Crime films This article is more than 8 years oldEl Chapo, Hollywood and the lure of the mob movie
This article is more than 8 years oldFrom Al ‘Scarface’ Capone to the recently captured Joaquín Gatmán, gangsters have always looked to cinema to boost their imageNews of the meeting between Sean Penn and the Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the psychology of organised crime bosses. Of course Guzmán wanted to make a film about himself. As I pointed out in my book Gomorrah, and we subsequently showed in the film, we tend to think that cinema observes the criminal underworld; in fact, it’s quite the opposite: the criminal world watches movies. The bosses are aware that a lot of the best cinema and TV focuses on crime, which makes them keen to be involved in the production. That way, they will be able to skew the portrayal of them in their favour. They, and their followers, need films to show their heroism, their victories over authority. Criminal organisations, from Mexico to Italy, have always looked to cinema to tell their stories, to give them inspiration or to take inspiration from them, heroes to imitate, codes to follow.
Al Capone was the first US gangster to do this. It was his nickname, Scarface, that gave the 1932 Howard Hawks film its title. While the director was working on edits, Capone sent some of his men to Hollywood to get an idea of how he was being portrayed, to make sure his character wasn’t some two-bit hitman. Only when the director persuaded Capone’s heavies that his film was pure fiction did they agree to leave the studio. The film had been shot two years previously, but the censors had blocked its release, on the grounds that it was too violent, and glamorised the gangster lifestyle. In an interview, Capone claimed to despise the gangster movies of the time, calling them “terrible kids’ stuff”, but rumour has it that he had his own prized copy of Hawks’s uncensored film.
Penn was perhaps satisfying his personal curiosity in going to see Guzmán, who, in the interview Penn got for Rolling Stone, not only doesn’t deny being a drugs trafficker, but boasts that he is the biggest there has ever been. “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.” He also talks about how he launders his narcodollars – usually the mafia’s most tightly held secret.
Penn quotes John Gotti, the late head of New York’s Gambino crime family, who always claimed to be a legitimate businessman, and other mafiosi who protested that they made their living from growing flowers, or farming. El Chapo doesn’t feel the need for cover stories; he boasts about his military capabilities. And he does it knowing that his life would make a great movie. He is well aware that his story of multiple daring escapes and recaptures fires the public imagination more than his crimes.
When Mexican marines raided Guzmán’s hideout in Los Mochis, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, they found DVDs of La Reina del Sur, a soap opera about a female cartel boss featuring Kate Del Castillo, the star who facilitated his meeting with Penn.
Mafia bosses need to create an image of power and glamour that, in reality, they don’t have – they often live hidden in underground burrows like rats – and cinema makes this possible. The Hollywood image of the crime boss, violent but charismatic and always surrounded by women, aligns them with an instantly recognisable stereotype.
In Naples, where I grew up, during the mafia war of 2004, the upcoming camorra members modelled themselves on gangsters from film and TV – The Matrix, The Crow, Pulp Fiction and, more recently, Breaking Bad. Aspiring bosses take on a well-known persona – it helps to create their personal mythology and inspire a following. When Cosimo Di Lauro, the son and heir of the boss Paolo Di Lauro, was caught in January 2005 in his hideout, he did not try to escape, but before he was brought out in front of the TV cameras, he put gel in his hair, styled it in a ponytail and put on a black mac. As the police officers escorted him to the car, he assumed a dark, brooding look – his best Brandon Lee impression. He was The Crow. Kids crowding the street took his picture, and Di Lauro the Crow became an instant screensaver.
When Pulp Fiction came out, the camorra killers forgot how to shoot: they turned the gun so the barrel was flat, like in the movie. The result was that their aim became wildly inaccurate. They would hit their victims in the legs and the stomach, and then have to finish them off at point blank. Cinema was no longer imitating life, but influencing it, too.
Tarantino’s anti-heroes were ideal models for upcoming mafiosi because they were drawn from the same timeless, rootless renegades. Because this is the image the bosses want to convey: outlaws, misunderstood, troubled anti-heroes. Cast out by civil society, they are focused on protection: protecting themselves against capture, protecting the weak against a hostile state.
