Gangsters, Then and Now
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Gangsters, Then and Now Lunching with the Sopranos of yesteryear. BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN Back in the early 1950s I would occasionally lunch in New York with Jay Love-stone, the onetime secretary of...
...By one o'clock the place would become pretty full, and I supposed that Adonis and company didn't like to dine with a lot of strangers...
...Can you picture Frank Costello yakking away about erectile dysfunction...
...A sort of dedicated place...
...Towards the end of the meal two big, hulking types sitting at a nearby table would get up and everybody knew it was time to go...
...The character Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, and the characters played by Tony Sirico and Federico Castelluccio look just like the occupants of the Adonis table...
...And when a stray diner and a companion dropped into the half-empty restaurant he was politely received by the padrone...
...He was very much clued into Washington intrigues and gossip, and in time, while still working for the AFL-CIO, he went to work for the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton...
...With such a clientele you could be sure that the osso bucco would be top grade and the pasta truly al dente...
...The successors to Joe Adonis (as an illegal immigrant and jailbird, he was deported during the Eisenhower era to Milan, where he died of natural causes) are now portrayed for us on television, with all their domestic troubles...
...You can never tell about what might happen on the way out if we leave now...
...Its cooking was the best, he said, and it was patronized almost daily by the top guns of the Mafia, from Joe Adonis, the capo di tutti capissimi, down to lesser capos...
...I tried not to look too often at where the mobsters sat: Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Johnny Dio, and others...
...No flashy suits, no flashy ties...
...Jennifer Melfi...
...Adonis and the others seemed so ordinary...
...Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University...
...I can't say I'm enjoying Tony's sessions with his shrink, Dr...
...Is this the end of Rico...
...Melfi all...
...Adonis's table was towards the back of the small, very unfashionable dining room...
...They're Adonis's bodyguards," Jay whispered...
...The difference between the gangster movies of yesterday and today's Sopranos is that we wouldn't have wasted sympathy on Robinson as he tried to bully Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, but now we listen with fascination as Tony tells Dr...
...BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN Back in the early 1950s I would occasionally lunch in New York with Jay Love-stone, the onetime secretary of the American Communist party...
...One reason for the daily lunch was that it avoided using tapped phone lines...
...Back when Hollywood made movies about gangsters starring people like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft, the nearest we got to their private lives was Cagney's squashing half a grapefruit at breakfast into Mae Clarke's stricken face in The Public Enemy...
...And yet, there is nothing like Robinson's last words in Little Caesar: "Mother of Mercy...
...Anyone who stumbled into this place for lunch was seated by the front windows far from the Adonis table...
...Let them go first...
...And except that Tony Soprano and his henchmen are killers, of course, who should all be in jail...
...Tony and his Mafiosi could be operating a giant corporation—except that we never get a look at what they really do with their surplus funds...
...Superb olives, stuffed artichokes, and Italian bread...
...Because the padrone knew Jay as a regular we were seated halfway up and diagonally across from the Adonis table...
...On a few occasions when I went for dinner, I was received politely but the table in the rear was never occupied...
...I couldn't hear what they were saying, and they never seemed to be concerned about our proximity...
...During the meal I would look on, marveling that one of the major mobsters in America and four or five gun-sels were sitting a few yards from my table, eating the same veal parmigiana as I was...
...Joseph Stalin had ousted him in the 1930s, and Lovestone had subsequently become an anti-Communist strategist with an office at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in midtown Broadway...
...It all seemed so normal, so bourgeois...
...I was reminded of all this as I read all the ballyhoo about The Sopranos's new season...
...In fact, why don't the Feds get some RICO indictments of Tony and his mob...
...Whenever we lunched (always at noon), Jay took me to his favorite Italian restaurant—up one flight of stairs on West 55th Street, nothing visible from the sidewalk except the restaurant sign...
...The Sopranos script reminds me of a bunch of Tyco-type business executives phonying up the books...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 4
