The Sins of Irish Fathers

The first big scene in the “The Godfather” takes place at a wedding. In “Road to Perdition,” it’s a wake.

Therein lies a signal of how director Sam Mendes’ new film, starring Tom Hanks as an Irish American hit man in Depression-era Illinois, will offer a variation on Hollywood’s long fascination with gangsters. The gangsters in “Road to Perdition” are primarily Irish, not Italian, and their moral failings are dramatized in a fatalistic universe dominated by the Irish Catholic Church.

“I think the Catholicism in the film is crucial,” says Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of “American Beauty,” “because it gives these people a structure that tells them it’s still possible to be saved.”

Paul Newman is cast uncharacteristically as a vicious Irish godfather, Rooney, who rules a criminal empire in rural Illinois in 1931. The story focuses on his most trusted henchman and surrogate son, Michael Sullivan (the Hanks character), depicted as a once-poor immigrant who took up with Rooney when it was the only work he could get. But Sullivan is not proud of his violent job and tries to keep it a secret from his two young sons.

From “Public Enemy” to “GoodFellas” movies have developed their own gangster mythology--and like most mythology it’s one that is only loosely related to reality. “Road to Perdition” relies upon this mythology but gives it a different twist, one that’s rooted in a religion in which even the priests are part of the gang.

Like the Mario Puzo-Francis Ford Coppola scenario for “The Godfather,” “Road to Perdition,” which opens Friday, is an immigrant’s story, but one with a bleaker mood and perhaps more preoccupation with the wages of sin. In a scene between Rooney and Sullivan, set in a church, the older man tells the younger one, “No one in this room is going to heaven,” an acknowledgment that both are damned for the choices they have made.

But bad as they are, Mendes takes pains to show these two main characters attending Mass and observing church rituals because “their faith saves them from sinking into the moral chaos” represented by another hit man, a mercenary sociopath played by Jude Law who is hired to kill Sullivan and one of his sons. “How do you marry an absolute morality with personal morality?” is the way Mendes poses the film’s thematic question.

“There’s a very strong Catholic sensibility there,” says David Self, the screenwriter who adapted the film from a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins (with illustrations by Richard Piers Rayner). “Michael Sullivan is a man haunted by his religion.”

Whether actual hit men think this much about spiritual issues is open to question (and if they do, whether they are more apt to be Irish than Italians or Jews), but “Road to Perdition” is a reminder that based on a closer look at American history, the Irish have been underrepresented in the cinematic gangster parade.

The films “Miller’s Crossing,” “State of Grace” and “The Cotton Club” all dealt with Irish criminals, and director Martin Scorsese will also include early Irish American gangs in mid-19th century New York in the upcoming “Gangs of New York.” But Italians have long held top billing in the American iconography of organized crime, from “Scarface” and “The Untouchables” to “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” with Jews (“Once Upon a Time in America,” “Bugsy,” “Billy Bathgate”) a distant second.

“It’s not a big secret that the Irish have been involved in this stuff,” Self says, “but it hasn’t been explored because they didn’t produce as many self-promoting charismatic figures.”

Mark Haller, a professor of history and criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia who for 30 years has been studying the rise of illegal enterprise in the United States, says, “By the 1890s, the Irish dominated gambling in the U.S.,” having brought the custom of betting on horse races with them from the old country. Bootlegging followed and blossomed during Prohibition.

“I think it’s important that they’re Irish,” Mendes says of his main characters, “because something happens to a community that arrives on these shores with nothing, and their national identity provides them with sustenance.”

Although “Road to Perdition” is only loosely based on real events, the idea that a crime syndicate in western Illinois during the Depression was run by an Irish gang “would not be surprising to anyone familiar with the underworld at that time,” Haller says, pointing to the prominence of the Irish in 20th century Chicago politics. “It was common for a guy who was the major bookmaker in an area to run for city council.”

Haller meanwhile attributes the rise of the Sicilian mafia mythology not only to the influence of “The Godfather,” but also to “scholarship in the late 1960s that suggested Italian dominance in crime,” which he believes was flawed, stemming from earlier congressional hearings that focused too narrowly on Italians and subsequent FBI wiretap reports that did much the same. He even argues that Al Capone was overrated.

