Tunes Change, but Mob Aura Stays the Same

From Prohibition’s smoky speak-easies to the often violent world of rap, mobsters have been attracted by the celebrity, glamour and rich financial rewards of the entertainment business.

The music changes from Rogers and Hart to the angry language of the streets. But gangster attitude has continued from Al Capone and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll to the killer of rap star Notorious B.I.G. on Los Angeles’ Museum Row just after midnight March 9.

Hang around the rappers and you can see it. When I was writing about last year’s murder trial of rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, who was acquitted, I was fascinated by him and his entourage, a tight group, swaggering down the hall, filling an entire elevator. I thought it must have looked like that in the ‘20s, when mobsters swaggered down Broadway with the crooners and comics they befriended and backed.

A few days after the rapper’s murder, a colleague said to me, “Isn’t this looking more and more like the 1920s--the outrageous, brazen gangland activity of all sorts. The ‘20s gangs were eventually subdued. Why can’t we do the same now?”

Actually, ‘20s gangs weren’t subdued. They just pretended to go legit, to Vegas, to trash collection or whatever other enterprise they chose to hide their criminal activities.

And, do we really want them subdued, we who celebrate the mob in movies such as “The Godfather,” “Scarface” and “Donnie Brasco”?

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I talked to someone who has studied the subject, Neal Gabler, author of an excellent biography of old-time gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who was in the middle of the old gangland-entertainment scene.

In those days, Gabler said, the mobsters kept in the background, except when they ventured out on expeditions of murder and mutilation. During Prohibition, Gabler said, “the mob was involved in every nightclub in New York.” Comic Joe E. Lewis’ throat was slashed when he got in the middle of a dispute over his contract, leaving him with a hoarse voice that became his trademark.

“But the relationship was by and large covert,” Gabler said. “They did not go around advertising they owned these clubs. Nobody would accuse the entertainers of being mobsters.”

Today, he said, “you have the criminals becoming the entertainers.” The slain Notorious B.I.G. was an ex-crack dealer. “You are seeing crime as entertainment and entertainment as crime, and that is substantially different [than the past]. It adds authenticity to the whole gangster style. What if in the old days Lucky Luciano had said, ‘Why don’t we go on stage, why don’t we write songs about our exploits.’ ”

Actually, it might have been a great hit, especially if they had had rap to make up for any deficiencies Lucky might have had as a singer.

“One of the things you have to understand is there is always a segment of American popular culture whose main purpose is to subvert American culture,” Gabler said. “‘Charlie Chaplin was one of those figures. Charlie Chaplin was reviled by moralists because he was sexual, vulgar, a terrible model.

“Americans love to subvert official culture. They love to subvert all the things William Bennett writes about.”

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But this is more than a culture war. Times reporters Chuck Philips and Alan Abrahamson reported last December that federal authorities are investigating alleged links between Death Row Records, a leading rap recording company, and organized crime in New York and Chicago.

Death Row President Marion “Suge” Knight, behind bars for violating probation on a 1992 assault, has denied such connections. But the unsolved murders of Notorious B.I.G. and of Death Row star Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, each looking like a gangland hit, point up the violence and crime in the rap music scene.

Yet we support it by buying the records--and romanticizing the dark side of human behavior.

The old mob and the new, a perfect circle of crime and violence, beginning in a speak-easy and ending with a music video, the same evil hidden by a saloon singer’s sad ballad or a rapper’s fury and power.