Life and Art

(An occasional column comparing real-life and cinematic accounts of history.)

Donnie BrascoDirected by Mike NewellTriStar Pictures

How did Joseph D. Pistone gain the unprecedented access to the Mafia he enjoyed for six years? Donnie Brasco streamlines Pistone's entrée into gangland, jettisoning a fair amount of real-life drama along the way. According to his book, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia (1987), written with Richard Woodley, the original plan was for a six-month FBI investigation of fences with Mafia ties. Pistone started out on the margins, helping to unload and sell stolen goods for the Colombo family in Brooklyn, N.Y. But his ambitions grew when he met Anthony Mirra, a well-connected soldier in New York City's Bonanno family, who was based in Little Italy. Mirra introduced him to another soldier, Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero.

Bursting with entrepreneurial initiative, "Brasco" rose to prominence in the Bonanno family. Mirra got jealous and accused him of concealing profits from a drug deal. This led to a series of "sitdowns" with higher-ups, at which Lefty stood up for "Brasco." At one point "Brasco" even suggested to Lefty that they put a hit out on Mirra. (Defense attorneys for the mob later questioned his tactics, and Pistone said he had made the suggestion for credibility's sake: He knew Lefty wouldn't follow through.)

The film mentions neither the Colombo family nor the showdown between Mirra and "Brasco." It also exaggerates the latter's affection for Lefty. Actually, Pistone writes, he felt closer to Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano, a Bonanno captain and Lefty's boss. Sonny and Pistone even enjoyed a kind of domestic life together--Joe would spend the night at Sonny's Brooklyn apartment and help take care of his beloved racing pigeons. They'd sit around the kitchen table "in our underwear," eating pastries and sipping espresso. In the film, however, Sonny comes off as an intensely dislikable employer and Lefty, as a simpatico underdog.

Donnie Brasco also overemphasizes the degree of distance Pistone kept from the FBI while undercover. At one point in the film, he goes two weeks without contacting his superiors, who turn to his wife in an attempt to locate him. Toward the end of the movie, we've begun to wonder whether he's thinking of abandoning the FBI altogether.

In truth, Pistone was under much stricter surveillance, and checked in with the FBI regularly. Toward the end of his stint, he was in particularly close touch with his main point of contact with the FBI bureaucracy, a man who had once worked as a street agent with him. Pistone carried a concealed tape recorder far less frequently than the film implies. And whenever he was wired, backup was always available. As reporter Ralph Blumenthal (also the author of The Last Days of the Sicilians: At War With the Mafia--The FBI Assault on the Pizza Connection) wrote in the New York Times: "All he had to do was drop the word 'purple' into a conversation and his fellow agents eavesdropping nearby would burst forth to rescue him."

Toward the end of the operation, both the real and the cinematic "Brasco" are given a contract to kill a rival (if he'd completed it, he might have become a "made guy"--a bona fide member of the Mafia). The movie portrays him with gun drawn and Lefty standing beside him, urging him to shoot. In truth, Pistone never got anywhere near the target. Nor did "Brasco" help cut up the bodies of rivals Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Philip "Philly Lucky" Giaccone, and Dominick "Big Trin" Trinchera after their rubout, as he does on-screen. (The three were really killed, however.)

In the film, "Brasco" explains to his wife with genuine anguish that if he walks out of the Mafia, Lefty will die. When the undercover operation ends, the film implies that Lefty's demise is imminent. In fact, it was "Sonny Black," not Lefty, who got "whacked" for his connection to Pistone--his body was eventually discovered in Staten Island, N.Y., both his hands missing. Mirra was also killed. Ruggiero was a target, too, but FBI agents picked him up before the mob could. Pistone testified against Ruggiero during a 1982 racketeering trial, at which prosecutors stated that Ruggiero had "made efforts to find Joseph Pistone in order to kill him" after he discovered his true identity. Ruggiero was sentenced to 15 years. He served 10 and died a natural death a couple of years after his release.

Pistone testified at scores of trials over a period of nearly six years. (According to the Times, his stint as "Donnie Brasco" is said to have been "the deepest infiltration of organized crime ever achieved by the FBI.") Pistone's information helped win more than 100 convictions--including ones in the infamous "Pizza Connection" case (which involved heroin trafficking) and the "Mafia Commission" trial (which sent virtually all the big-time New York bosses to prison)--in states as far-flung as Wisconsin and Florida.

