My Fascination with the Mob

Last week was Mob Week on AMC.  They were showing mob movies all week long.  And I got sucked right in.  Now, I've seen the Godfather at least a dozen times, but I found myself absolutely engulfed in the story once again.  It's amazing how quickly nine hours goes by when you're watching something so entertaining.  It's hard to believe that the Corleone family is fictional.  They seem so real and all I wanted to do was learn more about them.  So I took to the Internet.  I searched for a Corleone family tree, looked up back stories on characters like Clemenza.  There's even a Godfather wiki.  And all this information took me to real life mob stories that influenced characters and events from the movie.  Or should I say book.  That's right, I remembered that The Godfather was adapted from a book, a book I've never read.  So I added that to my Amazon wish list.  All I wanted to do was keep watching and keep reading and keep learning about all these people who were so fascinating and enthralling.

So that was my Saturday.  And then Sunday night rolled around and right before I was about to go to bed I saw a show titled Inside the American Mob: John Gotti.  Sucked in again.  I grew up seeing John Gotti all over TV.  The Teflon Don.  He was bigger than big.  And even though I had heard all these stories before, I was fascinated all over again.  And of course what I saw on the show led to more questions.  So back to the Internet I went, first looking at Gotti's biography and then info on the Gambino crime family to a history of the Five Families to bios of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.  Suddenly it was almost midnight and my plan for an early night was up in smoke.  Even today I keep thinking about the questions I didn't get around to answering last night.  If I had Netflix my queue would be full of mob movies and documentaries.

So why am I completely fascinated by the mob?  Some may say it's because I'm Italian and my family lives in Jersey.  But I just think that the people involved and the stories they create are riveting.  I can't really explain it, but I will continue to watch and read.