“From the foundation of Hollywood, organized crime is there.” So claims Tom Patterson, producer and director of new three-part documentary series, Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies.
Organized crime’s connection to the film industry actually predates Tinseltown, being present for the foundation of the medium itself, when inventor Thomas Edison sicced his hired goons on competitors in an attempt to maintain total control over early motion picture technology. As covered in Hollywood Crime Story, this resulted in said competitors – mostly Jewish businessmen from the east coast – fleeing westward and establishing the town and studio system that would become synonymous with movies as we know them.
That same period also begat the rise of organized crime syndicates on the other side of the country – The Outfit in Chicago, the Mafia in New York – a result of the criminal economy created by Prohibition. It didn’t take long for the two worlds to collide. Combining archival footage with talking head interviews, Hollywood Crime Story charts the interdependent relationship between the mob and the movies from development of cinema through to the year 1990, when the dual releases of The Godfather Part III and Goodfellas, per Patterson, “put a nice cap on that era of Hollywood”.
Episode one covers the dawn of the motion picture through the 1960s, a period that saw the ascension of Chicago kingpin Al Capone, who dispatches one of his underlings, Johnny Roselli, out west to explore new business opportunities. Roselli finds a Hollywood ripe for the picking, quickly establishing himself amongst its top stars and moguls, including and especially Harry Cohn, the vicious co-founder and president of Columbia Pictures. Its thanks to a half-million-dollar loan from Roselli that Cohn is able to buy out his partners at Columbia, thus giving the mob its first real stakes in one of the major studios.
We learn about Capone’s short but lively trip to Hollywood and his initially antagonistic, but ultimately positive reception to the loose biopic made about him in 1932, Scarface. We meet suave but volatile gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who moves to town and immediately starts rubbing shoulders with the industry elite; his underling and future replacement as head of vice in LA, the brutish Mickey Cohen, who got his start in crime at age nine when he held up a movie theater; Cohen’s abusive thug Johnny Stompanato, who marries movie star Lana Turner and is eventually stabbed to death by her teenage daughter; and the corrupt union officials whom the mob inserts as heads of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Teamsters. We get the startling tale of the bosses putting a hit out on Screen Actors Guild president James Cagney when he won’t hand his union over to them (his life only spared thanks to Scarface lead Paul Muni personally asking Capone to intervene) and a funny anecdote about Cohen robbing leading lady Betty Grable only for her to laugh it off when they reunite years later.
Most of these violent characters meet violent ends, but nature abhors a vacuum, so it isn’t long before new shady figures take the reins. Episode two of Hollywood Crime Story is set between the late 60s and the early 80s. “Rather than disappearing after the fall of the studio system,” explains Patterson, “organized crime becomes more intertwined with Hollywood than ever, but in more mainstream-accepted ways.”
In one of the series’ best moments, one-time president of Universal Studios Tom Mount tells of attending a meeting presided over by director Alfred Hitchcock, super-agent Lew Wasserman (whose uber-powerful agency MCA rose to prominence with the direct backing of Capone), former mobster and Las Vegas mogul Mo Dalitz, and lawyer Sidney Korshak, one of if not the most powerful man in Hollywood thanks in no small part to his large mob clientele. Mount recalls listening to these men “carve out” parts of Hollywood for themselves.
Wasserman and Korshack are two of the central figures in this middle chapter, as they were at the heart of a cadre made up of Jewish gangsters and businessmen known as the Supermob, or, alternatively, “the Kosher Nostra”. The Supermob ran every aspect of Hollywood, from casting to funding to unionizing – as well as off the books wheeling and dealing, such as negotiating the release of Frank Sinatra’s kidnapped son – but, as summed up by series narrator Jeff Rechner, “where the mob once used violence to exercise control, these new figures wield the boardroom as their weapon.”
Their story leads directly to the creation of the most iconic mob movie of all time: The Godfather. Shepherded by Korshack protege and maverick president of Paramount Pictures Robert Evans, secretly funded in part by Mafia and Vatican banker Michele Sindona, and given an unofficial greenlight by crime boss and Italian civil rights campaigner Joe Columbo (who’d be gunned down during a public speech while the film was in production), the massive success of The Godfather went on to reshape how both film-makers and criminals operated.
“When The Godfather came out, mobsters were trying to keep it low-key,” says Patterson. “Then they see this grand, wonderful old school depiction and think, ‘I want to live like that.’ You start hearing stories of the gestures becoming bigger — the kissing the ring of the capo, the big weddings, the whispered meetings, the code names.”
As with the rogue’s gallery from episode one, this renewed attention and heightened profile leads to tragedy for most of these individuals. But even as this second generation of shadowy powerbrokers are either dragged into the light or snuffed out for good, they manage to reshape the future of entertainment. Hollywood Crime Story argues: “In squeezing the life out of prestige film-making and transforming studio economics, Korshack and the Supermob may have unknowingly set the stage for the blockbuster age.”
That age truly dawns in the next decade, alongside mainstream cinema’s disreputable sister industry: pornography. Episode three explores how mob affiliated figures, such as Louis ‘Butchie’ Peraino, parlayed the money they made from producing porno flicks into purchasing and distributing legitimate films (in his case, titles such as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Enter the Dragon, Dark Star, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), thus creating an early model for independent film-making that we’d see take off in the 90s.
Alongside pornography, the other big revenue stream for Hollywood mobsters was cocaine, which became the drug de rigueur of the town’s elite. Robert Evans and his fall from grace become the focus for much of this episode, particularly his involvement in the disastrous production of the 1984 historical crime drama The Cotton Club. Reuniting with Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola in the hopes of recreating that film’s success, Evans made a desperate decision to secure funding by partnering with two members of Florida’s cocaine cartel. The subsequent falling out between the pair resulted in a highly publicized murder trial that would destroy what was left of Evans’s reputation (at least until his unlikely third-act reinvention 20 years later).
These stories are just a sampling of those covered in Hollywood Crime Story, which, by its directors’ own admission, barely scratches the surface. Inspired during the development of respective docuseries about Marylin Monroe and Elvis Presley’s connections to the mob, Patterson found that “Once you start diving into it, another story pops up, and another story pops up, and another story pops up. The hardest part was deciding what to include in the three episodes.”
To that end, Patterson is greatly helped by the expert team he assembled behind and in front of the camera, a mix of mob historians, such as senior director of education at Las Vegas’s Mob Museum and author Gus Russo, and film experts like Jonathan Kuntz and Christina Newland. The documentary succeeds not only as a breezy, but expertly researched look behind the Hollywood curtain, but also as a critical examination of the mob genre itself, its evolution from the silent era to the final decade of the 20th century. Patterson explains his decision to end in 1990 by asking, “Has there been a truly great gangster movie since Goodfellas? They either tend to look to the past or they’re on TV.”
Regardless of one’s opinion on post-2000 mob cinema, Patterson notes that “Organized crime in Hollywood ranges today from Ukrainian mobsters taking over streaming services to African gangs running piracy, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t live in the world of concentrated power in either a physical or psycho-geographic Hollywood anymore.”
However diffuse organized crime’s impact is on the industry in today’s digital age, you can bet the relationship remains a symbiotic one, with movies influencing how gangsters think and act, and vice versa, ad infinitum.
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