Why mobsters don’t talk like you and me
CRIMINALS, MORE OFTEN than not, do not have resumes. They generally can’t peddle their services on billboards, hire advertising agencies to develop their brands, find new hires on Monster.com, or discuss their problems at trade shows. And yet, just like normal, everyday law-abiding citizens, criminals are often businesspeople, seeking the one thing that every good company needs most: good, reliable help.
The dilemma of whom to trust is not one that’s exclusive to criminals–we make such decisions every day–but it’s a problem that’s especially prickly for those who live in a world shrouded in secrecy, a world where even a man’s name may not be his actual name. In his new book, ”Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate” (Princeton University Press), sociologist and Mafia expert Diego Gambetta explores this subculture and unearths an unspoken language among bad men. He offers insight on how mobsters, pedophiles, prisoners, and other shady characters earn one another’s trust and prove their mettle. And what he documents is both disturbing and, sometimes, hilarious.
It turns out–according to Gambetta, a native Italian and a sociology professor at the University of Oxford–that there are really practical reasons why Sicilian mobsters like to use nicknames, why pedophiles might out themselves to others online, why prison inmates fight (or don’t fight), and why mobsters from Japan to Russia might be out there, right now, reciting lines from ”The Godfather,” such as, ”Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
No, seriously.
IDEAS: Based on your research, what would people find most surprising about how people communicate in the criminal underworld?
GAMBETTA: I would say doing things that would seem irrational to us. Like revealing bad things that you’ve done. Or hurting yourself. Or hurting innocent people. I have a chapter on self-harm, which is probably the most unexpected thing you find.
IDEAS: What are some examples of ways criminals compromise themselves to prove their toughness or trustworthiness to another criminal?
GAMBETTA: One thing you can look at is how pedophile rings on the Internet work. Some of them work by asking new members to contribute previously unknown photographs to their website. In that sense, they contribute to the website of pedophile photographs, but at the same time they’re also giving information that they themselves have done that. So they are unlikely to be undercover agents. And with respect to physical harm, the best domain in which criminals have to prove their toughness, day in and day out, is prison. You find a lot of self-harm in prison.
IDEAS: What will prisoners do to themselves?
GAMBETTA: They will cut themselves, bang their head against a wall, swallow dangerous objects.
IDEAS: And that proves what?
GAMBETTA: It proves that you are tough enough and mad enough for them not to easily consider the option of coercing through physical violence.
IDEAS: In every prison movie you see, prisoners are fighting. Are prisoners really fighting all the time?
GAMBETTA: Yes, they certainly do fight a lot. And from a social science point of view, the interesting thing is when do they fight rather than not fight?
You see, for instance, that younger people and women tend to fight more than older prisoners, longer-sentenced prisoners, hardened criminals, because they are under a greater threat. They don’t have a violence capital to display.
IDEAS: You dedicate a chapter of the book to nicknames that criminals, namely mobsters, use, including The Accountant, Joe Baloney, Mozzarella, and–my favorite–Nino the Fool. Why do mobsters use nicknames so often?
GAMBETTA: The more dangerous the job you do as a mobster, the more it seems nicknames are used. For those that were convicted of homicide, they were referred to by others much more frequently by nicknames than by their real names. One hypothesis is they use it to make it harder for law enforcement to identify them. And there’s a simple reason–at least in Sicily. Namely, that a lot of people have the same name.
IDEAS: In the Mafia underworld, how celebrated is the movie ”The Godfather”?
GAMBETTA: It is very celebrated. Not just by the Sicilian Mafia and by the Italian-American Mafia, but oddly enough by people in the same line of business in Russia, in China, and in Japan. We have evidence that they understood that that was the sector of the economy in which they themselves moved, and there’s lots of evidence that they liked the film, that they could recite, by heart, bits of the film, in countries which you would think would have nothing to do with it.
IDEAS: We’ve got criminals out there in China and Japan who are modeling themselves after Michael and Sonny Corleone?
GAMBETTA: We do have evidence of that. Yes.
IDEAS: What are some other ways that criminals are modeling themselves on film portrayals?
GAMBETTA: Well, I guess ”The Godfather” is the big example because, for example, they don’t like movies like ”Donnie Brasco.”
IDEAS: Why not?
GAMBETTA: ”Donnie Brasco” is a very good movie, but it shows them as losers, as being taken in by this extremely skillful FBI agent, Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco. Several of them landed in jail, thanks to his undercover operation. And so, the movie portrays them at the losing end, and they don’t like that. Movies for them are a way of advertising, a way of gaining legitimacy.
IDEAS: Do you watch mob movies? ”The Godfather”? Did you watch ”The Sopranos”?
GAMBETTA: I did.
IDEAS: Did you enjoy it?
GAMBETTA: I did enjoy it, yes. Although I don’t think very many of them would go and see a psychiatrist. I don’t think there’s any record of anyone doing such a thing.
IDEAS: What about that great American movie ”Analyze This,” starring Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro?
GAMBETTA: I didn’t see that one.
IDEAS: You’re probably better off, actually.
GAMBETTA: I suspect I was.
Freelance writer Keith O’Brien, winner of the 2009 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, is a former staff writer for the Globe.
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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/do_you_speak_criminal/
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