Don Antonio Scagnelli


Who is Don Antonio Scagnelli supposed to portray?

Supposedly he is LCN, but Italian-American organized crime does not have a very strong presence on the west coast...

I assume that the incident portrayed in the movie took place during the 70s in which case the head of the Los Angeles LCN was Dominic Brooklier. But the L.A. mob never had that much power & influence compared to the east coast.

However, if backed by the Chicago Outfit, they certainly could get enough juice, muscle and influence to hurt the drug trade of the Mexican Mafia. But an all-out war between the LCN and Mexican Mafia would hurt the business of both criminal organizations and not make that much sense since they tend to run different rackets and on different turfs/territory....

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You were right with your assumption that it was based back in the 70s or around that time, but I never heard of them having a war against eachother. Its rumored the original Eme was backed by the Mafia who wanted to established themselves in the West and they knew they needed the Brown side of town, but they couldnt deal with the thug mentality that the ese's had of tattooing their affiliation and throwing up gang signs. Im not sure if that led to em colliding, but all I know is Eme only got stronger.

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That was a work of pure fiction just like the rest of this movie. In reality the Chicago Mob/LCN would slaughter these junkie prison gangbangers as theres no comparison between a prison gang in LA and a national organized crime syndicate that has been around for more than a century, is still considered by the goverment to be one of the most powerful OC groups in the US and also has old roots connecting it to a far larger and more powerful international OC syndicate that has been around for several centuries. Im refering of course to the Sicilian Mafia(aka the original mafia) and their cousin organizations in Italy, like the Camorra.
The LCN in Chicago, and elsewhere in other major cities, still has more than enough money, manpower and connections to make any any prison or street gang run for the border. Hell they could use their connections to transfer any of these prison gangsters out of their cushy cells and into a hell-hole in Illinois or somewhere in the MidWest were they have no power at all and the Mob most definitley does. Plenty of more experianced, smarter and ruthless hitters in some of those prisons than anyone the eme has with them and plenty of cons who would love to make a name for themselves with the mob as well. They've also got connections with the Columbians and Mexican cartels and I'm sure the Mob could have these guys do similiar things such as setting up key people that they want to clip since these mexican drug dealers could set them up easiest. Buiness-wise, The Outfit could ruin them in so many ways its just funny to even think about it. The LCN has the power to make allot more happen than a prison gang limited to controlling most of the Hispanic gangs in LA.
The rinky dink LA family at that time didnt have any real contact with eme members much less work with them. In fact, Olmos was greenlit for making up *beep* and putting it in the movie like it was fact and that garbage about hitting the mob bosses kid in prison and then no real retaliation resulting from it was absolutely a pure load of *beep* Olmos obviously has never dealt with a wiseguy before much less a mob boss. He also probably put crap like that in to make the movie more dramatic and controversial which means more tickets sold.
Olmos comes off as just another gangster groupie *beep* cheerleading for his favorite group of thugs like a few black gangster groupies have done with films like New Jack City or Hoodlum. Its funny, but now you see more of these stupid fantasy gangster tales being produced.. why is that? I'l tell you.. because gangsterism and thuggery SELLS. Gangster rap music is a perfect example.
Its all a hollywood fantasy their sellling though so they gotta compare off these new-booty wannabe mafia groups against this watered down phony version they invented to represent the LCN. Plus the racial angle gets stupid gangster rap kiddies to buy this *beep* and make themselves feel superior when they talk about it on internet message boards.

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Based on your diatribe, I'm going to assume you are either a)Italian-America or b)from New York or c) Both. La Eme dominates most West Coast prisons, w/ some ranks in the Mid-West. I would agree that they have very little (if any) pull in the East Coast, but the same goes for the Mafia in the West.

"They shoot horses, don't they?"

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Like you just said. They dominate prison's if they had an influence or power they wouldn't have so many dumbasses in prison. Most mexican and black gangs, deal drugs for a few months and get locked up. They are dumb as *beep* and wish they had the gangster life style.

