The Alto Knights
One of the most significant events in the sorry history of organised crime in America is the Apalachin mafia meet-up of 1957 – not a heist, hold-up, shoot-out, trial, assassination or major bust, but essentially a big Italian barbeque held in upstate New York as an adjunct to a conference of sixty or so underworld bigwigs with business to discuss in the wake of Vito Genovese’s recent moves to re-establish himself as boss of bosses.
In this film, scripted by Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) and directed by Barry Levinson (Bugsy), it’s suggested that the event was sabotaged by Genovese’s sometime friend and major rival Frank Costello as a coup to end their escalating hostilities – which include an attempted hit on Costello and the 1930s gangland movie-style assassination of Albert Anastasia in a barbershop – so he could get out of the rackets and settle down to grow roses. It’s dramatically satisfying, though more likely that the mere presence of a fleet of fancy out of town automobiles in hicksville, NY, inevitably drew attention. Levinson stages the scene as a kind of farce, with elderly urban bosses stuck in mud, getting fancy shoes wet, fleeing through forests, waving wads of dollars to flag down passing pick-up trucks and generally flailing … because the immediate upshot was a lot of tiny arrests with no real charges, with a bigger picture being that J. Edgar Hoover was finally pressured to admit what everyone already knew, that there was a national organised crime syndicate in the US. Hoover held off on this for so long because he knew a war on mafia crime was far less winnable than chasing after lone wolf bandits like Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde whose scalps could be displayed as FBI triumphs. Oh, and there were commies to chase.
The chief conceit of the film is casting Robert De Niro as both Costello and Genovese – invoking the myth of good and bad gangsters by presenting Costello as an inoffensive racketeer meeting a public demand and trying to keep things quiet while Genovese is ambitious, violent, paranoid and eager to expand into the newish field of narcotics. In America’s current climate, it’s hard not to see the pair as emblematic of a division between the productive tedium of business as usual and the dangerous excitement of allowing a lying sociopath with a short fuse to attain ultimate power and trash large sections of his own business out of sheer cussedness. It’s slightly distracting that Vito, who has a different body-shape as well as more extreme facial prosthetics, is a heavier disguise for the star than Frank – and there are several seamless scenes in which De Niro and De Niro face off for pointed conversations and confrontations, though it’s objectively funny that great tides of criminal history turn on simmering grudges and misunderstandings as if Vito and Frank were just the gangster versions of The Sunshine Boys.
The Alto Knights – named after a bar/club where crims hung out – streamlines complicated history – Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who were major figures, are either mentioned only in passing or not at all, though I remember from Mobsters that they were all in it with Frank Costello from the early days. The contrasting De Niros have contrasting wives – Debra Messing as a dutiful, cautious helpmeet and Kathrine Narducci as a volatile club-owner who mentions Frank in court in a rant during a divorce hearing and kicks off a lot of trouble. Cosmo Jarvis is funny as hit man Vincent Gigante – in real life, not an amusing figure – who botches the shooting of Frank, and gets hilariously nagged about it and abused by the petty, whiny Vito forever.
Like Levinson’s Bugsy – about another member of this bunch – it isn’t quite a top-tier criminal history on a par with The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America or Goodfellas, which use the crime movie as a way of exploring the puzzle of 20th century America’s fall from grace in a more sinuous, less on-the-nose fashion than this … but it does offer a satisfying, frequently funny sidelight on lifelong petty squabbles which turn out to have enormous implications. Nice to see it’s from Warner Brothers – who have been working this field since The Public Enemy and Little Caesar in the early 1930s and invented the sweep-of-gangster-history genre with The Roaring Twenties in 1939.
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