‘Casino’ Gets Several Aspects of Mafia Life Correct, Ex-Mob Boss Says
On lists of all-time great mob movies, you’ll often find Casino near the top. The 1995 Martin Scorsese classic starred Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone, who earned a nomination for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her role.
Casino epitomizes glamorous Hollywood ideals about Las Vegas and its ties to the mafia, and it did so with a gritty nineties edge that made it unique.
The film was also based on a real book by Nicholas Pileggi, one of the screenwriters for Goodfellas, another great mob crime film from a few years prior, so it came with some built-in clout.
None of that was lost on Michael Franzese, a former mobster turned motivational speaker who says that Casino gets more right about the real-life American mob than one might expect.
Why Michael Franzese knows what he’s talking about
Michael Franzese is a former caporegime and the son of Sonny Franzese, a former underboss from the Colombo crime family. While his time as a mobster generated him a great deal of wealth, it also landed him in prison for numerous years across a few different sentencing.
In the mid-’90s, around when Casino was released, Franzese made the decision to leave crime behind and pursue his fame as a motivational speaker. Today, he can be seen using his experiences to inform others about the reality of the mob.
‘Casino’ is surprisingly accurate, according to Franzese
Franzese recently sat down with Insider to talk about his time as a mob boss and to rate different famous mob movies on how realistic (or unrealistic) they are. When the topic of Casino came up, Franzese shared numerous insights that suggest the film got a lot more right than you might think for a Hollywood hit.
For instance, Franzese said that a scene involving a mobster hitting a person who had been caught cheating in a casino with a hammer was “not unrealistic” because, “in a mob-run casino, we certainly wouldn’t have tolerated anybody cheating like that.”
The ex-mobster went on to confirm how other violent incidents from the film mesh with reality, too, such as the idea that a mobster might break someone’s legs or otherwise make sure they ended up in a hospital somewhere just to prove a point.
It’s not just the brutal violence that the film got right, either
Casino might have done a good job showing how vicious gangsters were, but it also got another thing right: the style. Franzese notes that De Niro’s looks in the film were especially reflective of the sartorial choices he and his mobster friends would have made back then. Certainly, these guys wanted to look good, but as Franzese explained to Insider, there was a practical reason for all the snappy suits, too.
“Every weekend, I was at weddings and funerals. Half the time I didn’t know who died or who was getting married, but we had to go as a matter of respect. So we had to dress up quite a bit. I mean, I probably had 50 suits at that time.”
Commenting on the overall accuracy of ‘Casino,’ Franzese gave it a 7 out of 10 for realism.
