THENASTYBITS by Anthony Bourdain Page B

poor bastard being secretly recorded by the FBI, but sometimes three out of four of the close associates in the room with him were, or later became, government informants. It's hard these days, it seems, to get good help.
    So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don't? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy's disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction.
And of course, crime can be funny.
    The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have seen The Godfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They've seen Good-fellas. And these films made a powerful impression. Recently I visited my favorite Web site, gangland.com —an online repository for up-to-date organized crime arcana—to find a transcript of New Jersey's De Cavalcante crime family members enthusiastically speculating on which among their number had provided inspiration for the Tony Soprano character on The Sopranos. Real-life gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo, prior to falling down dead into his linguine with white clam sauce, is said to have practiced his Tommy Udo imitation in front of the mirror every morning. (You remember Tommy, the Richard Widmark character in Kiss of Death} The famous scene in which the giggling Widmark binds and gags an old lady into her wheelchair, then pushes her down a flight of stairs? "Heee-heee . . . heee . . . heeee"?) And there must be scores of aspiring Joe Pescis out there, taking the occasional break from the daily grind of extortion and murder to do dead-on impressions of Joe: "What? I amuse you? I'm a clown?"
    There is a powerful element of pure comedy, of classic schtick in the business of crime. With so many natural wordsmiths, mimics, movie fans, and practitioners of a century-old oral tradition, is it any wonder? And as Monty Python so astutely demonstrated many years ago, the basic elements of comedy all come down to the unexpected head injury, repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull. Whether it's Oliver Hardy getting a good smack upside the nut with a mishandled ladder, or a Colombo loanshark getting his brains spattered all over the dashboard of his shiny new Buick, the principle is the same—and it spells funny.
    Joe Pesci, thinking that today he's gonna be a "made guy," looks down at the floor, sees that the carpet has been rolled up— and has time only to say, "O/? shit!" before getting two behind his ear. Classic! Just like Oliver Hardy should know that a ladder will soon be bouncing off his face—because it bounced off his face in the scene before, and in the scene before that— Pesci's character should know that when a close personal friend invites you to a sit-down with the bosses, or says that you can have the front passenger seat ("That's okay . . . you sit in front"), there's every likelihood that a fatal head injury is imminent. There's a historic inevitability to both comedy and organized crime, and the punch lines are often the same.
    Times, sadly, are changing. Traditional criminal groups like New York's Cosa Nostra, Boston's Winter Hill Gang, Chicago's Outfit are being replaced by newer and less amusing stylists, clever mobs of ruthless Russians, Serbs, Israelis, Asians, Jamaicans, Colombians, and Nigerians whose appreciation of the classics seems lacking. Their crimes, for the most part, are so sophisticated and so boring that simply reading about them induces coma. Notoriously close-mouthed, even by professional standards, these recent arrivals to America's shores are less likely to provide the kind of recorded admissions that thinned the ranks