La Cosa Nostra means this “thing of ours,” and the old-school Italian mob really does belong to all of us. We’ve kept our enemies so close through pop culture that we’ve graduated from dog-earing page 26 of “The Godfather” to name-checking godfathers in rap songs to eavesdropping on their shrink raps.
After you read “Red Mafiya,” however, you’ll know that such gangsta love is mere nostalgia. The real wiseguys are the strangers among us. Sometime in the ’90s, the number of Russian mobsters in New York surpassed the head count of all five famiglias combined, and in this excellent primer by Robert I. Friedman, the don of investigative reporters, you’ll learn why you should care. The Mafiya is into everything from Wall Street to African diamonds to tropical casinos to the NHL. Sophisticated, versatile and just plain huge, it has compromised governments and threatens the integrity of world banking. “The Italians play bocce,” says one of Friedman’s sources. “The Russians play chess.”
Not only are the Russians smarter, they’re meaner. The shorthand versions of some Friedman anecdotes follow: “Arm hacked off with ax.” “Castrated with crescent-shaped knife.” “Gutted like sheep.” “Buried to the neck in gravel.” “Forced to eat gravel.” “Bit off booking sergeant’s nose.” The Russians are so hard-boiled it gives American cops the willies. One suspect chewed on bullets during a police interrogation. Another vocalized his contempt: “I did time on the Arctic Circle. Do you think anything you’re going to do is going to bother me?”
These brand new heavies think globally. Friedman describes a 1995 confab in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where delegates from the North American and mother-country factions discussed, in the words of one, “who we will kill, fuck.” A summit two years earlier was a conspiracy nut’s dream. Chartered jets brought Sicilians, Russians and Colombians to Yerevan, Armenia, to divide up turf. All attending agreed that Russian banks should become their official money laundry. “The big joke at the Armenian conclave,” writes Friedman, “was, ‘Why rob a bank when you can own one?’”
The most fantastic tale of global cooperation involves helicopters, submarines and cocaine. In 1993, Ludwig “Tarzan” Fainberg brokered a deal between the Russian military and the Cali cartel for eight MI8 choppers. Tarzan forgot to bribe the right people, so to save his life, a Miami coke dealer had to fly to Moscow and impersonate Pablo Escobar. Impressed, the Russians feted the faux drug lord at a secret nightclub called the Kamikaze, where the black-market rich gathered to watch bareknuckled gladiators fight to the death. Blood sprayed the trophy blonds in the front row. The choppers made it to Colombia, but the DEA interrupted before Tarzan could deliver the next item on the shopping list: a Russian Navy submarine.
Criminal summits, death matches — it all sounds like a straight-to-video flick, with thugs in ponytails and Armani, and an improbable international scrum of evildoers carving up the world. It seems like a fantasy, a synthesized, glossy counterpoint to the unglamorous dailiness of actual crime. But it’s real; the Russians even have a “Die Hard”-y brain trust of techies tapping away in the lair of a mad genius. The Mafiya hires many underemployed chemists and computer jocks from the failed Soviet empire. Semion Mogilevich, the “Brainy Don,” has a Ph.D. in economics. Those clichid bad-guy ponytails are another accurate detail — they’re a favorite fashion quirk of the vor, the Mafiya soldier. While we’ve been watching mob movies, the Russians have been living out the whole action genre.
The book’s core strength lies in Friedman’s eagerness to meet these vors face to face. He chats with Tarzan, Monya Elson, Marat Balagula, Evsei Agron, a full minyan of the mob aristocracy. Some are behind bars, others engaged in ongoing criminal enterprises. Some have sense enough to lie, others, unversed in omert` or the Fifth Amendment, don’t care. They brag about shootings that would otherwise remain mysteries to law enforcement.
