Italians and a Mob Mentality

This is shocking.

On Dec. 12, HBO plans to air a movie about organized crime. In “Witness Protection,” a career criminal is the target of a hit at his home that fails. Swiftly gathering his wife and child, he contacts the FBI and is offered full immunity in exchange for testifying against his mob associates trying to kill him. He reluctantly agrees, and the family enters the government’s witness protection program.

Although that seems routine, here’s the stunner.

The marked man’s first name is not Tony, Gino or Paolo, and his last name does not end in a vowel. That’s because Bobby Batton, instead of being Italian, is Irish American.

Get outta here.

Yup, it’s true: Coming soon, that rarity, an equal-opportunity mobster flick made for TV, one that echoes, ethnically at least, the Irish hoodlum Jimmy Cagney played in “The Public Enemy” nearly seven decades ago.

If this tire-screeching hairpin curve is possible for HBO--on which Italians and gangsters have been as inseparable as La Cosa and Nostra since the mid-1990s--who knows where it may lead? To a better place, one hopes, than the repeated Italians-as-Mafia stereotyping that appears to have desensitized most Americans.

While angering others.

You can’t blame Italian Americans or their activist groups--from the National Italian American Foundation to Fieri National--for being teed off at movies and television for so frequently linking Italians and crime. The latter is an organization of students and young professionals urging more positive depictions of Italians in response to “The Sopranos” and the Emmys and the potful of nominations it received this year.

Although that returning HBO series about a New Jersey mob family again taints Italian Americans with violent crime, it is superbly executed as well as widely praised. And Fieri National appears to recognize that it would get less mileage from assailing a series that many feel rises to the level of art than from leaning on TV’s lower-brow Mafiosi that have no redeeming value.

There’s plenty on the slate to target. Scheduled next March on TNT, which recently aired “Family Values: The Mob & the Movies,” for example, is something called “Boss of Bosses,” with Chazz Palminteri playing Paul Castellano, the notorious head of the Gambino crime family.

With just this milieu in mind, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) has sponsored a bill that would create an office, likely within the Federal Communications Commission, to report to Congress on media portrayals of ethnic, racial and religious minorities. “We don’t want to abridge anyone’s rights to free speech,” Fieri founder John Calvelli, who is Engel’s administrative assistant/counsel, said from Washington, D.C. “We’d have an annual conference to discuss everything and get advice from expert witnesses.”

Another conference, another set of sound bites. Nice thought, bad idea. Giving congressional politicians one more soapbox from which to attack their favorite scapegoats--the entertainment industry and TV programs they haven’t seen--hardly seems like a good idea. But you can understand the sentiment.

Showtime contributed its two-part “Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story” in July, following NBC’s rerun of its “Witness to the Mob” miniseries about Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. But it’s HBO that has all but owned TV’s Mafia franchise in recent times, from its “Gotti” movie three years ago to “The Sopranos” and the just-aired “Excellent Cadavers,” a mildly diverting, bomb-blasting, corpse-heavy docudrama centering on Sicilian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone (also played by Palminteri) whose crusade against the Mafia in Palermo cost him and his wife their lives in 1992.

Kablooey! Kablooey! Kablooey!

How novel, an HBO movie threaded by Italian mob violence, this one most notable for its gridlock of bomb-ripped flesh, the crazy wig worn by F. Murray Abraham as a Mafia boss who turned on his buddies, and such dialogue as: “He cut off his heart . . . and gave it to the pigs to eat.”

Oh, those Sicilians.

Even “The Rat Pack,” last season’s HBO movie about Frank Sinatra and his pals, had a Mafia subtext. And its movie this year about mob mensch Meyer Lansky was crisscrossed by Lucky Luciano and other Italian American racketeers. This year’s “Vendetta,” an HBO movie that did contain positive depictions of Italians (albeit in a crime setting), went virtually unpromoted, moreover.

Not that most Americans are complaining about the status quo. Undeniable is their fascination with the very crime they publicly condemn, as long as it doesn’t touch them personally. A scene in “The Sopranos” laid it on the line by showing mob boss Tony Soprano’s wealthy suburban neighbors being almost as intrigued with his line of work as kids are with Michael Jordan.

So it’s not surprising that the nation has loved gangster movies--and the Italian gangsters in them--for decades, witness Cesare Enrico Bandello, the snarling killer that Edward G. Robinson played in the landmark “Little Caesar” in 1930, and Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte in “Scarface” two years later. And on television, nothing has been more savage than Eliot Ness’ duels with Chicago’s Al Capone/Frank Nitti crowd in “The Untouchables,” which tommy-gunned its way through years of lucrative syndication after ending its four-season run on ABC in 1963.

Since the 1972 release of “The Godfather” and its subsequent sequels, however, Americans have been partial to the mythic Mafia of recycled Corleone. No need to exhume Mario Puzo’s family year after year, for it never was buried.

It wasn’t by accident that the opening theme for “Excellent Cadavers” sounded Godfatherly. Or that CBS scored big with viewers in the late 1990s with that pair of cement shoes, “The Last Don” and “The Last Don II,” shamelessly gory miniseries whose body and cliche counts rose simultaneously. Or that in between those two came CBS’ two-part “Bella Mafia,” whose avenging Sicilian mob women alternated between shotgunning their foes and slaving over hot pots of sauce.

Clearly, there’s money in Mafia. But at what cost?

And by the way, more shocking news. The one thing notable about “The Strip,” a new UPN series set in Las Vegas, is its powerful casino owner who looks, talks and acts like “da mob” and is played by that seasoned soldier of mobster roles Joseph Viterelli.

His character here, though, is Cameron Greene, a swanky name that, given his aura as a brutish, thick-necked mug, seems as phony as a bad nose job.

But along with HBO’s Bobby Batton, it’s a start.

*

CRIME II. With the latest FBI figures continuing to show a significant decline in crime nationally (including a 26% decline in Los Angeles murders), the city’s TV stations should change their ways.

They should dramatically curtail gratuitous crime coverage--that frightens people usually for the wrong reasons--in favor of reporting news whose impact is potentially much greater and more dangerous.

That’s what KCBS-TV did earlier this month in a solid four-part report by its “special assignment” unit reexamining and updating charges that contamination has been spread to the Simi and west San Fernando valleys by Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

This controversy has been raging for some time, and on Saturday, state investigators faulted California’s health protective agency with acting in bad faith and failing to communicate the lab’s pollution hazards to the public.

Reported by Drew Griffin and produced by Pete Noyes, the KCBS series dealt with the proposed environmental cleanup of the lab, which is located west of Chatsworth. Allegedly at risk are residents living within a five-mile radius of the facility. And 350,000 of them are involved in a class-action suit against Rocketdyne that demands comprehensive tests of soil, water and their health in connection with what Griffin called “the friendly fallout from the hill above them.”

Not so friendly, charged residents who related health horrors that they attributed to Rocketdyne pollution in a balanced KCBS report that was just the kind of calm, thoughtful, well-researched reporting on a critical issue that local stations should be doing instead of fixating on street crime.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.