In the film, Pistone is miserable about the consequences of his withdrawal from the Mafia, and receives minimal thanks: a $500 check at an FBI ceremony attended only by his wife and children. He stares through a window, lost in his other world. In life, the ceremony was held in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. "The room was jammed with dignitaries and government officials," writes Pistone. He did, however, leave the bureau in the mid-1980s, before reaching pension age, saying he couldn't deal with a desk job.

By all accounts, the Pistone family is alive and well and using many different names--the mob is said to have put out a $500,000 open contract on the former agent. Pistone writes that he's retained "some of the wise-guy attitude": He doesn't shy away from confrontations with maitre d's, waiters, salesmen, etc. Given the scene in the movie in which his character instigates a vicious assault on a Japanese maitre d', one can only hope he keeps his arguments oral.

RosewoodDirected by John SingletonWarner Bros.

The story line of Rosewood jibes with the work of a team of historians who investigated the 1923 Rosewood incident 70 years later, in 1993. Here's what happened: On New Year's Day 1923, a white woman named Fannie Taylor in a Florida town named Sumner announced that she'd been beaten up by a black man. Enraged, a white mob killed Sam Carter, a blacksmith in the neighboring black town of Rosewood who allegedly had helped Taylor's attacker get away. Meanwhile, Taylor's maid, a Rosewood woman named Sarah Carrier, told friends and family that it was Taylor's own white lover who had assaulted her. Four days later, supposedly in pursuit of Taylor's attacker, whites stormed the Carrier house, killing Sarah and her son Sylvester. During the attack, however, Sylvester managed to kill Henry Andrews, the superintendent of the Cummer Lumber Co.'s sawmill in Sumner, and C.P. "Poly" Wilkerson, a mill official.

The following day, the governor of Florida contacted the Sumner sheriff, Elias Walker, who assured him that everything was under control. The governor accepted Walker's word and, instead of dispatching troops to quell the disturbance, went hunting. Two days later, a group of between 100 and 150 whites torched the town. The official death toll was six blacks and two whites. National papers carried news of the "riot" that week, but before long the story disappeared. A grand jury was impaneled but issued no indictments. The story was forgotten until 1982, when a reporter named Gary Moore wrote about Rosewood for the St. Petersburg Times.

"The core of the story is in the film," says Maxine Jones, an associate professor of history at Florida State University and the chief investigator for the 1993 report. (The report led to a bill, passed a year later, that compensated the survivors and the descendants of the Rosewood families.) Where Rosewood embellishes (Sylvester survives; we see a mass grave of blacks) or invents (the character of Mann, a World War I veteran, played by Ving Rhames, who rides into town and saves women and children), the script can be said to allude to unverified testimony or inaccurate 1923 reports. Arnett Doctor, the son of a deceased survivor, told the research team that Sylvester used to send Arnett's mother Christmas cards, although he was unable to produce any. A survivor, Wilson Hall, 82, says that Sylvester did escape, and that he ended up in Texas. As for the number of victims, one white witness, James Turner, claimed he saw around 17 black corpses in an open grave. Another white man remembered a mass burial as well. The consensus seems to be that the final toll was certainly higher than eight. But Jones, for one, doubts that it was as high as the film implies (the typed epilogue puts it between 40 and 150). The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has been unable to find a mass grave.

Meanwhile, the story on which the Mann character is based first appeared in a 1923 article in the African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender. It referred to "Ted Cole, [who] ... led and inspired his brothers in blood against the murderous mob" in Rosewood. Moore believes the story was fictitious. Historians agree. Some survivors have objected to the character's inclusion. One, Robie Mortin, 81, recently pointed out that it was her relatives who had whisked her to safety, not some stranger.

By mythologizing Mann's actions--he guns down whites during the film's triumphant finale, a train escape based in fact but given a high-speed, Wild West flourish--the film does indeed diminish the politicized nature of the black resistance. As George B. Tindall writes in The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (1967), there was a "bristling new spirit of resistance, even retaliation, among Negroes" at the time. The 1993 Rosewood report notes that by the late 1910s, blacks had begun to fight back in "race riots" in Houston; Chicago; and East St. Louis, Ill.

The film's tidy, make-believe ending (Sylvester is reunited with his wife; a young white boy rejects his racist father; Fanny's husband realizes she's lying) is further belied by the actual experiences of Rosewood survivors. A book by Virginia reporter Michael D'Orso, Like Judgment Day, reports that for years, these survivors were reluctant to talk about what had happened, even with their own children. The hesitation can be chalked up mainly to fear, but there are other motivations. Contracts between Warner Bros. and the survivors, for instance, prevented most of them from participating in a documentary produced by the Discovery Channel and ABC, which aired last December.

--Compiled by Jared Hohlt and the editors of Slate.