Mob

The mob as portrayed in movies, and as it is in real life. And its hold over us. Prologue: Danny Toro, a member of a Chicago street gang for ten years, explains what gangster movies he liked most in his gang years and why. Scarface, with Al Pacino, was a good movie to get him pumped up to go out with his boys. A Lucky Luciano film taught him a lesson in how to be more compassionate with members of his own gang. (6 minutes) The Freshman: Writer Sarah Vowell explains why she watched The Godfather every day while she was in college. The film, she says, depicted a world with an understandable moral system to it. She explains what happened when she traveled to Sicily, where scenes in the film were shot. (12 minutes) Gangster's Daughter: Susan Berman, author of the memoir Easy Street, the True Story of a Gangster's Daugher, reads from her book about her father Davie Berman, a Jewish gangster and one of the men — with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel — who created modern Las Vegas. (7 minutes) Act Two continues after the break. More from Susan Berman on her father, who was a cold-hearted mobster by day and a devoted family man at night, just like gangsters in movies like The Godfather. And Terasa, daughter of a New York mafia family. (13 minutes) Neighbors To The Mob: Jerry Capeci, dean of the New York reporters who cover organized crime, on the decline of the mob in recent years. And Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker magazine, who discusses a photo his wife took of his old neighbors, the Gambino crime family. He lived across the street from John Gotti's mob clubhouse, on Mulberry near Prince, in New York's Little Italy. (15 minutes)