GANGSTER SQUAD…THE REAL ONE

 The other night, I watched—again—the 2013 Ruben Fleischer film Gangster Squad, starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone. I often watch late-night movies. It’s a habit I got into when I had a great deal more work for hire than now, and was under constant stress during the day. My work is all “mind work”—research, writing, editing and translation—and when there’s too much of it, it can be exhausting. By night-time my eyes are usually pretty well shot for any heavy reading, although I do always read a chapter of whatever book I’m into, before shutting off my bedside light. So relatively mindless movie-watching is basically a way to chill out before going to bed, where, otherwise, I might spend a lot of the night staring at the ceiling in the dark. And as it is, at least officially tucked into bed, I can only sleep about four hours.

Some nights, and more and more often, as tastes in movies change and most of the films I’d like to see again go into the “obsolete box” at the distributor’s, I can’t find anything appealing to watch and end up sitting in front of the TV with my headphones on (so as not to keep my wife up) staring at the backs of my eyelids. But now and again, there’s something to hold my interest.

Examples? Ranking high among the least, but still occasionally, shown are what are now considered to be of almost Jurassic vintage: The Magnificent Seven (the one with Yul, not Denzel, although the remake will do if the other one isn’t available: just pretend it’s an entirely different movie…because it is); The French Connection (I or II, makes no difference, both great rogue cop stories, and no one can make you believe it like Hackman); The Great Escape (whenever Nazis are being outsmarted by their prisoners, I’m there, and nobody ever rode a nine-hundred-pound German motorcycle quite like Steve McQueen); Gunfight at the OK Corral (Burt Lancaster’s habitual stiffness made him a decent Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas was a convincing if too healthy-looking Doc Holliday), although I prefer Hour of the Gun (basically the same story but with a much more human Earp—James Garner—and with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as the moribund but still dangerous Doc Holliday), and Bullit (again, raw, quintessential Steve McQueen at his implacable finest).

I always have a real dichotomy running in my mind while I read books or watch movies involving street justice. As an op-ed writer and editorialist, I always had an unwavering stance in favor of strict adherence to the rule of law and pro civil and human rights. I still do. I support the idea that no matter how bad a criminal is, he or she has a right to an unbiased trial and proper defense. The law, I tell myself, should be steadfast and unwavering. If not, you get police abuse and kangaroo courts. You get Rodney King and George Floyd. And more recently, you get Kyle Rittenhouse and his (not) victims.

But when I hang up my journalist hat and sit down to read or to watch TV and find myself in the midst of a narrative about tough gangsters and even tougher cops, there’s a hidden savage that takes over and finds great satisfaction in the street justice that those stories dispense. Perhaps the best example is the 1987 Brian De Palma film, The Untouchables. In point of fact, I for one have always believed that Prohibition was the most flawed, most hypocritical and most self-righteously puritanical federal law ever enacted. It was, furthermore, a law that, far from ending vice, did an incredibly efficient job of promoting it by making mafia bootlegging a multi-million-dollar business. And yet, there is something really appealing to me about Eliot Ness and his handful of “Untouchables” taking on Al Capone, at the time not just a ruthless gangster but also the most powerful man in Chicago.

My wife is appalled by the fact that I can accurately recite by rote most of the lines in the script along with the actors as they say them. More appalled still is a writer friend and avid cinema buff who hates De Palma and despises David Mamet, who wrote the screenplay. His idea of truly great classics includes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—A Space Odyssey and, by the same director, the 1975 film Barry Lyndon. I’d have to beg off if he ever invited me to see either of them with him. My snoring would make it impossible for him to enjoy the performance. 

That said, I never miss a chance to see Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a really extraordinary Vietnam Era story, in which the whole first half is devoted to the military training of the era and in which R. Lee Ermey—who once served as a drill sergeant in real life—not only plays the part of the platoon’s trainer well, but is, precisely, a carbon copy of my chief drill instructor in 1970 when I took Basic Combat Training at Ft. Bragg, NC. I so identify when I see the film that I find myself sweating right along with the other recruits as I watch him put them through their paces and tear them a new hole to breathe through.  

