Behind the Mystique of the Mafia

MAFIA business is not precisely booming these days, but business about the Mafia has never been better. There are nearly 1,000,000 God father hard covers in print, and over 10 million paperbacks. Jimmy Breslin's bestselling comic novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight -- said to be a takeoff on the chaotic exploits of Brooklyn's Gallo gang -- was recently reincarnated as a movie. Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father, a detailed and understanding portrait of the son of Mafia Boss Joseph Bonanno, has been on the bestseller lists for four months, and recently brought a beefy $451,000 for paperback rights.

There is a paperback called The Godmother, a movie (a retitled American version of a film by the respected French director Jean-Pierre Mel ville) called The Godson. Paramount is planning the official Puzo-scripted sequel to The Godfather -- The Death of Michael Corleone. Also in the works is a movie version of The Valachi Papers, the memoirs of Cosa Nostra veteran Joe Valachi. There is even a Godfather game, in which players compete for control of the rackets.

Why all this avidity for Mafia lore? "The Mafia are like urban cowboys," suggestsTalese. They are "feudal lords, and whether you like them or not, they're fascinating father figures."

Paradoxically, the Mafia types embody everyone's fantasies of flamboyant banditry even while reconfirming in their personal life strict and some times puritanical standards of behavior. "Mafia children respect their parents and are very well behaved," Talese points out. "And the parents themselves are very patriotic. They stand for capitalism and free enterprise and very much against Communism. They shake their heads when they see students tearing up a flag on TV and they can't understand why police put up with being called 'pig.' "

Interest in the Mafia knows no social or intellectual boundary. The Harvard Business Review has included an instructional primer entitled "How lock out the Mafia." A recent issue of Commentary carried a lengthy article entitled "Browsing in Gangland" by Joseph Epstein, who invoked such disparate sources as Sigmund Freud and Al Capone to prove that "we are all hooked on crime, because in our innermost beings most of us partly wish to be gangsters ourselves."

This brought a more intriguing demurrer from Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, who, befitting the author of Making It, thinks crooks "claim our attention not primarily by virtue of their brutality but by virtue of their worldly success: they are self-made men. We still want to read about men with the will, the energy, the daring, the boldness and the ruthlessness to claw their way to the top. But so powerful has the animus against business and commerce become in our culture that no legitimate businessman could possibly serve as the hero of any such story. Only an illegitimate businessman could; which is to say a gangster."

The Mafia leaders not only generate their own mystique but share in it. They have a good time, as Gay Talese reports, yukking it up over TV reruns of The Untouchables. They give high marks for verisimilitude and general elan to films like Bullitt, in which they admire Steve McQueen's resilient cool. Authors Puzo and Talese are esteemed for their portraits of Mafiosi as "men of respect" (although Mafiosi feel that Talese, especially, was taken in by his sources). The alltime Mafia favorite, however, is the movie The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Basil Rathbone, who plays the villainous Sir Guy Gisbourne, is hissed at every appearance. He is the totally corrupt and power-hungry official that Mafiosi feel they know so well. Between Errol Flynn, as Robin, and the cheering Mafia audience there exists, as they might see it, a kind of spiritual bond. It does not seem to extend, however, to that business of robbing to give to the poor.

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