It’s strictly business: the enduring allure of mafiosi in culture

ONLY a fool would associate with Tommy Shelby: he is a gangster, dope fiend and murderer. He is also eminently watchable, thanks to Cillian Murphy’s captivating, dead-eyed portrayal. Shelby is the dark heart of “Peaky Blinders”, which ran for six seasons and has returned as a film, “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man”, streaming on Netflix from March 20th.

On-screen mafiosi like Shelby make riveting anti-heroes: think of Al Pacino’s turn as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” and James Gandolfini’s depiction of Tony Soprano. Such portrayals, Ryan Gingeras, an American historian, explains in an engaging book, have influenced how actual gangsters act, talk and see themselves. The real-life versions may be less charming and eloquent—but, like their fictional counterparts, they reveal a great deal about the societies in which they operate.

Mafias have “reflected” and “helped define the making of the modern world”, Mr Gingeras contends, taking readers from classical Rome to modern Las Vegas to bolster his argument. Across times and places similarities emerge, such as clannishness, ruthless enforcement of rules and devotion to arcane initiation rituals.

They got their name in the early 1800s but have a rich “pre-history”. Mafias displaced brigands and bandits: simple thieves who preyed on travellers. Some brigands, such as the delightfully named Bulla Felix of third-century Rome, controlled small armies, but going brawn for brawn against a functional state is usually a losing proposition. A few lucky bandits were co-opted by young states that needed the muscle.

As states grew richer, as well as more organised, powerful and urban, they developed police forces that extended their authority and helped wipe out roving bandit groups. So mafias emerged in places the government’s influence did not fully reach—such as southern Italy, where the Camorra thrived in Naples and the Mafia in Sicily. Japan’s yakuza drew members from “the lower ranks of society” and gave them a job and a sense of purpose.

Mafiosi grew in tandem with, and sometimes assisted, the countries where they operated. Du Yuesheng, for instance, got rich through opium, prostitution and gambling in inter-war Shanghai, then became a philanthropist and allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Lucky Luciano aided America’s intelligence efforts in the second world war. Whitey Bulger, who ran one of Boston’s most feared gangs, helped the FBI apprehend his rivals.

Some gangs started out as simple kidnappers and extortionists, but Mr Gingeras convincingly argues that prohibition—of opium in China, gambling in Japan, alcohol in early 20th-century America—created modern mafias. It also created the first globally famous mafioso: a New Yorker named Alphonse Capone who spied opportunity in Chicago in the 1920s and founded the feared Chicago Outfit.

In America the mafia’s power waned in the late 20th century. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act of 1970 let prosecutors charge crime-family heads for underlings’ misdeeds that were part of a “continuing criminal enterprise”. Bosses, used to seeing versions of themselves on screen, came to love the limelight, which the old guard resented. “It took a hundred years to put this together,” one old-timer complained to John Gotti, the flashy head of the Gambino crime clan. “You’re ruining it in six months.”

But mafiosos’ hold over popular culture remains entrenched. In Turkey people started calling gangsters baba (godfather) after seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s films. Mr Gingeras notes that recruits to one Mexican cartel are still required to watch the trilogy “as a necessary tutorial in the meaning of loyalty and family values”. Sites of violent showdowns have become tourist destinations. Visitors flock to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which features a bullet-riddled wall against which seven of Capone’s rivals were machinegunned to death in 1929. The venue even cheekily offers discounted admission to law enforcement—an offer, surely, they can’t refuse. ■