The Everything Mafia Book (38 page)

Unlike the American Mafia, each yakuza clan of the Japanese Mafia has its own unique slang. A capo in the Bonanno family can understand a member of the Gambino crime family, but in Japan the clans often have a deeply secret slang that no one else can comprehend.

Here’s to the Ladies

The Rat Pack made many slang expressions for members of the opposite sex. They are interesting as curiosities from a bygone era, but male readers of this book should proceed with caution before referring to their significant other by any of these antiquated terms of endearment. Some of the complimentary terms for a woman that a Rat Pack hipster would like to get to know better are barn burner, meaning a very attractive woman. A petite woman was called a mouse, and a beetle referred to a well-dressed woman. Broad and chick were not insults but expressions of affection. So was gasser. Dame was not affectionate; in Rat Pack slang dame was not a compliment. A woman who liked to dance was called a twist or a twirl, and a girl who appeared to be ready and willing for a little hey-hey (romance) was called a tomato, in that she was ripe for the picking.

Likes and Dislikes

The Rat Pack was an opinionated clan. They considered themselves big leaguers and did not suffer clydes gladly. They were not good on names, so they would be likely to call you Charlie or Sam. They might greet you with “How’s your bird?” This was an inquiry into the health and well-being of your pelvic region. They had no time for creeps, crumbs, bums, bunters, finks, punks, or Harveys. If they said, “Let’s lose Charlie,” it meant that they found your company not particularly stimulating. Similarly, if Frank told Dean that they were in Dullsville, Ohio, it meant that he was bored and wanted to Scramsville. Also if Sammy told Peter Lawford that it was raining and it was not, that was another code for wanting to split the scene. “Cash me out” also meant a desire to leave that particular clam bake. And if another of them blurted out “Hello!” to no one in particular, it meant he had just noticed an attractive woman.

Much of the yakuza’s elaborate slanguage contains naughty words and scatological phrases that are not fit to print here. And just as the yakuza adopted a dress code straight out of Hollywood gangster movies, they borrowed some English words in a linguistic hybrid called “Japlish.”

Food

Food is an important part of the Mafioso’s life. Every meeting had food; every family event had food. Italian food is the mainstay of American cuisine, and the gangsters love it too, whether from their neighborhood eatery, the back of a bar, or from their mother’s kitchen. And while most mobsters were very masculine and would never stoop to doing “women’s work,” when it came to cooking they were right there stirring the sauce.

It’s All Kosher

Growing up in multiethnic neighborhoods, some mobsters took a fancy to the delicacies of other cultures. In
The Godfather
there is a scene where the family is eating Chinese food. Asian cuisine was popular with mobsters who grew up in Little Italy, which was located right next to Chinatown.

Mobsters in New York were also fond of Jewish food, hearing scams and levying decision over hot pastrami sandwiches and matzo ball soup. In Tampa, mobsters sipped Cuban coffee and ate yellow rice and black beans, while in New Orleans po’ boys and crawfish were Cajun-inspired mobsters faves.

Events

A football wedding is a wedding reception where the food is not a fancy catered affair, but rather plates of cold cuts with sub rolls, called footballs. It was one of the most popular ways to celebrate weddings in the more blue-collar, working-class neighborhoods where most of the gangsters grew up. Caviar wouldn’t fly at a neighborhood wedding!

Prison stays were also situations where food was important. As depicted in the movie
Goodfellas
, mobsters sometimes had cells that were different from the accomodations for the general population, and they could get Italian delicacies brought in. Even in tougher conditions, mobsters often bribed guards to bring in salamis and cheese.

CHAPTER 19
The Mafia on Television

The two most famous mob shows on television are ABC’s
The Untouchables
and HBO’s
The Sopranos
.

Both shows were and are controversial and also ratings blockbusters. They have been accused of defaming the reputation of Italian Americans, yet are enormously popular with Americans of all ethnici-ties. But much the way that the mobster has been a staple of the movies, gangsters have been bad guys in television for as long as the little box has been beaming signals into households across the country.

A 1950s Hit

Eliot Ness was a stalwart young federal agent when he was assigned to the Chicago office and began his campaign against Al Capone. He and his elite corps were called “untouchable” because they couldn’t be bribed. This set them apart from many of their brother officers at the federal level and on the Chicago police force.