R. Lee Ermey, quintessential DI

But, with regard to The Untouchables, those lines that I’ve committed to memory are just so good! Like when the tough Irish beat cop, Malone (Sean Connery) takes Ness (Kevin Costner) to church—because, he says “these walls have ears” when they meet in the police precinct—to talk to him after the not yet famous Treasury agent asks him to help him “get Capone”. Malone asks Ness, in order to nail Capone, “What are you prepared to do?” Ness tells him, “Everything within the law.” To which Malone asks, “And then what are you prepared to do?”

He elucidates. “You wanna know how to get Capone? Here’s how. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone.”

When he asks Ness if he’s ready to do that and Ness says he’s sworn to get Capone using all legal means at his disposal, Malone sighs and says, “Well, the Lord hates a coward.” And then, “Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?”
“Yes,” Ness answers.
“Good, ’cause you just took one.”

Later, as Malone, twelve-gauge pump in hand, is leading Ness to Chicago’s South Lasalle Street Post Office to carry out their first successful raid on Capone’s operations, which work out of the backroom warehouse of that federal property, the tough Irish cop says, “How do you think Capone knew about your raid the other night?”

To which Ness says, “Somebody on the cops told him.”

“Right,” says Malone. “Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.”

Malone convinces Ness that he can trust no one on the police force.

“Then, where are we gonna get help?” Ness asks.

“If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.”

And THEN what are you prepared to do?

Enter a young Andy Garcia as Stone. Ness and Malone go to the pistol range where police recruits are practicing and Malone asks the instructor to send out the consistently two best shots. But one at a time.

The first guy is a straight-arrow blithering idiot who, when asked why he wants to be a cop, stutters, stammers, searching for the textbook answer and finally says he thinks maybe he could help…the force. Malone thanks him and sends him back to class before turning to Ness and saying, “There goes the next chief of police.”

Now wise-guy Andy Garcia comes out. 

“This kid's a prodigy,” says the instructor.

“Why do you want to join the force?” Malone asks.

Stone, with an ironic grin, “To protect the property and...”

“Oh, please, don't waste my time with that bullshit! Where are you from, Stone?” asks Malone, cocking his head and scrutinizing the recruit.

“From the Southside.”

“Stone? George Stone, that's your name? What's your real name?”

“That is my real name,” says Stone.

“Nah! What was it before you changed it?”

“Giuseppe Petri.”

“Geezus, I knew it! That's all you need, one thieving wop on the team!”

Cuffing the towering Malone on the shoulder, Stone says, “What's that you said?”

Malone, shoving his clipboard into the other man’s chest: “I said that you're a lyin' member of a no-good race.”

Standing toe to toe with Stone, as Malone feels him making a move, he pulls a sap from his coat to hit Stone with, but Stone already has his .38 drawn and the barrel shoved against Malone’s throat right under his chin. “That's much better than you, you stinkin' Irish pig,” Stone says.

“Oh, I like him!” says Malone with a grin over his shoulder to Ness.

“Yeah,” says Ness, “I like him, too.”

“Congratulations, son,” says Malone. “You just joined the Treasury Department.”

This is classic cop-story cinema, and excellent writing. And the outcome is a classic ending of good triumphing over evil. Ness bends the rules he said he would uphold. He even, technically, commits murder by throwing gangster hitman Frank Nitti (chillingly played by Billy Drago) off the roof of the court house to his death, but only after the other man has murdered two members of his team, one of whom is Malone. We get the feeling that the end has justified the means, a corrupt judge is forced to do the right thing, and Capone goes to jail. It’s a question of fighting fire with fire.