Considering what Friedman knows and the Mafiya’s use of murder as cure-all — no quaint code protects cops or journalists — the mere existence of this book qualifies as foolhardy heroism. Thirteen reporters have been whacked in the past decade. Friedman opens “Red Mafiya” by describing the threats he’s received, from a nasty valentine (“I will make you suck my Russian DICK!”) to a $100,000 contract on his life. But he’s been risking his neck in this fashion for the past decade, because many of these chapters first appeared as magazine articles. He’s been knocking on doors in Brighton Beach, N.Y., visiting gangsters in prison and generally making a pest of himself, as he admits. The result is an indispensable introduction to the new face of organized crime. Anyone tempted to emulate Friedman, however, should ponder the protection the FBI offered after informing him of the contract — nothing. They suggested he “lie low.” And a DEA agent chimed in with some advice: Buy a gun. A .357, specifically, because it doesn’t jam that often.
Life gets cushier all the time. Every month or so the wired world crosses another threshold of ease, and now we don’t even have to stir from our mouse pads to get sorbet and videos: Point and click at someone further down the food chain and the fruits of privilege will appear.
But in the land of plenty and the age of comfort, sometimes it’s hard to get our rocks off, and that’s where the suffering of others comes in handy. The past four years have seen a boom in danger porn. Around the time that even Grandma got e-mail, the public developed a taste for painful accounts of physical ordeals heroically endured by someone else. Danger-porn voyeurs peep from a safe remove as proxies battle “The Perfect Storm” or launch themselves “Into Thin Air.” The more strenuous the travail, the more alien it is from our cosseted lives, the more titillating it seems.
The safest distance is the distant past — rife with bummers, free of vaccines and anti-lock brakes. Two new contenders for the danger-porn canon raid the 19th century for twin ordeals so impeccably awful and so damn gross that the movie versions were probably cast before the book contracts were dry. “The Custom of the Sea” and “In the Heart of the Sea” are, as the former’s subtitle proclaims, “shocking” true tales of “shipwreck, murder, and the last taboo.” Both books tell a story of terrified, starving sailors who, adrift in open boats, are forced to kill and eat their companions.
Survival cannibalism was once so common that it was “The Custom of the Sea.” Neil Hanson’s book of that name recounts the most notorious instance of this custom in British maritime history. Off the coast of Africa in 1884, a freak wave crushed and sank the Mignonette, an unseaworthy yacht bound for Australia. Three crew members survived in a dinghy for four weeks by killing and devouring a 17-year-old cabin boy, Richard Parker. Rescued by a German steamer, the men of the Mignonette returned to a sympathetic British public and a government determined to prosecute.
With appropriate penny-dreadful gusto, Hanson exploits every blood-drinking, marrow-sucking, human-jerky-curing moment. The Mignonette’s captain, Tom Dudley, a former ship’s cook, did the butchering: “He reached into the still warm chest cavity and pulled out the heart and liver … The three men ate them ravenously, squabbling over the pieces like dogs.” Trial transcripts and contemporary newspapers aid Hanson’s poignant re-creation of the crew’s emotional voyage from horror to elation to a second round of torture courtesy of Queen Victoria’s courts.
What lifts “Custom” above the tabloid, however, is Hanson’s evocation of context. He relates the history of maritime cannibalism in one sleek chapter. He makes a strong case that the Mignonette and the 560 other British vessels that sank that year were victims of greed: Their owners had no incentive to keep them seaworthy because lost ships meant big insurance paydays and no wages owed to the sailors. The Mignonette disaster had a still larger social significance because the show trial of the survivors was the Crown’s attempt to end the custom of the sea forever.
“In the Heart of the Sea” has no such significance to justify it, but it does have a higher body count. Nathaniel Philbrick’s book centers on the 1820 death match between Nantucket, Mass., whale hunter Essex and a really big whale, which the Essex lost. Twenty men in three small craft escaped and wandered the Pacific; three months later there were two boats and five men left. Rescuers found bug-eyed stick figures hunkered over a pile of human ribs, with finger bones stashed in their pockets.