The bodyguards of camorra boss Immacolata Capone, who was shot dead in 2004, were dressed like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: bright yellow jumpsuits and cropped blonde hair. Two boys who were killed in a shootout in Caserta, near Naples, in the same year, had modelled their gangster style on Pulp Fiction: before they opened fire they would recite the sonorous passage from Ezekiel favoured by hitman Jules Winnfield.
The anti-hero who has no fear of danger: this is how the camorra members like to see themselves. Cesare Pagano, the boss of a mafia splinter group in Scampia, near Naples, was arrested in 2010. He had been one of Italy’s most wanted. When he was brought out of the Naples police headquarters to be taken to prison, he put on a T-shirt bearing a picture of Steve McQueen who, as a boy, had spent time in reform school.
Cinema introduces a new vocabulary to the mafia’s self-expression. The term “godfather” was never used by the Italian mafia before Francis Ford Coppola’s film. The term used for the head of a family or a family member was always compare, never padrino. It was only after the film came out in 1972, Italian-American mafia families started using “godfather”. They also started wearing pinstripe suits and dark glasses, and intoning lines from the film.
It’s not just kids who are so easily influenced. Luciano Liggio, boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra until the mid-70s, was photographed sticking out his lower jaw like Don Vito, while Gotti, known as the Dapper Don, assumed the style wholesale. In the early 90s, the boss of Cosa Nostra, Bernardo Provenzano, while on the run from the authorities and the uncontested top entry on Italy’s most wanted list, used to go to the cinema in the centre of Palermo, risking arrest, to see the last film in the Godfather trilogy.
But the favourite film of South American gangsters, by a long margin, is Brian De Palma’s 1993 movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino. It changed the way a whole new generation of crime associates saw themselves, and wanted to be seen. What organised crime demands from a gangster film is that it show the gangster life in a way they recognise, but with an epic quality that, in reality, the criminal world mostly lacks. A great gangster movie must edit out any moments of bestial violence. It will show a boss treating women and children with great respect. It will not show the squalor of his hideout, and the mangy food he is forced to eat. It will skate over the long periods in hiding, waiting for news – with no luxury, no women, months and months without seeing his children.
What the people see must be the opposite of this grim existence. In Casal di Principe, outside Naples, the boss Walter Schiavone owned a villa so grand and luxurious it’s known locally as Hollywood. When he was planning the house, it is said, Schiavone gave a copy of Scarface to his architect and told him to build him a house like Tony Montana’s.
Villas in the style of Montana’s extravagant palazzo have been erected by mafia bosses in different parts of Italy: the head of the Alvaro di Sinopoli clan, based near Reggio Calabria, was building a palace fit for his descendants. While he was in custody, security forces confiscated the unfinished construction. Another monstrous villa was built near Bologna by the boss of the Mancuso clan, whose wealth is based on importing cocaine from Spain and Colombia. But the Italian mafia’s love of all things Tony Montana doesn’t end at architecture: Naples bosses even enhance their tough guy image by keeping lions and tigers in cages.
So what should we do? It’s obvious that we are not going to stop making films about organised crime. The only thing we can do is pay careful attention, making sure that the gangster is not using the film to send hidden messages. It would seem that El Chapo, in his interview with Sean Penn, is talking to El Mayo Zambada, his close associate and rival in the Sinaloa cartel. Penn didn’t ask El Chapo any searching questions. He offered him the opportunity to make a declaration, and this is dangerous.
Films about crime can’t get hung up on moral issues, because then they become films with a message, and that would mean they weren’t reporting life in all its complexities. Mafia bosses love films that truly reflect their reality.
The point is this: films don’t create the mafia, but films about the mafia may explain or decode the organisation for its members; they interpret the life for those who live it. Film-makers have studied organised crime and know how it works; they can give a dispassionate insight, a view from the outside.
El Chapo must have seen Narcos, about Pablo Escobar: he would have seen how the US and Colombian police were portrayed as clean, whereas corruption was endemic in both forces. He may have decided that he could do something different; to reveal some deeper truth about our times, as only a good mafia film can do.
In crime films, power dominates everyone’s relationships. They are set in a world where there are no rights, where, if you want something, you get it by any means at your disposal – legal or otherwise, with tears, smiles or machine-gun fire. Where everyone is at war with everyone else. Where the winner is the one prepared to risk prison or death, for power.
Roberto Saviano is the author of Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia (Pan). His latest book is Zero Zero Zero (Allen Lane).
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