The real Eliot Ness

Gangster Squad is the same kind of story, but with way fewer constitutional guardrails. The Untouchables is, in the end, almost totally fictional, except that there really was an Eliot Ness, who after Prohibition, became Cleveland’s Safety Director, placing him in charge of the police and fire departments. There he had as remarkable a career as he had in the Treasury Department, but when he started flirting with a mayoral run, his career went south, he divorced his wife Edna and he became a notoriously heavy drinker. He did work for the federal government out of Washington after leaving Cleveland but never recovered his past glory, and died of a heart attack in 1957, at the age of fifty-four.

There was indeed also an Al Capone who was every bit as flamboyant and larger-than-life as Robert De Niro played him in the movie. Even the scene where De Niro-Capone bashes one of his men’s brains out with a baseball bat is a reasonable facsimile of a real-life occurrence. And, as in the film, Capone did actually go to prison on tax fraud charges. But the rest of the film is almost totally a fabrication.

Capone...not exactly De Niro

For instance, the only time Capone and Ness actually met in person was when Ness was one of the federal officers who accompanied the convicted gangster to prison after sentencing. And in real life, Ness had nothing to do with Frank Nitti’s death. After a grand jury was convened to look into allegations of his organization’s extorting the Hollywood film industry, many years after Prohibition, Nitti, who didn’t want to die in prison, committed suicide—incredibly, by firing three shots from a .32-caliber revolver because he was so drunk that he missed his head with the first shot, fired the second through his jaw, with the small-caliber bullet exiting his skull but not killing him, and finally,  firing a third shot directly into his brain and finishing the job.

De Niro as Capone...baseball!

But Gangster Squad is a much more grim and true-to-life film. There’s no scintillating dialogue or memorable quotes. It’s pure action and raw violence. There’s no bending the rules—they get broken all to hell. And—exception made for certain literary license—it is a true story.

The LA Gangster Squad—Organized Crime Intelligence Division or OCID—has been rendered legendary thanks to writers like James Ellroy, Paul Lieberman and Donald H. Wolfe, in all of whose works the special-ops division has figured prominently. The squad was formed in 1946, on secret orders from then-LA Police Chief Clemence Horrall (played in the film by Nick Nolte). It was indeed headed up by Sergeant Jack O’Mara (played by Josh Brolin), with the specific aim of running members of the East Coast mafia out of Los Angeles. Among the most high-profile of these were, indeed, Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn), Jack Dragna (John Polito), Jack Whalen (Sullivan Stapleton), and Johnny Stompanato (James Carpinello)—who was, famously, movie star Lana Turner’s boyfriend, and who, just as famously, was shot to death by Turner’s daughter while he was in the process of beating the actress within an inch of her life.

The real squad. Sgt. O'Mara seated on the far left

Again, however, unlike in the movie, Cohen never had Jack Dragna killed. In real life, Dragna, who was born in legendary Corleone, Sicily, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of sixty-four. Nor was Cohen beaten to death with a lead pipe in prison, as suggested in the film. He was actually released from prison shortly before he died of cancer at age sixty-two. But beyond these historically inaccurate details, Gangster Squad is largely true.

Josh Brolin actually reached out to the family of his real-life character, Sergeant O’Mara, while he was making the movie. It was a great experience, as Brolin describes it. As it turned out, “He was a guy like me,” Brolin told LA Times reporter Paul Lieberman. “He's in love with California, but came back from the war to a ton of corruption in the LAPD. When Mickey Cohen moved in and monopolized and began to poison Los Angeles, he took personal offense to it. He was the Serpico of his time. He refused to be bought and he wanted to get it done.”

Brolin as O'Mara

How he got it done, however, had little to do with due process. In the movie, O’Mara holds up his LA sergeant’s shield and tells his squad that when they go after the mob, “leave these at home.” They basically act like a rival gang, breaking up Cohen’s operations by any and all means necessary, including attacking, extorting, beating and killing anybody and everybody in the mafia food chain and destroying the infrastructure that feeds Cohen’s fortune, while illegally wire-tapping and surveilling his organization.

By all accounts, O’Mara and his crew did very much the same. While the film was being shot, there was a sole surviving member of the OCID who was in contact with the movie’s production. Consulted about the squad’s standard operating procedure, he assured Brolin and others that if their methods were employed today, “we would have been indicted.”