Ness got Capone on tax evasion charges, despite his many more malevolent transgressions. J. Edgar Hoover was intensely jealous of Ness’s successes and did his best to thwart his upward mobility. Ness wrote his memoirs in the 1950s and died shortly thereafter, bitter and in obscurity. He did not live to see his autobiography become the source material for one of the most successful television shows in the new medium’s history.

The First TV Gangland Hit

Robert Stack played Eliot Ness in
The Untouchables
TV series, which first aired in October 1959. The show ran until September 1963. After the 1987 movie was a big hit, Stack starred in the TV movie
The Return of Eliot Ness
. This was a purely fictional rendition, and Stack was a little long in the tooth to play Ness, who died in his middle fifties.

Staccato Delivery

The machine guns were not the only things with a rat-a-tat-tat delivery on
The Untouchables.
The show was narrated by the notorious newspaper and radio personality Walter Winchell, no stranger to covering real-life gangsters. Winchell’s delivery was as rapid-fire as the Tommy guns in the garage on St. Valentine’s Day. A slower yet nevertheless measured staccato was intoned by TV’s Eliot Ness, Robert Stack. Stack later used his trademark delivery on
Unsolved Mysteries
.

The two-part pilot revolved around Ness’s pursuit of Al Capone. The earlier episodes were done in documentary style, and the gangsters Ness battled were based on real people, hence the controversy and the lawsuits.

When real-life crime figures were exhausted, Ness took on fictionalized hoods and some real hoods that the real Ness never encountered, such as the malevolent matriarch Ma Barker. Though the real Untouchables were long gone by World War II, the fictional Ness was still operating in Chicago in the 1940s and matching wits with Nazi saboteurs.
The Untouchables
ran for four seasons and has been in reruns ever since. It even inspired a movie version in 1987 (see Chapter 20).

There was also a 1993 television version of The Untouchables that emulated the look and feel of the 1987 movie. Elliot Ness was played by Tom Amandes, who later went on to star on the show Everwood. Al Capone was played by character actor William Forsythe. While Capone’s bribes and bullets could not touch Ness and company, bad ratings could. The show lasted only two seasons.

Critical Responses

The Untouchables
was a violent program, a Tommy gun shoot-’em-up on the mean streets of 1930s Chicago. By today’s standards it is rather tame, but it shocked many viewers in its initial network run. CBS received many protests from parents who were concerned about the impact the show would have on their children. The violence was a forerunner of what later TV shows would become. In that sense,
The Untouchables
might be considered one of the more influential shows in television history.

Ethnic Backlash

Most of the protests about the show came from Italian-American groups. The old Cagney and Bogart films rarely used Italian surnames for their characters, but
The Untouchables
made no secret of the ethnicity of its villains. Capone and his cronies were mentioned by name, and many felt this was an ethnic slur. In fact, the producers were sued by, among other people, Al Capone’s widow!

Far-Reaching Implications

Desilu Productions, a company run by two classic TV icons, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, produced
The Untouchables
. At one point Desi received death threats and was obliged to travel with bodyguards. The ever-volatile Francis Albert Sinatra even accosted Arnaz in a Hollywood restaurant and chided him for his involvement in such a scandalous show.

Eventually, some compromises were made. Once the series had exhausted the many historical figures in the Chicago mob, they decided to give the fictional villains non-Italian-sounding surnames. And the actor who played “Nick Rossi,” one of Ness’s team, got more lines as a result. This was to highlight an Italian-American good guy on the show.

Robert Stack, now so associated with the role of Eliot Ness, was actually a last-minute replacement for actor Van Johnson, who bowed out at the eleventh hour. Stack went on to make television history, imbuing Ness with a stoic manner and clipped speech patterns that were affectionately parodied by everyone from Leslie Nielsen to Dan Aykroyd.

Money Talks

The mob was not pleased with their depiction in
The Untouchables
. One of the sponsors of the show was L&M cigarettes, back in the days when tobacco advertising was allowed on TV. Rumor has it that the mob threatened to use their clout with the mobster “Tough Tony” Anastasia threatened to use his clout with the Longshoremen’s unions to see that millions of cartons of L&M cigarettes would sit on the loading docks, unpacked by the longshoremen and undelivered by the truckers. L&M dropped its sponsorship of the show in short order, costing the network and all those concerned a lot of money.