Tony Soprano lives in a suburban McMansion. Don Corleone lives in what amounts to a royal palace with round-the-clock armed guards. Tony Soprano squabbles with his wife over what kind of orange juice she got at the supermarket. Don Corleone has servants to squeeze his oranges every morning. Which is closer to a real-life Cosa Nostra boss – now or in the 1940s?
They live at the Caravelle Inn.
My wife went to a party at Tony Accardo’s second house at this link and a McMansion would be a step up. Same with Sam Giancana’s. You live too flashy and you call attention to yourself, capice?
I’m scratching my head over your link there. It says Al Capone Museum in the link but it directs me to a page about HTTP geekery. What gives? I really am curious to see the house you’re talking about.
From “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances”, by Levitt and Venkatesh
“An individual’s rank within the gang is of critical importance for his personal renumeration. The local gang leader is the residual claimant on drug profits. As shown in Table II, the gang leader retains between $4200 and $10,900 a month as profit, for an annual wage of $50,000-130,000.”
Mph! That ain’t even upper-middle-class, nowadays!
Well the Mafia boss that the Italian police nabbed outside of Corleone the other year was living in a little peasant’s cabin.
One of my coworkers is of Italian descent and has plenty of family back there. His younger sister had a friend in college who happened to be the daughter of a major organized crime figure in Italy; she went to her friend’s house for vacation one time and they were flown in on a private jet, met by a couple carloads of guards and they spent the time at a very nice and extremely safe mansion. Friend’s sister was rather innocent and didn’t quite understand the situation until later.
I guess that covers the extremes, I bet that dropzone is right on the nose for most of them in this country - if you live in a big mansion and have a parking lot full of Ferraris you’ll call a lot of unwelcome attention to yourself.
Don Corleone’s place in The Godfather wasn’t exactly flashy. It was called the “Long Island Compound” – including the main big house and an arrangement of smaller houses in a horseshoe/cul de sac arrangement – the point being that it was off the main roads and access at the open end could be carefully controlled; so it wasn’t designed to impress the world, but to be secluded. I just wonder whether any RL American boss could really afford such a compound.
In the 1960s we had a genuine local Mob boss living in my neighborhood. This was a typical postwar suburban subdivision type neighborhood. He had a typical house for the neighborhood – a little larger than most, but nothing fancy. The house was on a double-size lot and he had a large garden in his back yard.
There was absolutely nothing about the house that would attract any attention – except for the police car that was parked on the street every night.
Going to my husband’s extended family in Jersey is like stepping onto the set of the Sopranos. I’m pretty sure they based the show on his family. (His grandfather was head of the local Teamsters during Hoffa’s reign, if I understand the stories aright.) They’re none of them connected nowadays, of course. 
Nice, but not too nice homes. Marble and leather everywhere. A couple of columns for no apparent reason. Real nice pianos, nice dishes for daily use and another really nice set for special occasions. Always, for some reason, an extra dining room they don’t use. Inground pool out back, large wooden deck, big multi-car garage. They’re always remodeling something. Kids have every game system under the sun and their own big screen TVs to play them on. But nothing like Paris Hilton level of spoiled rich kid. Rather comfortably middle-class, but not Richie Rich by any means.
Sure. John Gotti was very, very rich. So was Al Capone.
Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano don’t live in the same kind of house because they aren’t the same level of gangster. Michael is the Don of one of the five great Mafia families of New York, at a time when the Mafia was more powerful than it is today. He and his father, when they were Dons, were each one of the five or six most powerful crime lords in the country. Tony Soprano is an underboss in the 90s/2000s. It’s like comparing the CEO of General Electric with the director of a midsized GE plant in Paterson.
Tony is a boss, not an underboss – that is, he does not answer or kick up to anybody, not even his Uncle Junior, any more. (Actually, the nominal boss of the family is a guy who went to prison shortly before the first episode, but he has never been mentioned since.)
OTOH, I have noticed, on the show, that the New York guys do tend to look down their noses at the Jersey guys, for some reason . . .
Yes, yes…a new Bookmark…
I used to date a girl from Oak Park, we’d walk around her neighborhood and she’d point out all the mobster’s houses for me. I recognized some names there.
