The Mafia: A Cultural History, by Roberto Dainotto – From battle scars to screen stars

The Mafia – A Cultural History

Author: Roberto M Dainotto

ISBN-13: 978-1780234434

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Guideline Price: £20

In an episode entitled Christopher, from the fourth season of The Sopranos, Tony's consigliere Silvio Dante takes exception to a Native American protest demonstration planned for the Columbus Day parade. Silvio, inflamed with wounded pride for the old country, rounds up a crew of heavies to roust the demonstrators, who have deemed the commemoration of a genocidist an affront to their people.

Behind closed doors, Mafia wives, ladies who lunch, and lecturing intellectuals heckle about over the evils of Italian-American stereotyping. The ironies layered into the teleplay by Michael Imperioli, who also played Christopher Moltisanti in the show, are delicious: Mafia hoods and bullies deployed to protest the libelling of their race as Mafia hoods and bullies.

Roberto Dainotto doesn't explicitly refer to the episode in this book, but he can hardly have missed its point. The Mafia: A Cultural History hinges on a moral knot: the mythologising of chivalric Cosa Nostra values of honour, loyalty and family versus the grim realpolitik of institutionalised racketeering, money laundering, shakedown operations and assassinations.

Throughout this dense but eminently readable book Dainotto professes admiration for Mafia-inspired art (primarily film) but doesn’t flinch at showing his disdain for the brutalities that inspire it.

In the early chapters, Dainotto, a Sicilian-born professor of romance studies and literature in North Carolina, explores the mob’s southern Italian origins in the 1800s, painting a less than pastoral portrait of a rural peasant class under the heel of northern monarchs and magnates. Here was a people crippled by taxes on grain, inheritance and even newborns and subject to army conscription.

Economic oppression provided fertile breeding ground for an outlaw caste. Soon after reunification in 1861, the Italian state implemented a “zero tolerance” policy on tax evaders and deserters, effectively criminalising the underclass. A state of emergency was declared, civil rights were suspended and the south was denounced as a rogue province. Lawbreakers were burned out of their houses, hanged or imprisoned, and even the most apolitical of southerners became radicalised. Cosmopolitan northerners fascinated by their barbaric country cousins bought Mafia-inspired romances and flocked to Mafia-themed operas.

In its original form “Mafia” was an all-purpose term: it could denote Sicilian pride or a brotherhood born of poverty or even function as a compliment to a comely maiden. By the late 19th century, Dainotto tells us, it had come to signify the mob as we know it: a criminal subculture with no regard for the law, which subjected estate owners to intimidation, death threats and sabotage.

Already the codification and fetishisation of Mafia customs had begun. In August 1875 a deposed land owner and surgeon, Dr Gaspare Galati, sent a memorandum to the ministry of the interior describing initiation rituals familiar to any Godfather fan. Dainotto writes: "The finger pricked with the needle by an officiating member; the drops of blood spilled on the image of St Anthony; the sacred image set on fire; the burning card passed from hand to hand; the oath . . . There it was: the whole pseudo-masonic shebang."

Later the author links the birth of commercial cinema to the American fascination with gangsters, crediting early classics such as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy with rescuing the picture house from its postdepression slump. To get around the prohibitive Hays Code, film-makers had to disguise outlaw stick-up flicks as cautionary tales.

Scarface, which was released in 1932, created a new benchmark for screen violence. Its producer Howard Hughes claimed that cinema had a moral imperative to show mob bloodshed in graphic detail, but the true motive was, as ever, sensationalism in service of box-office receipts. Scarface became a test case. In its wake Hollywood's moral guardians imposed draconian censorship restrictions that would persist until the 1960s. None of this impeded the rise of Al Capone or Lucky Luciano or prevented the gangster from becoming the US's favourite folk devil.

Tax-free buck

Mob business was good between the wars: prohibition gave many unlettered immigrants a way to make a tax-free buck by way of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution, while out-of-work war veterans found good use for their combat skills on the streets of Chicago and New York.

"The typical story of Mafia novels and films of the 1920s and early 1930s entailed a simple paradigmatic plot – the hero rises to the top, remains isolated and dies alone in the end – which resonated with the desires and fears of society at large," writes Dainotto. Such tales described the true trajectory of the "American dream": it begins with the Mediterranean definition of success, the man measured by his standing in the community, his power linked to how many people he knows, and ends with the last act of The Godfather II or Brian De Palma's Scarface remake or even Martin Scorsese's Hughes biopic, The Aviator: a rich man dies friendless in a vast mansion, the casualty of a showdown between himself and his ghosts, or the cops.

As the century progressed mafioso ambition became synonymous not just with bootstrap aspiration but with capitalism itself. Dainotto quotes an essay written by the critic and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson in 1990, the year Goodfellas put Scorsese back on the map. "When indeed we reflect on an organised conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit – surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself that we are thinking, American capitalism in its most systematised and computerised, dehumanised, 'multinational' and corporate form."

Chief among this book's virtues is its insight into domestic Italian art and politics. Even as American mafiology became so mainstream as to mate with gangsta-rap braggadocio, long-running Italian TV dramas such as La Piovra (The Octopus) provided anti-Mafia polemic on prime time.

Then, at the turn of the century, David Chase relocated the mob to New Jersey suburbia. The Sopranos was Scarface in sweatpants, re-creating the gangster epic as a literal rather than figurative family saga. The series opened with Tony in his shrink's office, overcome with ennui: he came in at the end. He and his crew are becoming premature "oldfellas", endlessly parroting and parodying old Godfather dialogue. Even Tony's choice of music – classic hard rock – marks him as a dinosaur.

The Mafia: A Cultural History has its blind spots (Scorsese's work gets short shrift), but the accent is on Italian history, not American culture. Your average gangster-movie buff might be better directed towards Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls or Brett Martin's Difficult Men for the skinny on the making of Mean Streets or The Sopranos. But any reader interested in Mafia facts rather than myths will find Roberto Dainotto an exceptionally informed and illuminating guide.

Peter Murphy is the author of John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River