Does "The Departed" Show Martin Scorcese's Heart of Darkness?

In 1990, director Martin Scorcese’s “Goodfellas ” examined gangster life from the inside. The film didn’t shy away from the downward spiral of its characters, as they were slowly consumed by their own culture of corruption. As in several of Scorcese’s well-known works, the characters here reap what they sow – they’re violent men who meet violent ends. Religion, in the form of Catholic rituals and iconography, is present but rarely redemptive.
Click Here

To many critics, the film’s violence and stylish camerawork were masterful in technique and execution, and represented an artistic high point for the filmmaker. “Goodfellas” soon took its place alongside “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” among the director’s most acclaimed works.

Since “Goodfellas,” Scorcese has directed several films, including a remake of “Cape Fear”; a romantic period piece ( “The Age of Innocence”); another mob tale (“Casino ”); a story about the dalai lama (“Kundun”); and a couple of shots at earning an elusive Best Director Oscar (“Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator”). Each film had its rewards, but each was notably flawed in some way – too long, too impersonal, or too lacking in passion.

With “The Departed,” the passion returns in spades, but the film is, like so many other Scorcese-directed works, overly long, terribly profane, brutally violent and extremely dark. The cinematic technique, especially during the film’s first hour, is dazzling – a fluid mix of camera movement, Classic Rock, and Mob machinations that sets a grim and gritty tone for what’s to come. But the energy soon lags, and a sea of despair drowns most of the characters, while the law of diminishing returns takes hold of the film. It becomes one more look at the criminal mind, with big-name actors depicting desperation, savagery and duplicity.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Billy Costigan, a cop from a troubled family who goes undercover to infiltrate the circle of Boston crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Costigan works closely with superiors Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) and Queenan (Martin Sheen) who protect his identity, but their efforts to arrest long-time crime boss Costello are stymied by Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a police mole who keeps Costello one step ahead of law enforcement. The parallels between Costigan and Sullivan carry over to their love lives, with both men falling for the same woman (Vera Farmiga). As the noose tightens around Costello, the two cops struggle to keep up their false fronts, while each seeks to expose the other.

“The Departed” is a remake of “Infernal Affairs,” a Hong Kong film that clocks in at 1 hour and 41 minutes, but Scorcese, given the chance to work with Nicholson and his favorite actor of late, DiCaprio, can’t contain himself. He takes the efficient Hong Kong story and pads it significantly, resulting in a bloated, drawn-out story that grows punishing as the violence mounts. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, “The Departed” manages to be more confusing than the much shorter film on which it’s based. Even so, the morbid outcome still surprises – it provoked gasps among the audience watching an advance screening – but getting to that point is arduous.

For this viewer, the ending couldn’t have come sooner. “The Departed” is ultra-violent, and despite memorable performances from the iconic Nicholson and the scene-stealing Alec Baldwin, the end result is less than thrilling.

Scorcese has gone to this well too many times. That well is not yet empty, but “The Departed” is far from refreshing. It is, rather, soul-deadening. Better for Scorcese to make different films, even if flawed, than to rehash the bloodletting and tough talk he’s already proven he can do so well.

Thanks to Christian Hamaker

Tweet

Fed Request Cloaked Jury for Chicago Mob Trial

Friends of ours: Joseph "Joey The Clown" Lombardo, Frank Calabrese Sr., William Dauber

Federal prosecutors in one of the most significant Chicago mob cases ever are moving to cloak the names of jurors in secrecy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitch Mars told a federal judge last week prosecutors intend to ask for an anonymous jury -- a move defense lawyers in the case are likely to oppose. The request is considered rare and extreme. It's typically reserved for cases in which alleged mobsters, terrorists or drug kingpins are on trial.

Mars did not say in court why he wanted to keep jurors' names secret, but usually prosecutors make the move to reduce jury tampering. Also, the feds can ask for an anonymous panel when jurors would have a reasonable concern about their safety.

Some of the defendants on trial have a history of allegedly tampering with the judicial system.

Reputed top mobster Joseph "Joey The Clown" Lombardo is accused of killing a witness against him in another federal case in 1974.

Another defendant, brutal mob loan shark Frank Calabrese Sr., is accused of taking part in the murder of mob enforcer William Dauber and his wife, Charlotte, in 1980. William Dauber was cooperating with federal investigators when he was slain.

In the mob case, jurors are expected to have to fill out a questionnaire. But potential jurors would not even put their names on the questionnaire, instead only using their juror number, if U.S. District Judge James Zagel grants the prosecution's request.

Defense lawyers in the case have signaled they would object to an anonymous jury. Jurors may already be on edge hearing evidence in an organized crime case. To be told their identities are being kept secret could create bias or fear concerning the defendants, according to defense lawyers involved in the case.