A recently charged Mob underboss lives in my town in a large, very expensive house with Iron Fences and Stone Lions. The house is out of step with my town, and stands out. The weirdest part is it in on a trunk road and not in a development. The only thing low profile about him is that my town has a lot of even more expensive homes in nicer locations.
He really blew it with the Stone Lion crap. It reeked of mob before he even got convicted. We assumed the owner was mobbed up and we were right.
As far as I can tell, there are many other mob-connected people in my town that do keep a much lower profile. We are not sure about any of them, but suspicious. Of course, we never ask anyone else about. I would not want to know.
On the other side, Long Branch use to be a bit of a retirement community for old mafia guys. My brother rented an attic apartment for a nice older gentleman that was in is mid-seventies. He was involved with the numbers and had something to do with a book. He was retied and we did not ask any questions, but he let slip in conversations what he had been. As far as we could piece together he was the equivalent of middle management and lived a solid middle-class retirement in a house opposite the boardwalk.
Jim
I had a relative who was a cop on Staten Island, and he pointed out some sections of the island where he said some highly placed Mafiosi lived.
The houses looked nice, comfortably upper-middle class, but not as luxurious as I’d have expected.
The explanation I was given was this: if you’re a mob boss and your cover story is that you’re a olive oil importer contractor or a plumbing supplies salesman, you’re expected to live a lifestyle commensurate with that of an olive oil importer, a contractor or a plumbing supplies salesman.
That is, you may control millions of dollars behind the scenes, but you’re asking to get smacked down hard if you live as if you have millions at your disposal.
A woman I work with used to see Accardo at the A&P. He lived a simple life.
I’ve probably mentioned this here before but when she went to Big Tuna’s my inlaws were happy because she finally had started to get smart, like now she was going to grow up and be a Mafia Princess. But they were Sout’ Side t’rough an’ t’rough and grew up with Sout’ Side attitudes. She remembers the house as being flashier inside than out and what she said of Tuna was, “He liked the way I fixed a highball.”
“But your idea of a highball is any citrus pop plus any booze you happen to find.”
“He liked it.”
She was working in the blood bank of the hospital where he died and resented how his doctors would order up buckets of platelets that would go bad if they weren’t used. It seems everybody finally gave up delaying his appointment with Satan so his gurney was pushed into a corner of the ER and he died alone, as is right.
My memory of a picture of Momo’s basement family room, where he was whacked, was Basic Fifties Suburban.
I’ve been given shit here for my casual attitude toward murderous criminals but they have been such a part of the environment around here that they’re like squirrels or pigeons. I mean, on that page I linked you can see a place I used to work across the street from the Lexington Hotel, as in “Al Capone’s Vault.” I was in a bar where the “fashion show” was more exuberant than I expected, but at the end of the bar was a group of older guys dressed like Tony Soprana huddled talking so I figured the last thing I needed to worry about was a cop walking through the door. Okay, they’re more like rats than squirrels, but you get used to rats if they aren’t biting your toes.
I remember an interview with the top FBI accountant (it used to be that the only people who could become FBI agents were already cops, lawyers, or accountants) who had a poster-size picture of Capone in his office with the caption, “It took an accountant to bust Capone.” A low profile pays off.
He was the top financial whiz of the Mob-and made millions. Yet he lived simply-and had simple tastes (stayed maried to the same woman). Meyer was smart to keep a low profile; he lived off cash only-no bank accounts for the pesky Feds to check up on.
Such discussions always remind me of Lorainne Bracco giving guests a tour of the Henry Hill household in Goodfellas; a totally ordinary, split-level suburban ranch with a grotesquely tacky early Eighties interior, with lots of overstuff leather and chintzy marble. (I especially loved the rock wall that rolls aside to display the home theatre.) I don’t know any mobsters, and Hill was a solider, not a boss, but this is how I imagine most Mafia bosses living.
Capone was obviously an exception; heck the guy (along with a few others, like Pendergast) ran entire cities, decided who got elected and how long they stayed in office. Organized crime hasn’t had that kind of control since the Fifties in most places; even on the East Coast they may run unions but they don’t “own the docks”.
The Godfather shouldn’t be taken as any kind of marker for how Mafia figures live or the ethics by which they operate; it’s a Greek tragedy in the form of a Mob movie, not a detail examination of the Italian-American Mafia.
Stranger