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In Praise of Nepotism

Chapter One

We're All Goodfellas Now: An Introduction to the Nepotistic System

Most Americans have seen Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, a Hollywood epic that celebrates three generations of an American mafia dynasty. Based on an equally popular novel by Mario Puzo, The Godfather's astonishing success fueled the rise of its director and his stars and spawned a host of imitations, establishing the gangster movie as the definitive American film genre of the late twentieth century. References to The Godfather permeate popular culture. Many people know the script almost by heart. Real gangsters are even said to have adopted the rituals and language of the Corleone family-a strange case of life imitating art.

Most influential of all was The Godfather's humanizing vision of the mafia itself. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the public perception of the mafia was formed by grainy images of gangsters lying sprawled in pools of blood or twisting their guilt-ridden hands during televised anticrime hearings. Puzo and Coppola took us inside the feared and hated Cosa Nostra to show us the mafia as not only an ethn ... read full excerpt from In Praise of Nepotism ebook