Had Philbrick needed a reason to revisit this gorefest beyond the mere gnarly fun of it, he might’ve chosen metaphor. Never before had a whale rammed a ship, and it was as if a lone titan were finally protesting a holocaust: The Essex was hunting west of Chile because Nantucket’s whalers had scoured the Atlantic clean. Metaphor, however, was taken — the 85-foot bull that sank the Essex inspired “Moby-Dick.”
Philbrick grasps instead at historical context — and misses. Issues handled ably by Hanson elude him. For example, Hanson notes that in eating the cabin boy, the Mignonette trio followed a second custom of the sea. Though tradition required drawing lots, over the centuries the short straw seemed to have a strange attraction to women, boys and blacks. On the Essex, a third of the crew was black, and not one black sailor survived — but Philbrick never mentions the long record of rigged contests or fully engages the possibility of bias.
Unlike the case of the Mignonette, the Essex case is notable only for sheer calamity. It didn’t spark a shift in the whale trade or set a legal precedent. Philbrick masks this lack of meaning with a lot of talk about Nantucket. His asides about local quirks and lingo turn from irrelevant to annoying, but as a loyal islander Philbrick keeps them coming. Why should we care that in 1997 some kids from Newburyport cut up a beached whale? Just because Newburyport “was where many of Nantucket’s first settlers had come from”?
As danger porn, Hanson’s “Custom” has the kind of edifying art-film trappings that make you forget you’re a voyeur. Philbrick’s book works best if you skip to the dirty parts.
If you got all your history from the History Channel, you’d probably think World War II was the Hundred Years War. The power of the same endlessly reblended black-and-white footage to enthrall viewers of a certain age has kept that conflict a constant on the tube. The Greatest Generation never tires of flipping through its scrapbook.
A writer looking for a TV tie-in, then, would be dumb if he didn’t make the Second World War the core of a book called “Days of Infamy: Great Military Blunders of the 20th Century.” Two years ago, author Michael Coffey edited “The Irish in America,” a companion tome to the PBS docu-saga of the same name, and since then he’s led seminars on how to synergize. With “Days of Infamy,” he’s got the requisite WWII reference in his title and the History Channel series link. He’s even got an intro penned by Mike Wallace, a superstar to the gray-haired target demographic.
Evaluated as history, though, “Days of Infamy” fails. There are sins of commission, like implying that Britain granted India independence (rather than conceding it), and there are worse sins of omission. Should more than half a book about a whole century be devoted to one short stretch of it? For every German and Japanese battle Coffey cites, there are whole chunks of the globe missing. Lost, for example, are 50 years of Arab-Israeli bloodshed; there might not be much of a PLO today if not for catastrophic miscues by Egypt’s President Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, symbolic end of the age of colonialism, receives only two pages.
Coffey prefers anecdotes from the Last Good War and, failing that, any other English-speaking war. And even these stories he retells with little drama and perfunctory detail. In his hands, MacArthur’s breach of the 38th parallel in Korea becomes a mere stumble instead of a near-Armageddon. Perhaps that’s because Coffey is the sort of tone-deaf writer who can title a chapter, without irony, “World War II Gets Ugly.”
His more serious problem is deciding just what constitutes a “military blunder”; he uses both parts of the term so inclusively that “Days of Infamy” ends up as a broad, shallow, high school-textbook account of the century’s geopolitics rather than as a useful history of armed struggle. When the very existence of the Cold War is a “military blunder,” then so is every unfortunate event of the past 100 years.
“Days of Infamy” fares better when assessed purely as a video-derived product aimed at a certain market. At least its omissions become understandable. Consumers want to hear and see stories about U.S. involvement in familiar wars. Though 20 Americans died in Somalia in 1993 (the how and why became the recent encyclopedically detailed treasure published as “Black Hawk Down”), Coffey’s readers probably wouldn’t have wanted to revisit Mogadishu any more than they’d have enjoyed reading about car-bombed Marines in Beirut or about HMS Sheffield getting shot up in the Falklands.