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The power of the "Outfit" (La Costra Nostra, La Mana Negra, the Syndicate, whatever you want to call it) has been vastly reduced. Since the 70s, the Feds have been systematically dismantling it. Rudy Giuliani, in particular, played a big part, doing major damage to the Five Families.

They are a shadow of their former selves. Except for the Tri-State area, they have little of the power and influence they formerly wielded.

After John Gotti was sent up for life, his son (John Gotti, Jr) tried to become the boss and ended up in prison about after about 10 minutes.

While the idea of a real-life Vito Corleone sending a Luca Brasi to take out real-life Santanas, JDs, et cetera, is interesting, it's not reality.

The mob is still strong in construction and "cartage" (i.e. trash collection) in the Northeast, but they no longer control the dope trade in this country. And now that gambling is legal, they've lost that source of revenue. The unions have been cleaned up as well by the Feds. The Teamsters (whose pension fund built many of the original hotels on the Vegas Strip) were actually taken over by the Justice Dept which rid them of the "criminal element."




"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world think he didn't exist."

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If the Italian Mafia is so tough how come big bad John Gotti had to pay the AB money for protection from the Black guys. It just goes to show how the Italian Mob is NOT what is used to be.

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American Me was not entirely a work of fiction. It was based on a true story and based on true characters. Olmos took a lot of liberty with his final version of Floyd Mutrux's script but nonetheless much of the film is based on reality. Of course, in the Up In Smoke commentary, Tommy Chong says that a former corrections officer who plays the jailer guarding the bus in Up in Smoke wrote the original script to American Me. The script has been around since the '70s, and it was based on the real Eme. The Nuestra Familia really kills Cadena (who Olmos is based on), but by that time Cadena had fallen out of favor with la Eme for becoming active in leftist politics and befriending blacks like George Jackson, with the plan of forming a super gang that united all of the races, something the other Eme members were emphatically against. Even though there's no proof of it, it's not totally implausible that some la Eme members wanted Cadena dead. So, Olmos's depiction of the Eme killing Cadena (Santana) was not totally baseless, although it did cross a line that led to nasty repercussions that included the death of the poor lady who plays the grandmother in the overdose scene. She was a gang counselor with a lot of ties to the Hazard neighborhood and was warned not to work on the film.

As far as Scagnelli goes, my guess is that he's fictional and that Olmos put the scene in there to take a direct shot at Scorsese, Coppola and the vanguard of mafia cinema and let them know there's a new sheriff in town, as Latino gangs at that time were and still are the most powerful force on the street in LA. I've done a little reading on the LA cosa nostra family (The Dragnas) and from what I've gathered, they were weak sauce after prohibition. Lucky Luciano and the syndicate sent Bugsy Siegel to Hollywood and Jack Dragna was warned to back off. The depiction of Dragna in the movie Bugsy wasn't flattering, either, as Bugsy has him crawling on the floor and barking like a dog. Not sure if that's based in reality but clearly there wasn't a lot of respect for Dragna, even by the other cosa nostra families. After Siegel was killed Mickey Coen became the New York mob's guy in Hollywood, still usurping Dragna. Dragna tried to have Coen killed and failed. Johnny Roselli was sent out by the Chicago Outfit to straighten things out in LA. After Roselli's death, I wouldn't be surprised if the Latinos, not to mention the Crips and Bloods in south Central, were the muscle on LA's streets. By this time the RICO act was passed and the mob could no longer operate in the open. Of course now street gangs are being wrapped up in the RICO act so karma is a mother.

At the end of the day I think the mob wanted to control Hollywood and didn't care about the rest of LA, similar to how the Chicago Outfit didn't want anything going on in Vegas outside of the skim, which is why they had Spilotro killed (basis for movie Casino).

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The Aryan Brotherhood regularly carries out hits on the mafia in California.