“Capone was never a member of a mafia-like group, and he didn’t even dominate crime in Chicago,” Haller says. “But he did hold press conferences.”

Collins, the author who has made a career out of writing fact-based graphic crime novels set in the 1930s and ‘40s Midwest, believes the Irish weren’t considered as colorful as the Italian mobsters of that era. “Maybe the Irish assimilated sooner,” he says.

Collins was doing research for one of his Nate Heller detective books when he came across the story of a real Irish godfather named John Looney whose base of operations was Rock Island, Ill., 20 miles east of Collins’ home in Muscatine, Iowa.

“Road to Perdition” is the Looney legend writ large as the framework that holds the tale of Michael Sullivan, whom Collins says he largely invented.

“Having written a lot about Italian gangsters, I thought, why not write about this other slice of society?” Collins says. “But the bottom line is that it’s a dark side of the American dream story: immigrants being denied the American dream but going after it anyway. And I wanted to explore the notion Americans have that you can be a bad man at work and a good man at home.”

Current leaders of the Irish American community in the so-called Quad Cities area of eastern Iowa and western Illinois, where Looney once roamed, acknowledge the legend of the former crime boss but are not eager to resurrect it. Pat Burke, president of the St. Patrick’s Society of Quad Cities U.S.A. says, “That’s why our society is not championing the movie.”

The exact location of the town where the Looney-turned-Rooney character lives is not specified in the film, only shown to be many miles of farmland removed from Chicago, where Sullivan travels to seek help from Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti, played by Stanley Tucci. “Looney was a real bad character,” says Bill Fisher, a retired captain in the Moline, Iowa, Police Department and chairman of Irish Heritage Day in nearby Davenport, “but as far as I know, he was the only one,” meaning the only prominent Irish gangster from the area that anyone can remember.

Told from the point of view of Sullivan’s 12-year-son (played by Tyler Hoechlin) remembering a six-week period when he went on the lam with his gangland father, “Road to Perdition” is “an Irish tragedy,” in the words of screenwriter Self, “with elements of redemption and confession” blended with the violent acts that unfold.

“I’m an Irish Catholic guy myself,” says Self, who adds that he wanted to tell “an everyman story about organized crime, rather than the story of the top family guy.” Hence the focus on the henchman rather than the king.

Hanks and Newman both portray killers who have made pacts with the devil, but the henchman’s heartfelt struggle to save his son from a life like his own becomes the movie’s narrative thrust.

In the process, some of the darkness that hangs over Hanks’ character is lifted. “You make the good bad guy the best man in his world” is how Collins looks at the redeeming qualities in his Catholic antihero.

This view is unlikely to assuage Lynn Cutter-Gronke, the great-granddaughter of a Looney lieutenant named Anthony Billburg, whom she believes to be the role model for Michael Sullivan. Cutter-Gronke, who grew up partially in Rock Island and now lives in Torrance, has not seen “Road to Perdition” but through the years has taken a dim view of Hollywood’s tendency to glamorize gangsters.

“They were horrible people!” Cutter-Gronke says about Looney and his gang. “There’s a difference between victims in Hollywood movies and victims in real life. People can talk about stuff like this who haven’t lived through it, but we lived it, we know it, it affected our whole family for generations--the shame, the fear, the alcoholism. The town never really recovered.”

Her great-grandfather, who ran afoul of Looney, she says, when he tried to leave the gang and form his own empire, staged an ambush in an alley in 1922 in an effort to kill Looney. It failed, killing Looney’s son Connor instead. Billburg went to prison for 12 years and later died of tuberculosis, as did Looney.

Collins says he is unaware of Billburg or his great-granddaughter.

“There were several lieutenants that Looney betrayed,” the author says. “But there was no one like Sullivan. I don’t like to use real historical figures in a dishonest fashion. I was infuriated by ‘The Untouchables’ movie where [screenwriter] David Mamet had Frank Nitti thrown off a building by Elliot Ness--something that never happened.”

Even if Collins had used the real Billburg as a role model, it would have posed an additional problem for Sam Mendes and company: Billburg was Swedish, not Irish. Which might be welcome news at the St. Patrick’s Society of the Quad Cities U.S.A., but not anywhere that stories are told and movies are made.

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Sean Mitchell is a regular contributor to Calendar.