In an interview with the LA Daily News, Brolin recalled: “I met one guy from the actual Gangster Squad, who was in his eighties. To be able to talk with him, I think, was more informative than anything because he was a tough guy and he was very stoic and elusive, which I loved, and I found him very intimidating…True, they were doing the right thing, but they did it in a way that didn’t necessarily follow all the rules,” Brolin says. “The fact that fifty years later, he wouldn’t tell me anything, I thought, was so bizarre. Like, who’s going to care now? But I’d ask him a question and he’d just look away.”

Last Squad member, Sgt. Lindo Giacopuzzi, died
in 2018 at one hundred years old.

It’s no coincidence that this Gangster Squad code of silence remained as entrenched as the same code, known as omerta, that prevails in the cosa nostra. Clearly, there are parallels, and the code of silence isn’t the only one. While Jack O’Mara was, by all accounts, an unbending straight arrow who never broke a rule for his own benefit, but for the higher benefit of society as a whole, the mob-busters that James Ellroy—one of the most meticulous historical crime-novelists in America—writes about tell a different story. It is the topic, and LA is the setting, for many of his works, none more typical than LA Confidential, which became a contemporary cinema classic, starring James Cromwell, Guy Pierce, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger, when director Curtis Hanson took the story to the screen in 1997.

Cromwell - a chilling Capt. Smith

In it, Cromwell plays a truly chilling Captain Dudley Smith, whom Ellroy fans have known ever since he was a tough and less than honest LAPD detective-sergeant. In LA Confidential, the now-Captain Smith has formed a mob-squad, the main purpose of which—as in Gangster Squad—is to run the likes of Mickey Cohen and company out of LA and back to Chicago or the East Coast where they belong. But there’s nothing altruistic in Smith’s ambitions, which tend toward running out the mobsters so that he can take over their illicit operations and use the LAPD to guard his interests. For his squad, the corrupt police captain has carefully chosen men who represent both brains (like Spacey) and brawn (like Crowe) with their common factor being their moral flexibility. Enter a rookie prodigy (Pierce), who looks like a by-the-book sort of fellow, but who is, barely beneath the surface, every bit as ambitious as Smith.

The story Ellroy tells isn’t (in this case or in that of any of his extraordinary noire-genre police novels) one of a clear-cut struggle between good and evil. His stories are about two evils that violently clash in a death-battle until only one is standing. In neither case is society or the rule of law the undisputed winner. Not by a long-shot.

Cromwell, Crowe, Pierce and Spacey - LA Confidential

Is street justice sometimes a brand of true moral justice that feels utterly satisfying to our moral outrage? Absolutely. It’s also true that all of the score-settling and contempt for procedure can, in the end, lead, as in The Untouchables and Gangster Squad, to a legally reached outcome—in short, the removal from society of dangerous criminals, circumventing their often-incredible power and influence, and convicting them of whatever is possible (in fiction as in real-life, tax evasion in the cases of both Capone and Cohen). This, as an alternative to insisting on the moral obligation to seek punishment for their higher crimes—extortion, corruption, murder—when evidence is too scant to bring them to trial.

In these cases, our moral satisfaction is surely better placed than when “justice” is merely dispensed from the barrel of a gun, as is the case of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, the series of righteous avenger films created by and for Charles Bronson, and all of the copy-cat motion pictures to follow since then. Because, as Ness—through the words of David Mamet and in the voice of Kevin Costner—points out in The Untouchables, when we take the law into our own hands, no matter how noble our purpose, we “become what we have forsworn.” One who kills in the name of “justice”, in other words, is no less a killer than the one who kills with malice. And vengeance isn’t the same as justice, because it isn’t based on what we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt but on what we “believe”, and what we think we know.   

Ignorance can indeed be bliss. Because, if you can’t help being aware, as I am, of your contradictions and your moral conundrums, then it almost takes all the fun out of watching street-justice movies. Almost…but not quite.