New movie ‘The Alto Knights’ revives bitter feud between major mobsters

The newest Mob movie written by journalist and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, The Alto Knights, is his third major script focused on organized crime, along with Goodfellas and Casino.

Together, these movies, featuring various characters in different eras, tell the story of the Mafia’s rise from street crimes to casino boardrooms to its eventual decline.

Named for a Mafia social club in New York City, the new movie, scheduled for release on March 21, depicts a feud between powerful mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, with Robert De Niro portraying both characters. During a power grab in May 1957, Costello was wounded in a shooting planned by Genovese and bungled by hitman Vincent “Chin” Gigante. According to Pileggi, this rivalry within a Mafia clan was part of the Mob’s gradual undoing.

“The Alto Knights is really about the end of organized crime,” Pileggi told The Mob Museum. “It takes a while for it to die. It’s mortally wounded, and it’s bleeding for a couple of years, but now it’s just about expired.”

Currently, there is “very little left” of the Mob from an earlier period when Mafia families and Jewish gangsters were involved in bootlegging and illegal gambling, Pileggi said. Alcohol has been available legally in the U.S. since Prohibition ended in 1933, and casinos and sportsbooks are operating lawfully these days across the country.

The money now is in narcotics trafficking controlled by criminals from various countries, Pileggi said. “Gangster crime today, it’s drugs, and it’s different,” he said. “That’s where it is organized.”

Chasing ‘the American dream’

Directed by Barry Levinson, The Alto Knights is coming out decades after the release of Goodfellas and Casino, the two movies that cemented Pileggi’s reputation as a top Hollywood screenwriter. Those earlier films, which he co-wrote with director Martin Scorsese, are based on Pileggi’s nonfiction books Wiseguy and Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. For the 1990 film version of Wiseguy, the title was changed to Goodfellas to keep it from being confused with an unrelated CBS television series called Wiseguy. Pileggi also co-wrote the 1996 Harold Becker-directed movie City Hall, a New York political drama with Mafia overtones.

Pileggi’s background shaped his interest in organized crime. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where many mobsters lived, Pileggi, now 92, said he was fascinated by “the awe in which they were held in the neighborhood.”

Later, as an Associated Press reporter and magazine writer covering crime, Pileggi became intrigued by “street-level guys” in places such as Bensonhurst. These were the neighborhood gangsters not often portrayed in movies such as 1972’s The Godfather, which focuses on the upper echelon, including the fictional Corleone family’s ultimate leader, Michael.

Working as a journalist, Pileggi met Henry Hill, a New York Mob associate who couldn’t be a Mafia made member because he was half-Irish instead of fully Italian as required. Hill gave Pileggi the perspective of an outsider operating on the inside. Pileggi knew Hill’s story would make an interesting book.

“I wanted the street-level wiseguy, and Henry Hill came along,” Pileggi said. Hill was an opportunistic hustler stealing, among other things, merchandise from delivery trucks. “Michael Corleone wasn’t hijacking a truck,” Pileggi said, “but Henry Hill was.”

A criminal group in Hill’s circle later pulled off a larger heist of cash and jewels flown into New York by Lufthansa Airlines, an incident included in Goodfellas. The fast-paced movie, which also features Hill’s relationship with his wife, Karen, remains popular today, long after its release 35 years ago.

From there, Pileggi’s attention shifted to a Kansas City court case in the mid-1980s involving criminals skimming untaxed casino revenue from Las Vegas. These mobsters were operating at a higher professional level than New York wiseguys hijacking trucks.

To Pileggi, the events in Las Vegas represented a “next step” in the overall Mob story. “This is organized crime really moving into big business,” he said.

Needing central characters for the book and screenplay, Pileggi finally convinced Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal to talk with him. During the 1970s, Rosenthal oversaw the Stardust and three other casinos in the Las Vegas Valley for Midwestern crime families and thus would be important to Pileggi’s story. Initially, Rosenthal wouldn’t talk. However, after learning from Pileggi that De Niro would be portraying him in the movie and that he’d get to meet the actor, Rosenthal opened up. In the book, Pileggi used real names such as Rosenthal’s and the Stardust, but for the film, the names were changed. The 1995 movie also stars Sharon Stone as a character based on Rosenthal’s wife, Geri, and Joe Pesci as a dramatized version of the Chicago Outfit’s Tony Spilotro. An affair between the Stone and Pesci characters creates dramatic conflict in the movie.

Pileggi said Rosenthal, a longtime bookmaker from Chicago, had hoped to live “the American dream.” “Lefty Rosenthal always used to say that the American dream is great wealth with very little work, no work, just the check comes,” Pileggi said.

Emotional expression

Pileggi’s focus on interesting characters, like those in Goodfellas, Casino and The Alto Knights, gives his work an added dimension. In the book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, author Glenn Kenny wrote that Pileggi “doesn’t just transcribe his subjects.”

“He creates credible, recognizable, memorable voices for them,” Kenny wrote. “And he tells a compelling and frequently mind-boggling story.”

To make a story compelling, Pileggi said, you need people like Frank and Geri Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro, and Henry and Karen Hill.

“For my kind of movies, I always have to find those kind of characters,” Pileggi said. “There would have been a Casino book if all I had was the trial and the taking over of the casino [in Las Vegas]. It would have been an interesting book, but it becomes a movie when you have Lefty, Tony and Geri, just like Goodfellas became a movie. Lufthansa would have been exciting, but you had to have Henry and Karen.”

A person wanting precise facts can turn to scholarly books, documentaries and court records, Pileggi said, but effective Hollywood movies need to convey an “emotional expression.” “It may not get the facts right,” he said, “but it’ll get the emotion right.”

With homes in New York City and Los Angeles, Pileggi continues to work on movie scripts about the Mob.

“There are always stories,” he said.“ The Mob is a life-and-death business, which gives urgency to the story you’re writing about. Mob stories or war stories, they’re more classic because they are life and death. It gives power to the story.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.