How the Mob went mainstream Is this the end of the Italian-American?

The American mob has been failing for years. In 1970, Congress passed the RICO Act, which for the first time allowed prosecutors to target anyone belonging to an “enterprise” involved in racketeering — even if the robbery or fraud was done by someone else. That meant bosses became vulnerable: in the mid-Eighties, several New York dons were indicted under RICO and condemned to 100-year jail terms. The prospect of such awesome sentences soon encouraged mobsters to snitch. One example is Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, now a YouTube regular but who became infamous for testifying against his colleagues in 1992. 

Beyond the rise in guilty verdicts, the mob’s decline can be traced through American culture. When it appeared in 1972, The Godfather mirrored a phenomenon that broadly still existed. Weeks after the movie premiered, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, like Franzese a member of New York’s Colombo family, was gunned down while celebrating his birthday at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. A few decades later, this bloody way of life was already sliding into caricature. In the second episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in 1999, Tony and his friends sit about quoting The Godfather, drowning in nostalgia from their South Jersey strip joint. 

Visit Little Italy now, and Gallo’s killing feels like it could have happened in the Bronze Age. In truth, little but the name remains: the pastries are stodgy, the delis are closed, and the souvenir shops sell t-shirts emblazoned with “Faghedda Bout It”. Across the East River, my old Queens neighbourhood tells the same story. In 1982, two gangsters were executed at Licata’s, a bar the brothers ran in Ridgewood. In some ways, the area hasn’t changed: the yellow brick rowhouses, with their bay windows and Victorian plaster details, look as smart as ever in the sun. These days, though, the mafiosi have disappeared, replaced by $19 cocktail bars. Tellingly, the bar at Licata’s old address remained an underworld stalwart — it’s just that Albanian toughs hung out there instead. 

This hints at a broader trend: while RICO surely ravaged the mafia, the social foundations that gave it strength have crumbled too. That’s obvious enough demographically. Around 1900, that warren of tenements where Gallo was killed hosted some 10,000 paisans, even as substantial Italian-American enclaves arose from Providence to St Louis. Yet you’re now more likely to hear Cantonese than Calabrian on the streets of New York, with only 5% of Little Italy’s population boasting heritage from Il Bel Paese. And if that makes organised crime harder — thugs no longer have a captive audience to extort — the flight to the suburbs is revealing in other ways. 

When it first emerged, at the dawn of the last century, the mafia could recruit from pools of poor young men, just arrived from Neapolitan slums or Sicilian hilltop towns. Illiterate in Italian and ignorant of English, membership helped migrants navigate the treacherous paths of American capitalism, especially when discrimination from Anglo society remained a pervasive (if exaggerated) threat. Through the 1890s, more than 20 Italians were lynched for real or alleged crimes, including 11 on a single day in New Orleans. As late as 1969, sophisticates at Yale could chortle that if “Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen”. Cynically or not, mobsters justified their actions on ethnic grounds too. “Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience,” said Joseph Bonanno, one of America’s youngest ever dons. “This was the glue that held us together.”

Nowadays, Italian-Americans face little worse than lazy jokes. More to the point, they’ve brushed off their outsider status and are fully at home in the American mainstream, earning comfortably more than the national average. There are Italian-American congressmen, and Italian-American asset managers, and an Italian-American judge on the Supreme Court. There’s even an Italian-American first lady: though she was born a Jacobs, Jill Biden’s grandfather was a Giacoppo. The need for Bonanno’s glue, in short, has gone, whacked by Michael Franzese and his $15 dog tags. And if even the remnants of the Cosa Nostra now succumb to America’s contemporary manias — the biggest mob hit in years only happened because the killer was made mad by QAnon — millions of honest Italian-Americans are shedding their identities too. 

The US Census makes this plain. In Philadelphia, for instance, the number of self-identifying “Italians” slumped by a quarter in a decade. And though some 16 million Americans still consider themselves Italian, either in full or in part, that’s down 7% too. The linguistic data is also telling. Between 2001 and 2017, the number of people who spoke Italian at home fell by 38%, a decline that’s particularly marked among youngsters. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-dying tongues in America. Religion, that other bulwark of Italian-American identity, is moving the same way. In 1972, 89% affiliated with the Catholic Church. Four decades on, that figure had dropped to just 56%. All that’s marinated by marriage: as early as 1985, more than two-thirds of Italian-Americans under 30 were tying the knot outside the community. 

Beyond the raw figures, you sense the passing of a world elsewhere. For the first time in years, Italian is no longer America’s favourite cuisine, with cannoli and ziti replaced by Mexican tacos. And then there’s the music. Between 1947 and 1954, some 25 Italian-Americans topped the nation’s pop charts. From Frankie Valli to Perry Como, they seduced audiences with their light tunes and dark looks, playfully embracing their italianità. In a 1959 duet with Dean Martin, appropriately called We’re Glad that We’re Italian, Frank Sinatra crooned for Chianti, and explained that linguini “sends me reeling”. It goes without saying that, in an age when Latino artists make all the running, any attempt to sing about puntarelle and anchovies today would be mocked to a shallow grave. 

