Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia

Even though he recently lost his mind, it is important to remember Rudy Giuliani saved New York not once, but twice. He restored law & order and economic vitality as mayor, but before that, he liberated the City from the tentacles of organized crime. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he spearheaded an unprecedented prosecution of New York’s “Five Families,” all at once. The FBI agents and prosecutors explain how they did it in the three-part documentary series Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia, directed by Sam Hobkinson, which premieres this Wednesday on Netflix.

The FBI had been trying for years to take down the Mafia, but to little avail, until an Ivy League law professor offered the FBI a free seminar on applying the relatively new RICO statute. For the special agents reluctantly attending, it was a revelation. RICO provided a legal framework to tie the bosses to the crimes of their captains and soldiers. This would be a game-changer when paired with greater wiretapping latitude and technology.

Fear City is largely told from the perspective of the FBI and prosecutors, which is actually a nice change from most Mafia-centric mob programming. As a result, there is no phony sentimentalizing the Mafia as some sort of “family”-style organization. Instead, they make it clear what predatory parasites they were. John Savarese, a young prosecutor Giuliani assigned to the case, explains he was particularly outraged by the Mafia’s crimes as an Italian-American, because the Mafia preyed on newly arrived Italian immigrants, forcing their way into their neighborhood businesses.

It will probably be particularly galling for the old thugs to see their longtime critic, Curtis Sliwa, making similar points in the opening (but nobody can deny he adds color). In addition to Savarese, we also hear from Giuliani himself, as well as his lead prosecutor, future Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and many of the FBI Agents assigned to the Five Family-specific task forces. However, some of the wildest talking-head interviews and recreation-sequences feature the mysterious technician who placed their bugs, often literally under the bosses’ noses.

Killing Them Softly: Beating Them Over the Head with “the Message”

Sometimes even criminals need a bailout.  Of course, they can always help themselves to an involuntary one.  That is what crime and government are all about.  Yet, somehow Andrew Dominik turns a modest heist caper into a didactic statement on political economy in the frustrating lost opportunity titled Killing Them Softly (trailer here), which opens today nationwide.

Killing reminds viewers how annoying it is to have to listen to CNN in an airport concourse.  Say what you will about Tarantino, but at least his gangsters listen to vintage soul music.  It is news radio all the way for Dominik’s low life thugs.  At almost every point of Killing news reports of the 2007 financial crisis and Obama’s campaign speeches blare down on viewers like Big Brother in Oceania.  The economy was bad.  We get it, thank you.  Here’s a newsflash—it’s still stalled.

Against this omnipresent backdrop, Frankie recruits his dog-napping buddy Russell to pull off a risky score.  They are going to hold-up the mob-protected card game run by Markie Trattman.  Ordinarily, knocking over a connected game is a losing proposition, but in this case someone else will automatically be blamed: Trattman.  A while back, he conspired to take down his own game and blabbed about it afterward.  Everyone likes Trattman, so they let it slide, once, but if it happens again things are sure to get ugly.

At first, everything seems to be going according to plan.  Then fixer Jackie Cogan is called in to investigate.  He intuitively knows Trattman has been set-up, but he does not have much sympathy for the man.  Frankly, sentiment really is not his thing, not even for an old past-his-prime hitman chum he mistakenly brings in to help clean up the job.

You can see why Brad Pitt is a movie star in Killing.  Even when chewing on over-the-top “America is a corporation not a community” dialogue that would make The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns snicker, he is an electric presence.  For the most part, his scenes with Richard Jenkins’ Driver, the exasperated counselor to the mob’s corporate governing committee, are smartly written and bitingly witty.  However, Dominik plays out his crime as a metaphor for capitalism well past the breaking point.

Yet, when you strip away Killing’s layers of ostensive “relevance,” one is left with a fairly routine crime drama.  A score goes down and several people involved, one way or another, are subsequently dispatched, but it is difficult to care much about their fates.  After all Dominik scrupulously establishes the lack of innocence in this world.  Still, Ray Liotta has his moments as the tragic Trattman, a self-defeating figure like so many of Killing’s characters.

There is no meaningful takeaway from Killing, because its premise is faulty.  The mob is not like a corporation, it is like a government that can take what it wants and change the rules at its convenience.  Dominik’s adaptation of George V. Higgins’ novel gives viewers a few clever lines and a couple of colorful scenes, but that is about the extent of it.  A real disappointment, Killing Them Softly is not recommended when it opens today (11/30) in New York at the AMC Kips Bay and Regal Union Square.

The Girl vs. the Mafia: Amenta’s Sicilian Girl

Teen-aged girls are supposed to be moody and argue with their families, but seventeen year-old Rita Atria never had a chance for domestic happiness. After her uncle murdered her father to assume sole control of their mafia clan, a desire for revenge consumed her. Yet, in pursuit of vengeance, Atria became a unifying symbol of courage and justice for Sicilians, who now reverently honor her memory. While altering her name to Mancuso and simplifying the historical record somewhat, for dramatic and legal reasons, it is indeed Atria’s story Marco Amenta tells in the new mafia drama The Sicilian Girl (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday at Film Forum.

Rita Mancuso is the apple of her father Don Michele’s eye, but even as a little girl, she bitterly clashed with her mother. As a result, when Don Michele is assassinated by her uncle Don Salvo Rimi, her family life becomes distinctly unpleasant. However, she has an ally in her brother Carmelo, an up-and-coming mafia soldier, who shares her desire for retribution, but counsels patience. Unfortunately, when Rimi also eliminates Carmelo, Mancuso loses all that remains of her family support system. With nothing left to lose, she does the unthinkable, approaching an anti-mafia magistrate based on the late Paolo Borsellino who is hailed as a hero across Italy for his organized crime prosecutions.

Girl is grand tragedy, but it is also a very direct and personal story of a young woman forced by circumstances to mature awfully quickly. Its themes of family, betrayal, sacrifice, and justice are quite universal and accessible. In fact, it sharply dispels any lingering notions of the mafia’s alleged family values. Indeed, the only figure in the film that seems to be honoring their familial commitments is the magistrate.

A tricky film to cast in Italy, Girl features a relative newcomer as Mancuso and a veteran French actor as the magistrate. In a star-making turn, Veronica D’Agostino is riveting as Mancuso, perfectly balancing her gritty toughness and the tender vulnerability of her age and circumstances. Yet, it is Gérard Jugnot who really provides the film’s heart and conscience. His understated performance presents the magistrate not as a crusader or a prospective hero, but an honest workaday public servant, trying to do his job.

In a way, Girl is a refreshingly old-fashioned film, presenting fact-based drama without intellectual gamesmanship or irony. Still, Amenta realistically grounds the film in its Sicilian setting, shooting on location in Palermo and Palazzo Adriano (though he found it advisable to avoid Atria’s village of Partanna, for obvious reasons). He even drew a number of supporting cast members from the Sicilian shadow world, including at least one member reportedly considering a career with the mafia.

Atria/Mancuso’s story is sad and infuriating, yet ultimately heroic. Far more emotionally engaging than Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, the sensitive Girl is one of the most satisfying organized crime films to be released in years. It opens this Wednesday (8/4) in New York at Film Forum.