HENRY HILL: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

What were the odds that the mob rat Henry Hill would die of natural causes, or out of jail? He beat those odds pretty well, which was my original lede for the obituary which is up at the Guardian online (you can link to it here) and which you might see in tomorrow's paper paper.

What's published is cut considerably from what I wrote: the paper asked for colour and it was hard to resist including many of the details of Hill's escapades, already familiar from Scorsese's Goodfellas. In the film the execution of Billy Batts is played for an almost surreal humour, and as I say is indeed the centrepiece of Scorsese's film. In some ways I think it's the best of his gangster pictures, which is another aspect of my original that got cut back: but certainly it's important to realilse that even the hypocritical notion of 'the Family' found it hard to survive through the 'me-decade' and the explosion of paranoiac drugs.

Ray Liotta's performance deserves great praise; he catches the essential weakness behind Hill's slick hustler facade, and the essential violence behind most of his colleagues. The real Hill's slide out of witness protection and afterwards was far less glamorous than his gang years, and his addictions took their toll. I find the idea he and Whitey Bulger might have been drinking together (unknowingly?) at some bar along the coast in Santa Monica or Malibu an intriguing one. Bulger took Hill's betrayals a step further, using his informing to further his own crime career--letting the authorities do the hard work for him.

It was telling too that Hill was scooped up in the net of the bottom feeders like Howard Stern or Geraldo Rivera--a fate Kid Twist might not necessarily have preferred to his Coney Island swan dive. But Hill might be the prototype of the gangster who's media image made him greater than he was. And I was surprised to see that he'd opened a restaurant in West Haven, where both my parents grew up. I remember an uncle telling me proudly that he took a course at Syracuse just after the war, where the professor called West Haven the most mob-controlled and corrupt little town in America. Uncle Gene said it made him feel proud. Henry Hill would have thought the professor a mark to be taken.

KLEID AND ALLEN'S BROWNSVILLE

Although everybody knows the names like Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lepke Buchalter, and Mickey Cohen, the overall place of Jews in organised crime has sometimes been overlooked. But Neil Kleid and Jake Allen's graphic novel picks a good starting place for tracing their centrality and importance: the tenements of Brooklyn, where immigrant Jews and Italians grew up side by side, strove to gain acceptance and establish themselves in business, and transformed the gangs of their neighbourhoods into the business of organised crime. It's an inner-city story: the big difference being that the Italians had a tradition of such organisation in their old country, whereas the Jews did not. But free of the shackled existence in ghettos and facing pogroms, the Jewish experience appears to have been one of taking advantage of relative freedom.

Which is what provides the dynamic tension for this novel: the way Albert Tannenbaum turns his back on his hard-working, honest father, and to a large extent on his faith, in order to make money as part of a larger, more successful family.Kleid does a nice job of integrating his story with real gangsters; it's especially good to see a prominent role for Abe Reles, 'Kid Twist', who was arguably the most brutal and most feared of Murder Inc, and who, when he started ratting out his fellows, may have marked the turning point for the Jewish mobsters, certainly as a career option. Kleid is also good on the relationship with the national syndicate, with the Capones, and between the various gangs; there is a parallel with today's drug gangs who work the 21st century equivalent of those neighbourhoods, far more viciously and violently today.

The story doesn't always flow, it's more a series of vignettes whose tension sometimes disipates, especially as Allie moves in and out of the picture. The conflict and torment of informing is probably not milked for all it could be either. But that's also down to Allen's art, which reminds me a bit of Guy Davis' on the Sandman Mystery Theatre. He gets the black and white atmosphere down, and is good on indicating relationships through his layouts, but within the frames he is much dynamic, and his figures sometimes lack enough individualisation of character. This is often a problem in a story which is largely about relationships, the constant betrayal of life in the mob, and the alienation from self which results from it. What is impressive is that when the story reaches its denouement, both writer and artist step up as well, and it delivers a punch.

Brownsville by Neil Kleid and Jake Allen
NBM Publishing $12.95 ISBN 156163459x