Adler - Hollywood and the Mob

The Producers: Money, Movies and Who Really Calls the Shots

Tim Adler

First published in Great Britain in 2007

This electronic edition published in 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 2007 by Tim Adler

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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For Jack and Theo

Harry, the guys a crook.

So? This town he should fit right in.

Hollywood producer Harry Zimm
referring to mob loan shark Chili Palmer
in Elmore Leonards Get Shorty.

When my mother and father first visited New York in 1957 there was such a commotion outside their hotel one morning that, at first, my mother thought Marilyn Monroe had arrived. Then, through a window to the left of the hotel lobby, she caught a glimpse of a dead man sprawled in a barbers chair. What my mother had witnessed was the murder of Mafia gangster Albert Anastasia.

Anastasias nicknames in the Mafia were the Executioner and the Mad Hatter. Comedian Jerry Lewis remembered playing the Copacabana Club in New York in the 1950s, and making fun of a man in the audience. What Lewis did not realise was that his victim was Anastasia. Dean Martin stepped in to cut his pal off before he said something stupid. Years later, Lewis remembered being onstage that night although he could not see him, the comedian could feel, as he put it, the gangsters cold steel eyes hitting him like bullets.

The gangsters wealth came from his control of Brooklyns docks, at the time the entry point for almost all imports into the USA (and most exports leaving it). The forty thousand dock-workers (longshoremen) who operated the three hundred deep-water ports along the Brooklyn waterfront were ultimately under Anastasias control. Dockworkers took what they wanted or boosted, in Mafia parlance before loading goods onto ships, passing loot back up to their Mafia overseers. On the Waterfront (1954) exposed Mafia intimidation of dockworkers, deciding who could or could not work on a particular day. However, Anastasia wanted to be more than just the capo, or street boss, of the docks. He murdered his own don, Vincent Mangano, and became enforcer to Frank Costello, head of the five Mafia families in New York.

Now Anastasia became embroiled in a power struggle within the Mafia. Vito Genovese was vying for control of the New York mob, or Syndicate as people called it. Genovese was determined to replace Costello he of the wheezy, gravelly voice who was one of the inspirations behind Marlon Brandos character in The Godfather to become capo di tutti capi, or boss of bosses. He persuaded Carlo Gambino, Anastasias second in command another inspiration for Brandos character to join him. But first, Genovese would not only have to get Costello out of the way, but Anastasia as well.

Gambino justified Anastasias murder to the Commission or board of directors of the five families because the waterfront boss was guilty of charging initiates a $40,000 fee for inducting them into the Mafia, a break with tradition which appalled the dons. Gambino thus assembled a trio of assassins, the Gallo brothers Joe (Crazy Joe), Larry (Kid Twist) and Albert (Kid Blast) to murder the Brooklyn gangster.

On 25 October 1957 two men walked into the Park Sheraton Hotel as Anastasia sat back in the barbers chair. Towels had been draped over his face. They shot the gangster in the back of the head several times. Anastasias foot kicked so hard that it broke the footrest.

Ever since my mother first told me as a child that story of mistaking the crowd outside the Park Sheraton for the arrival of Marilyn Monroe, I have had the idea that somehow Hollywood and the Mafia are intertwined.

Delving deeper, one realises that not only has the mob run through the history of the movies like letters through a stick of rock, but, in some cases, the Mafia actually was Hollywood. The dream factory has always been grounded in a criminal reality. The Mafia has intimidated actors and producers with threats and violence from the 1930s when the mob was extorting the studios for $1.5 million a year (the equivalent of $14 million today) right up to the present day, with members of the Gambino crime family in prison for threatening actor Steven Seagal.

After all, Hollywood and the mob are both, to an extent, in the same business. The theatre has had a dubious moral reputation for centuries. Wandering minstrels, fairground barkers, exploitative impresarios and various conmen have always peopled entertainment. Both Hollywood and organised crime offer people what they want. One peddles escape through flickering images, while the other sells oblivion through drugs and sex and gambling. The boys had always been involved in the entertainment things, it was a natural, said union organiser and Mafia associate Max the Butcher Block.

Film historian David Thomson has pointed out that Hollywood moguls in the Golden Age often behaved like gangsters. It was a way of acting tough and showing off to each other. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was bosom pals with gangster-turned-agent Frank Orsatti, while Chicago mobster Johnny Rosselli was so close to Columbia Studios boss Harry Cohn that they wore identical rings. Frank Renzulli, one of the executive producers of The Sopranos, says producers have liked to be associated with gangsters throughout the history of show business. Hollywood has come to believe its own mythmaking, seeing gangsters as glamorous rather than merely as thugs and extortionists. Brooklyn gangster Henry Hill, the character Ray Liotta played in GoodFellas (1990), said, All the movie people want to schmooze the hoods. The hoods are like some prized piece of jewellery you parade around with at a party. Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper pointed out the opposite is also true that criminals enjoy hanging around celebrities.

After all, Hollywood has taught gangsters how to dress and how to behave. In person, gangsters were mostly uncouth and stupid. Johnny Rosselli, for many years the Outfits man on the West Coast and a movie producer himself, could not even read. But movie gangsters such as Humphrey Bogart and George Raft, who in real life was under the wing of the Mafia and whose best friend was Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who controlled Hollywoods extras union, were stylish and laconic. Raft taught the boys how to dress white tie with black shirt while Bogart taught them how to speak. As Raymond Chandler noted in