When the butcher, who is terrified and wishes to comply but can’t scrape up the required payoff, fails to meet their demands, the two gangsters kidnap his daughter, who is eventually rescued by the police. Ostensibly based on a true story, the plot involves two gangsters who write a threatening letter to a butcher, demanding extortion money lest he, his family, and his butcher shop face destruction.

Often when a business was marked for death, a mafioso would dip his hand in black paint and mark a storefront with an imprint of a black hand. The “ Black Hand” of the title refers to Italian extortion rackets that trace all the way back to the 1700s in Naples.

Subtitled True Story of a Recent Occurrence in the Italian Quarter of New York, this 11-minute silent saga is widely considered the first gangster movie ever made. Old / Classic Mafia Movies The Black Hand (1906) You can watch the first mafia movie ever made for free on YouTube. Here are some of history’s most famous and influential Mafia films, both domestic and foreign, followed by a brief chronology of Italian organized crime both in Italy and America. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are the most prominent directors of Mafia films, which focus on drug trafficking, book-making, extortion of businesses, and contract murder. Gangsters such as Al Capone and John Gotti are among the unlikeliest folk heroes in American history. Real 1939 mugshot of Al Capone, a historical American gangster and businessman that inspired many mafia movies. Still from Illustrious Corpses: a mafioso justifies a murder.Īlthough persecuted and confined to their own ghettos when they first arrived on American shores in the late 1800s, Italians weren’t fully recognized as “American” until the 1950s and 1960s, and largely due to the fact that they systematically fought against nativist persecution through their adeptness at organized crime and contract murder. The assimilation of Italian-Americans into wider American culture is a success story that has captured the nation’s imagination because it was widely achieved through organized crime.

Good recent movies based in italy