There’s an irony here. By wearing their heritage on their sleeves, icons like Sinatra first made it sexy, then acceptable, then routine — then nothing much at all. Not, of course, that Italian-American society will vanish overnight. For one thing, identity is about more than language or God. For another, we shouldn’t overgeneralise. This Christmas, and for many more to come, families will celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a distinctly Italian-American take on the festive meal. No less important, there remain places where the old customs retain some power. Dodge the rats, and take the D Train uptown from Little Italy, and you’ll soon reach another ethnic enclave. This time, though, the Italian community in the Bronx preserves more that makes it special, from mozzarella makers and fresh pasta stores to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a neo-Romanesque doorstop that still offers mass in Italian. 

Yet the broad trends, I think, are indisputable — just consider that Americans loved cricket until the Civil War. What I mean is that where the English have been, Italians are going; that sooner or later, every immigrant community is destined to be conquered by that mangled mongrel army called the United States. Certainly, this is happening far beyond people whose surnames end in vowels. In 2010, around 35 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry, down from 40 million in 1980. Two years ago, self-declared German-Americans accounted for about 12% of the population, a 4% drop in a decade. Other groups, from Belgians to Czechs, are assimilating too. And though the results are sometimes muddled, with Irish-American identity enjoying a late resurgence, this decline is again visible on the streets and in the suburbs. In Upper Michigan, viewers can no longer watch Finland Calling, a bilingual television show that ran for 53 years to 2015. Across the Great Lakes, the Ohio town of Lorain lately witnessed the demolition of the United Polish Club. It had first welcomed patrons back in 1913.

Quite apart from the flattening power of the American Dream, these identities are doubly vulnerable now. In 1960, when the US was almost 90% white, the countless fissures of Old World ethnicity unsurprisingly mattered more. There’s a reason “Polack” jokes were once so common, and why Martin and Sinatra started their song with “apologies to the Irish and the Jews”. But in 2024, when it’s race not ethnicity that counts, how can Welsh- or Dutch- or Swedish-Americans retain their idiosyncrasies in a culture, in politics and in media, that sees them merely as white? When even prime-time comedy decries Tim Walz for “white nonsense” — the answer must be that they can’t. Nor are things likely to change, especially when “majority-minority” status arrives in a few decades, and when Trump and his discontents have prodded two-in-five white Americans towards racial identitarianism. 

But integration is an old American pastime. And where the English have gone, and the Italians are going, more recent arrivals will someday travel too. In time, Cantonese will fade from the tenement courtyards. There’ll come a day when those Albanians bury their shotguns and shuffle off to Westchester, the proud dads of asset managers and congressmen. 

This isn’t, however, simply an elegiac tale of loss. Rather, the passing of the clubs, and the cooking, and the identities that underpin them, has birthed a political storm. As late as the Vietnam War, so-called “white ethnics” were habitually assumed to vote Democratic, showing collective loyalty to the traditional party of migrants, Catholics and blue-collar workers. And so it proved: 78% of Polish-Americans voted for Kennedy in 1960, with the same percentage of Irish-Americans backing Johnson four years later. Even Italian-Americans, somewhat faster to go Right than their hyphenated peers, overwhelmingly championed LBJ. After half a century of wealth and assimilation — leavened by demographic shifts and the racially tinged mantras of people like Richard Nixon — the DNC surely would leap at such numbers today. In 2020, barely half of Polish-Americans gave Joe Biden the nod. In New Jersey, 57% of Italian-American men now say they’re Republican, comfortably more than other white males in the state. 

These trends are affecting practical politics. Boasting a large Italian-American population, Staten Island, alone in New York’s boroughs, went red in 2020. That’s dovetailed by GOP gains in other suburbs, in the Bronx and Long Island, where two recent Republican winners were suggestively called Anthony D’Esposito and Kristy Marmorato. Clearly, the Empire State has some way to go before it becomes competitive at the national level, but Donald Trump could nonetheless win more votes here than any Republican since 1988. It’s the same in the battlegrounds. For Poles in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), or Hungarians in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), razor-thin electoral margins mean the conservative turn matters. And recall once more that where they’re going, newer migrants will finally follow. Small wonder some Asians and Latinos are now moving Rightward themselves.

While the numbers are doubtless useful, the most interesting shift is cultural. And here, again, we return to the mob, with Italian-Americans using the last dregs of gangsterism to proclaim their politics. Trawl community Facebook pages, and many posts favourably compare Donald Trump to a mafia boss, praising his thuggish charm and disdain for social convention. It presumably helps that even his name is Don. He may be a born-again Christian, but Michael Franzese is much the same. Between waxing sentimental for the Cosa Nostra, he also shares more polemical videos, for instance reminding viewers that Trump “lowered your taxes” and that “we had no wars” during his time in office. Sometimes, he’s even more explicit. In a February interview with Piers Morgan, the presenter suggested the former president acted like a mob boss. “What’s wrong with that?” Franzese retorted. “You know how many people tell me, ‘I wish the mob was running the country right now’?” As a policy prescription, it sounds dubious. But as a mark of integration, I can think of nothing better.