But a book with no higher ambition than riding shotgun to a TV series risks being compared to that show and found wanting. Now airing, the History Channel’s “Great Military Blunders” tells the same stories as the book with more vigor and greater detail, and with the benefit of eye-catching computer simulations. Coffey’s last tube-tied book included such print-only extras as essays by Frank McCourt and other famous Irish-Americans. This time, there’s no reason to follow along in the libretto.
One reason movies about war are so hot right now is that few American males
have had to face the real thing. For a man who’s never braved enemy fire,
who’s never been “tested,” “The Thin Red Line” and “Saving Private Ryan”
can seem like parables of character. Would I, the ticket buyer wonders, be
willing to die for a nameless hill or an unknown soldier?
But the blood in these filmed battles is spilled for a larger cause, by men
of every station. In real time, long after the last Good War, the dying
hasn’t stopped; now, though, it’s done by blue-collar volunteers in morally
muddy police actions. Never has the murk been more obscure than it was in
Somalia on Oct. 3, 1993, when, in the American military’s nastiest
firefight since Vietnam, 19 soldiers died in the name of little more than
one another. An incident that began with two downed helicopters ended with
American casualties being dragged through the streets and American policymakers scrambling for the exit.
“Black Hawk Down” re-creates, with exacting detail, the gory confusion of
that day, when questions of heroism were far from cinematic. Mark
Bowden’s work ethic inspired him to track down 50 veterans of the conflict
and bring back Mogadishu whole. He conveys the sound and the feel of
killing — of what it’s like to watch your bullets splash through a
stranger and of the claustrophobic panic you feel when the strangers you
are shooting at begin to close in. He established such trust with his
subjects that they told him about everything from the banal (“It felt like
a movie”) to the brutal (trying to plug a spurting artery with an index
finger) to the embarrassing (masturbation in combat). We’re reminded that
these are young men with excess animal energy that surfaces in both
violence and sex, that the flip side of valor is an evil carnal thrill.
“That was the secret core of all the hoo-ah … esprit,” Bowden writes.
“Permission … to break the biggest social taboo of all. You killed
people.”
Mogadishu has already inspired several books and documentaries, with
another set for CNN in April. Spy planes and surveillance cameras made it
one of history’s best-documented battles. Bowden’s rendering, however, is
the most accurate and extensive, because in addition to first-person
accounts he wrangled access to confidential Army action logs. He also moves
beyond Soldier of Fortune-style bravado, interviewing dozens of enemy
combatants so that we can learn why a thousand angry Somalis threw
themselves into the high-tech maw of the Army Rangers, sacrificing their
lives just to teach the U.S. government a lesson. Sometimes the book bogs
down in this conscientious detail — Bowden wants us to know where every
man was at every minute. So much data and so many different dramas and
casts are braided into this one engagement that the account becomes
confusing; more maps and recaps might’ve helped keep it straight.
This is the sort of crowded time line that Web sites were invented for. In
fact, the Rangers have used Bowden’s original Philadelphia Inquirer
articles as the core of their own Mogadishu cyber-memorial, linking the
text to maps and bios in a shorter, tighter version of events. But if
Bowden had also opted for simplicity, imposing a dramatic arc on confusion
and paring away supporting characters, he’d have left some men’s last hours
unremembered. In other words, if he’d made his peerless record of this
forgotten war more like a Web site, he’d have been making it more like a
war movie. And that will happen soon enough anyway, because Jerry
Bruckheimer has already bought the rights to the book.
andy griffith’s been in reruns for 30 years, Lucille Ball for nearly 40. Both stars have enough cultural resonance to maintain that healthy blue glow deep into the high-def future. Neither, however, can hope to match the tube time logged by Adolf Hitler.