Judges don't always grant a request for an anonymous jury. In the Chicago trial of two men charged with racketeering and allegedly tied to the terrorist group Hamas, prosecutors wanted an anonymous jury, but the judge denied the request. This month, the men were found not guilty of the most serious charge against them but convicted on lesser charges.

Tweet

The Brothershood Mob Squad

Friends of ours: Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Joseph Valachi, John Gotti, Lucchese Crime Family, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, Gambino Crime Family
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family, Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa

The phenomenon of Mafia nostalgia is so ingrained in the American consciousness, one might think Frank Costello and Albert Anastasia were among the founding fathers. In fact, our fascination with modern Italian-American organized crime dates only to the early 1960s, when the traitor Joseph Valachi first laid bare its internal structures and codes. Interest in the Mafia has proved far more enduring than the syndicates themselves, which have never recovered from the jailing of John Gotti and so many other godfathers in the 1980s and early 1990s. All we have left are Tony Soprano, the best work of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and our memories. Ah, the bad old days.

The Mafia has been very good for Hollywood producers and newspaper reporters, which explains the media circus that surrounded the trial earlier this year of New York’s two infamous “Mafia cops,” Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, who today remain in jail even though a judge has vacated their convictions. The now-retired detectives, dragged from their gaudy Las Vegas old-age homes to face the tabloid pack, were shown to have funneled sensitive intelligence and actually carried out murders for the crazed Luchese family godfather Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso back in the 1980s. The whole episode felt plucked from another era, as if these were the last two American turncoats to be prosecuted for cold war espionage.

Any number of books and movie projects are said to be in the works, and the first, “The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia,” by Guy Lawson, a veteran crime reporter, and William Oldham, a former New York Police Department detective who helped break the case, has now arrived. The good news, at least for Mafia aficionados, is that Lawson and Oldham have this material down cold. They seemingly had access to every Police Department document, every recorded conversation and every exhibit employed to convict Eppolito and Caracappa.

The bad news is that it’s all here: every dull dinner between the two detectives and an F.B.I. informant, page after page describing a screenplay Eppolito once wrote, apparently every case Oldham ever worked. “The Brotherhoods” is a perfectly fine book that could have been much, much better had the authors only known when to clam up. One suspects that within this overstuffed, ultradense 511-page anvil is a lean, nimble 275-page claw hammer yearning to swing free, a sequel to breezy underworld page-turners like Howard Blum’s “Gangland.” It’s not just that Lawson and Oldham throw in the kitchen sink. Like Gambino soldiers gleefully raiding a Canarsie warehouse, they haul out a refrigerator, 18 microwave ovens, 82 dinette sets, 994 Viking ranges and, still feeling a tad light, the entire inventory of the New Jersey Turnpike Ikea.

Part of the problem is that “The Brotherhoods” is not one book but two. The first is a straightforward if exhaustive narrative of the case, presumably written by Lawson. After putting down the galleys for the 15th time, unable to thrash my way through thickets of paragraphs so dense I began looking for hobbits, I took a hard look at his prose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. His sentences are spare, his adverbs scarce, his name-pronoun exchanges are good, his transitions are functional if unspectacular. The trouble is Lawson’s use of detail. There’s a world of difference between “telling” detail and telling every detail. At one point I had to stop and shake my head when I realized he was actually explaining the brand name of a chair Oldham uses during a prison conference.

The second book really slows things down. This is Oldham’s lengthy interjections into Lawson’s prose, which come in paragraph after paragraph of quotation, sometimes five and six at a time. While Oldham’s views can be informative and entertaining, the effect is akin to a director’s commentary on a DVD film. Oldham strives to provide context, but too often serves up platitudes. To cite just one example of dozens: “In major organized criminal investigations there is not an obviously straightforward cause and effect. Conspiracies occur in parallel universes and timelines. What is the chronology of the crimes that are investigated? What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it happen?” This might be catnip for cops, but ahem, sir, could you please stop talking during the movie?

For those willing to wade through it, “The Brotherhoods” has its rewards. The authors do a stellar job of portraying the Police Department as a dysfunctional bureaucracy, making us see how Caracappa, who worked in the elite Major Case Squad alongside Oldham, was a much bigger fish than Eppolito, a blowhard toiling in deepest Brooklyn. They are adept at conjuring organized crime’s inbred world of social clubs and row houses; every cop in the book seems to have a cousin Joey “in the life,” and vice versa. Rarely have Mafiosi seemed like such losers as they do here, obese men in track suits debating whom to kill once they finish their ziti. Gaspipe Casso comes off as a cut above his knuckle-dragging peers, but his story was told just as well — and faster — in Selwyn Raab’s “Five Families.”

