Me: Jimmy no dont say that rein it in no stop no stop no look how many warnings stop stop oh no you fool oh well your fault
I too loved Pesci’s quietly spoken go to boss Buffalino.
Congressman Dan Flood, who served northeastern Pennsylvania in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1945 to 1980, was investigated by at least eight separate U.S. Attorney’s offices and had 175 possible cases pending against him. A so-called ‘muscler’, Flood used his influence to direct federal contracts to people and corporations in exchange for cash kickbacks.
The ‘Flood-Medico-Bufalino Triangle’ was one example. Medico Industries of Plains Township, Pennsylvania, received, with Flood’s help, a $3,900,000 Department of Defense contract to produce 600,000 warheads for use in the Vietnam War. Bufalino, who frequented Medico offices, was an associate of general manager William ‘Billy’ Medico and president Philip Medico, who was a caporegime in the Bufalino family. The FBI discovered that Flood would often travel in the Medico Industries jet. Flood was eventually censured for bribery and resigned from the House in 1980.
Nothing really in politics changes eh. The Mafia are merely replaced by Russians.
It was Angelo Bruno who was known as the “The Gentle Don” due to favouring non-violent options and I think Sheeran’s accidental arson put that across well. Did it show his fate in the film? Scenes with Keitel just kinda disappeared when everyone aged. His successor was a complete psycho who had people killed for looking at him.
I watched this all in one go and started to fade about 2 hours in. Was the Kennedy assassination presented as a mob hit? I think it was and is that crazy? I mean, I think it’s crazy, but it’s just presented in the move so matter of fact. I know there is a lot of weird ass conspiracy stuff around Kennedy, but is a mob hit one of those, or did this just come out of left field? Obviously I knew about the Bay of Pigs stuff (and I never understood why Cuba was suddenly important to the country) but I never considered a mob angle before. One of the things with a movie like this is to try to separate fact from fictions created to make the story more plausible. EDIT: And I mean, obviously a mob hit is not a fact, but I’m just wondering if this is like some conventional wisdom and I just somehow missed it.
Speaking of fiction to make the story more plausible, my favorite exchange was the one in the car about the fish. “So you just went into the store and said ‘Gimme some fish?’”
Yes, the mob hit thing is a very old conspiracy theory at this point, it isn’t new. Various reasons being given for it, usually being that the mob delivered the election and then the Kennedys went after them (like Bobby’s anti-organized crime crusade as Attorney General).
Keep in mind that a number of incidents as described by Sheerhan have been debunked, including his account of the killing of Hoffa. In fact, he had a reputation as a bullshit artist who had as many versions of Hoffa’s death as the Joker had explanations for his scars.
It would be interesting to hear Scorsese talk at length about this; in the “conversation” video on Netflix he’s clearly skeptical about the source material, but never dwells on whether it’s literally true.
Scorsese has been a fiend about getting the overall tone and setting of his mob movies right, famously making Goodfellas as an antidote to the (in his eyes) romanticized tuxes-and-grand-opera mob portrayed in the Godfather movies. On the other hand, he’s never been shy about changing individual facts, details, and motivations, doing it so much in Casino that all the characters ended up with different names than their real-life and book counterparts. (“Ginger” in particular is very different.)
To some degree it doesn’t matter in terms of character drama: even if Sheeran didn’t pull the trigger, even if he never pulled any hits in his life, he was pretty clearly involved in Hoffa’s disappearance, making the overall theme of betrayal still relevant. And, given there’s no other account of how Sheeran was involved, you could argue you might as well go with the one Sheeran gave.
But yeah, don’t take it literally in terms of historical fact. In particular, as the article notes, there’s no evidence that Hoffa ever ordered a hit on anybody.
Yeah, this is how I’m approaching it. The guy from the NYT in the article above who has written so much about Hoffa and his disappearance and he (the NYT reporter) sounds like so much sour grapes. In fact, that whole article sounds like sour grapes. A bunch of folks who were super involved in documenting the controversy (either because they were reporters or investigators) and they all got upstaged by Sheeran and now they’re bitter and angry.
One of the ways they discredit the story is by saying Sheeran only did it to benefit his family. How does Sheeran get to keep the proceeds from a book about murdering people? I thought that was illegal.
