundated with triads, the Chinese Mafia, they have often been a popular subject of movies. Director John Woo has made some modern-day classics, including
A Better Tomorrow
and
The Killer
. Known for his outlandish action sequences and otherworldy gun battles, Woo’s movies were some of the first to break through to American audiences.

A recent Asian gangster movie was
Election
and its sequel
Triad Election
. The story has a
Godfather
-like tone to it, telling the story of a triad civil war and the ascension of a new boss. The two movies dig deep into the modern-day triad and how they succeed by corrupting law enforcement in Hong Kong and mainland China. Some of the scenes are particularly brutal, but the action is secondary to the intricate plot, weaving Machiavellian machinations with humor.

The Untouchables
on the Big Screen

Brian De Palma’s
The Untouchables
movie does not have much in common with the TV series of the same name, other than the setting and the antagonists. A young Kevin Costner plays a less assured Eliot Ness, tutored by Sean Connery in an Academy Award–winning performance as tough Irish cop Jimmy Malone. Perennial gangster movie star Robert De Niro gained a few pounds for a cameo performance as Al Capone.

Sean Connery won an Academy Award for his moving performance as Jimmy Malone, the Irish cop who serves as a mentor to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness. The character was a purely fictitious addition to the story. Ness had many brave men on his team, but giving him an elder mentor was purely a dramatic device.

The Chicago Way

Award-winning playwright David Mamet’s screenplay does not adhere to the historical facts any more than the television show did. Novice Treasury agent Ness arrives in Chicago, and his gung-ho naiveté is mocked by basically the whole Chicago police force and political machinery. He finds “the one good cop in a bad town” in the person of Connery, and together they assemble their version of the Untouchables.

Connery plays a more rough-hewn Obi-Wan Kenobi to Costner’s Luke Skywalker as he tutors him in the ways of “the Force,” Chicago style. He delivers the famous advice, “He pulls a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way. And that’s how you get Capone.”

Three Strikes and You’re Out

Perhaps the most famous scene in
The Untouchables
movie is the De Niro/Capone baseball bat scene. Capone lectures his tuxedo-clad associates about the importance of teamwork as they are enjoying a fine meal and cigars in an elegant setting. He circles the table comparing their business to a baseball team, before savagely bashing the skull of one of the henchmen who allowed a valuable stash of bootleg booze to be impounded by Ness and company. In real life, Capone is alleged to have personally murdered at least three men with a baseball bat.

CHAPTER 21
The Other Mafias

You don’t have to be Italian to be in a Mafia. Although technically the term Mafia is of Italian origin, many ethnic groups have formed organized crime gangs over the centuries. And while the ethnicities are different, the modus operandi is the same: drugs, gambling, vice, extortion, fraud. But some of these crime groups have expanded into the world of arms trafficking, nuclear weapons trafficking, and terrorism. This chapter will look at some of the more noteworthy and notorious “other Mafias.”

The Russian Mafia

The Russian mob has been around for a long time. But after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, the organized crime community in Russia came into its own. The underworld went above ground and thrived as it never did in the era of communism. There had been an American-Russian mob in Brooklyn since the 1970s, but in the early 1990s New York City saw an influx of fresh mobsters from Russia and some of the breakaway republics.

Like the crime families of the American Mafia, the Russian Mafia is not a monolith but rather a loose confederation of crime outfits. This makes them difficult to track and adept at moving from crime to crime. And though their presence in America is on the rise, their hold over Russia is staggering.

Nuclear Threat
Perhaps the most

Perhaps the most infamous activity the Russian gangsters are involved in is far removed from low-level scams and bookmaking. Since the Soviet Union fell, it has been a primary concern of both Russia and the United States to keep an eye on Russia’s nuclear stockpile. There is a great fear that the Russian mob would not hesitate to get its hands on nuclear material and sell it on the thriving black market that emerged as the former communist countries were exposed to the world of capitalism.

This unthinkable horror is no longer the farfetched plot of a James Bond movie. Starting in the mid-1990s, intelligence agencies in Europe began receiving indications that Russian gangsters were actively looking to get their hands on nuclear material, including enriched uranium.

Yearning to Breathe Free

In the 1980s, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its most frigid, it would appear that the sneaky Soviets played a nasty trick on America. Anti-Semitism was rampant in Russia, and as part of the many negotiations that went on during the Cold War, the communist government agreed to let many Russian-Jewish refugees leave the country. They also used it as an excuse to open their jails and rid themselves of their worst criminals by shipping them off to the United States under the guise of a liberal and compassionate policy.

Fidel Castro did the same thing with the Mariel boat people in 1980. Soviet Russia and communist Cuba simultaneously got rid of the lowlifes in their society and inflicted them upon the United States. Hundreds of thousands of criminals came to America to continue their criminal activities in the New World.

In January of 2008, Russian police commandos swarmed over a group of men leaving a supermarket in Moscow. They grabbed a sixty-one-year-old man, wearing jeans and a leather jacket. He was Semyon Mogilev-ich, the most notorious Russian Mafia boss around. Worth an estimated $100 million, he was wanted for multiple murders, drug running, and arms trafficking.

Pax Europa and America

The Russian mob has moved beyond its homeland to every corner of the globe. They are most active in Eastern Europe, where they merged with native ethnic gangs there, and in America, where they teamed up with the traditional Mafia as well as other criminal organizations to further their nefarious career. The shifting alliances and structure of the Russian mob has made it difficult for law enforcement to take out large numbers. But as intelligence grows, so does the ability of the cops to understand them and work to remove them from the crime world.

Brighton Beach Memoirs

Initially, the Russian Mafia operating in America preyed mostly on other Russian immigrants who had settled in the United States. Shakedowns and extortions were common crimes inflicted on the decent hardworking Russians. They also engaged in the usual crimes such as thievery and prostitution.

The Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York, was a hotbed of activity for the Russian Mafia in the 1970s. It even formed an uneasy alliance with the Italian boys who had been in place for decades. The homegrown Mafia was not about to let these newcomers start muscling in on their territory. The Italians let the Russians operate, but at a price that must have stunned those raised in a communist regime. They had to pay a hefty “tribute” to the Italian Mafia for the privilege of operating in New York. La Cosa Nostra’s aggressive capitalism was a rude awakening for the Russian Mafia.