Of the two cops, the pathetic, porcine Eppolito — whose cinematic ambitions peaked with a goombah cameo in Scorsese’s “Goodfellas ” — is the most vividly drawn, this due to his mind-bogglingly wrongheaded memoir, “Mafia Cop,” in which he boasted of his Mafia lineage, which included his father, Ralph Eppolito, known as Fat the Gangster, and an uncle, Jimmy the Clam. Caracappa remains a cipher throughout, a wary, watchful figure with the look, and apparently the personality, of an undertaker on downers. Both could have used additional reporting to flesh out their careers and back stories; there aren’t many clues in the text as to what a pro like Caracappa would see in a mook like Eppolito. But Lawson, presumably viewing Oldham as the Ken Jennings of criminalia, falls prey to the common trap of letting only the caged canary sing. Isn’t there anyone else who knew these two detectives?

The book also suffers from several factors out of the authors’ control. For one thing, they cannot tell the full story of what Eppolito and Caracappa actually did, because the two detectives have never publicly discussed, much less admitted, their crimes. So what we get is a narrative engine built around Oldham’s investigation. This is interesting if unremarkable material, in part because his probe was a whodunit only in its infancy. After Casso, in an abortive attempt to reduce a life sentence for murder, told prosecutors about Eppolito and Caracappa in 1994, the next 10 years of story line are purely an exercise in proving what the unreliable Casso claimed.

In the end, for all Oldham’s dogged work, the case is broken when Casso’s conduit to the cops, the aging fence Burton Kaplan, finally cuts a deal of his own after nine years in prison. The authors do their best to wring drama from Oldham’s jailhouse tango with Kaplan, but Kaplan is bland beyond belief. The narrative payoff, the eureka moment the authors spend 300 pages building up to, comes “after dozens of calls and six weeks of talking,” of which little is said. “I think we got a deal,” Kaplan’s attorney tells Oldham. Memo to: Ahab. From: Whale. I think we got a deal.

Thanks to Bryan Burrough

Tweet

Family Above All - The Black Donnelly's

From a promo for the new NBC Show called The Black Donnelly's. They are already being called the "Hunky" Mobsters".

Meet the Donnelly Brothers: Tommy, Jimmy, Kevin and Sean. There is nothing that these four Irish brothers wouldn't do to protect each other, and for them that means lying, cheating, stealing, and, occasionally, calling the cops. Narrated by wannabe gangster Joey "Ice Cream", this gritty series bears witness to the Donnelly brothers sudden involvement in organized crime, focusing on how they go from boys to mobsters, and showing how their new life affects their relationships with family, friends, and lovers.

Academy Award winners Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco ("Crash ") are the creators of this gritty new crime drama series loosely based Moresco's background. The ensemble cast includes Jonathan Tucker ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), Billy Lush ("Huff"), Thomas Guiry ("Mystic River"), Michael Stahl-David ("Uncle Nino"), Keith Nobbs ("25th Hour"), Olivia Wilde ("The O.C."), Kirk Acevedo ("Oz").

Tweet

Reputed Chicago Mob Boss 'Joey the Clown' Could Face Fresh Charges

Friends of ours: Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo, Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, Frank "the German" Schweihs

Reputed mob boss Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo and another man could face new charges for going on the lam after a major indictment against them was unsealed, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

"We may seek to add charges to the indictment based on their fugitive status," Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitchell A. Mars told federal Judge James B. Zagel at a hearing in a racketeering case known as Operation Family Secrets.

Fourteen alleged mobsters and mob associates were charged in the indictment alleging that leaders of the Chicago Outfit were involved in 18 murders, including that of Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, the mob's onetime top man in Las Vegas who was killed and buried in an Indiana corn field.

Joe Pesci played a character based on Tony Spilotro in the 1995 Martin Scorsese film "Casino."

Lombardo, 77, was captured by FBI agents in a suburban Elmwood Park alley in January 2006 after nine months on the run.

The other runaway defendant, alleged mob enforcer Frank "The German" Schweihs, 76, was captured by FBI agents in December 2005, hiding in the hills of Kentucky south of Lexington.

Lombardo attorney Rick Halprin said that an unlawful flight to escape prosecution charge would add little to the case compared to the racketeering count his client is charged with. "Given the breadth and scope of the case, I don't believe I'm going to lose any sleep over it," he said. Schweihs attorney Ellen R. Domph had no comment.

Zagel told attorneys Tuesday that he likely would order a hearing to determine exactly what jurors might hear from prospective government witness James Wagner, a former FBI mob investigator who now is president of the Chicago Crime Commission.

Prosecutors want Wagner to tell the jury the story of the Chicago Outfit based on his decades of experience investigating the mob.

Halprin has asked Zagel to limit what Wagner would be allowed to say. Zagel told Mars to provide the court with a written explanation of what the former agent would tell the jury.

Thanks to Mike Robinson

Tweet