Ever since D-Day, Nazis have been a shortcut to box office — and now cable TV — success. Years ago, The Discovery Channel and A&E discovered they could juice up their ratings with heavy doses of Hitler. By the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991, the two networks combined aired at least six hours of military programming in prime time weekly — so much so that TV Guide, in 1992, derided the cable twins as collectively forming “The Hitler Channel.” Having already noted Hitler fatigue in their audience, network execs decided to retire him. The networks dug themselves out of the bunker with crime and celebrity — and as soon as footage of the Gulf War became available, its high-tech gloss drew higher ratings than Panzers anyway.
Hitler, however, is still alive, not in Argentina but on another cable network. A&E spun off the History Channel, and that’s where Adolf now makes his home. And he’s quite at home there: The History Channel airs as many as 40 hours of World War II programming weekly, and sometimes as many as 12 hours in a single day.
Why is Adolf such a durable TV star? The uncomplicated allure of evil, in part. Few symbols convey so much so quickly to a channel surfer as a swastika, and few villains have had such a perverse, magnetic pull as Hitler. Several years back, when I asked the director of research at Discovery about the volume of Hitler-centric programming on the original docu-nets, he compared Der F|hrer to his other ratings grabber: the shark. “People like sharks because they are unknown and dangerous. He’s the shark of World War II.” Yes, of course, Hitler was dangerous, but he is also very much known. Would he have such a powerful hold over so many viewers if they didn’t get such titillation from his very-well-known, and very obviously evil, deeds — if they didn’t identify a little with this particular shark?
Other reasons are less pernicious. Besides being the first good war in terms of film stock, it was also the last Good War in terms of ideology. No recent conflict can provide such a clear and satisfying narrative: We fought hard against bad guys who were notably bad, winning a definitive victory in the end. And, unlike Saddam Hussein, Hitler was no pushover. For a certain aging segment of the population, World War II is the most important thing that ever happened, a reminder of personal and national youth and purpose. A show like “War Diary” is really a scrapbook from a vivid personal past.
When the History Channel appeared in the beginning of 1995, all those thousands of hours of World War II footage gave programmers a proven means of building an attractive, albeit gray-haired, advertising base. Affluent white males between 24 and 54, a species of viewers rarely found in concentrated form, love watching shows on wars; almost any war will do — the History Channel airs programs about the Revolutionary, Civil, Korean and Vietnam wars. But they especially love World War II. The History Channel’s vice president of historical programming, the improbably named Charlie Mayday, notes that WWII series win better ratings than any other televised wars.
But we’re getting a little past the expiration date. By continuing to keep old shows about the Good War in constant rotation, the History Channel risks becoming a kind of nonfiction Nick at Nite. Network executives seem to have recognized the danger, and some things have started to change. Just as syndicated reruns of “The Honeymooners” drifted out of broadcast TV’s choicest slots after a while, retreating to later and later air times without disappearing altogether, so History’s war horses have been shoved into the creases of the schedule. “Victory at Sea” is at 4 a.m., “Battleline” is at 4:30. And Mayday assures me that the network will continue to demilitarize its schedule.
“What we’re shifting to in the fall is more of a use of (war documentaries) in early and late fringe (time slots) rather than the core of the schedule,” he explains. “We’re going to be running most of our military programming at 11 p.m. You’ll know every night you can watch it.” Mayday will experiment in prime time with a series on trains and something called “In Search of History.”
Is Hitler’s new slot opposite “Seinfeld” reruns a first step in the beginning of a nightward drift into the wee hours? Mayday acknowledges that the channel’s push to up its quotient of original programming will slightly diminish the overall total of military fare. But there hasn’t been a fundamental transformation: Indeed, Mayday tells me that several original World War II specials are scheduled for prime time next season, as well as a brand-new series called “Secrets of World War II.” “I don’t look at (this kind of programming) as a lesser form of history,” Mayday says. “I think it’s a key part, and we’re dedicated to it.”
So don’t expect World War II, or its biggest star, to fade entirely into that good late night. Don Delillo put it best in the 1985 novel “White Noise,” in an exchange between Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies, and his wife, Babette: “He was on again last night,” says Babette. “He’s always on,” answers Jack — “We couldn’t have television without him.”
