Hollywood Hype
Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2015, Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" (1990) is, unlike the fictional "Godfather," one of the few Hollywood films to deal with actual, real-life Italic low-lives---in this case, the robbers who pulled off a heist on a Lufthansa cargo plane at New York's Kennedy Airport in 1978, hauling in a then-record $6 million dollars. (Note: Hispanic drug cartels in South America and Miami were pulling in much more than that during the same period).
Joe Truth
Yet even here, Tinsel Town cheats: The two men who came up with the idea for the robbery, Louis Werner and Peter Gruenwald (both German Americans), were eliminated from the script; Werner was in debt to his bookie, Martin Krugman (Jewish American, who is turned into a rather comical figure in the film); Jimmy "The Gent" Burke (Irish American), a truly infamous figure in the history of New York organized crime, became less important than Joe Pesci's irascible little psychopath; and, instead of Werner and Gruenwald telling the "dumbfellas" about the potential opportunity at the airport, Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Nick Pileggi, gave the honors to Joe Manri, a minor figure whose real-life name was Manriquez (he was Hispanic).
Such obfuscations are par for the course in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to reinforcing the idea that organized crime in America, both then and now, is, and has been, a strictly Italian phenomenon. It hasn't and it isn't. The only difference is that Hollywood makes endless movies (mostly fake) featuring Italian thugs.
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