That has never happened. There is not one single case of the AB carrying out hits on the Mafia. In fact, John Gotti supposedly hired the AB to kill a guy back in the late 1990s after he got beat up in prison by a black inmate. The AB agree to kill the guy for Gotti for a $100,000 pricetag. The AB was eventually indicted for that murder conspiracy in this recent AB case that made national news and took down those three top AB leaders last year.

Also, the Mexican Mafia hitting a Los Angeles mobster never happened. It's complete fiction. Supposedly, Los Angeles mobsters Aladena "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno and Michael "Mike Rizzi" Rizzitello were close to many members of the Mexican Mafia. Fratianno supposedly met them while doing time in Chino, and Rizzitello was Fratianno's confidant. Actually, in the late 1970s, Fratianno hired a couple Mexican Mafia members to help him hit members of the Los Angeles Mafia in a power grab. However, the murders never happened because Fratianno got arrested first for a fatal Cleveland, Ohio, mob car-bombing and it was revealed he was a longtime FBI informant and he then become a cooperating trial witness against Mafia leaders from coast to coast.

I do agree, however, that had the Los Angeles Mafia and the Mexican Mafia had a clash, or a war, against one another in the 1970s, the Mexican Mafia could have squashed them like a bug! The Los Angeles Mafia was basically a crew by the late 1970s and not even really what I would refer to as a Mafia Family by that time. They were once powerful in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, but by the 1970s their time had passed. And no other Mafia Family would have stuck their neck out for the low-level, two-bit mob guys in L.A.

Also, don't forget that the Mexican Mafia named themselves after the Italian Mafia. I don't know if I'd go as far as saying the Mexican Mafia idolized the Italian Mafia, but they admired the national organization the Italian gangsters set up and modeled their own organization after the Cosa Nostra.

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the weakness and ultimately the demise of the italian mafia was there reluctancy to get involved heavily with the heroine trade.


Again, this needs to be corrected.

From the early 1940s to at least the mid-1980s, the Italian Mafia, in partnership with their Sicilian Mafia cousins across the Atlantic Ocean, completely dominated the heroin trade. At one point it was estimated by the U.S. Federal Government that the Italian Mafia controlled over 80% of all the heroin imported into North America. That's a lot of heroin!

The Pizza Connection Case alone in the 1980s was one single Italian Mafia heroin pipeline that pumped $1.6 billion dollars worth of heroin onto the streets of big cities up and down the East Coast, all over the Midwest, in Florida and throughout Canada. Granted that was the street-value estimate, but the Government concluded that that one single heroin pipeline sold at least 1,600 kilograms of pure heroin, which probably generated at least half a billion in the wholesale heroin market (or what the mobsters involved actually made off of it by selling it to key heroin distributors who supplied the street heroin-trafficking groups). And this pipeline was in operation during the Mafia's leaner years of controlling the heroin trade in the late 1970s and early '80s when other groups like the Chinese Triads and Middle Eastern trafficking organizations were moving in on the heroin trade that was traditionally dominated by the Italian Mafia.

The Mafia never tried to dominate the cocaine trade because they couldn't control the source country, which was in South America. The heroin that the Mafia distributed was processed in Sicily, and imported into the U.S. and Canada. So they could control the heroin trade from the so-called "farm to the arm" or from the source to the street.

So, for about a good 40 years from the 1940s to the 1980s, at least 80% of all major heroin distributors in the United States or in Canada were supplied by the Italian Mafia. Their most domineering decades were the early 1940s through the late 1960s.

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Not to get off the subject, but there is some trivia for the character of "Don Antonio Scagnelli". The actor who portrayed this character was Tony Giorgio who played "Bruno Tataglia" in the first Godfather film. Bruno, along with Virgil Sollozzo and a third gangster kill Luca Brasi(Corleone Family Hitman) before the hit on Don Vito Corleone(Marlon Brando). Bruno, of course, is killed after Sonny(James Caan)orders his hit out of retaliation for the hit on Don Vito and for the assault on Michael(Al Pacino)by the corrupt cop, Capt.McClusky(who was also associated with Virgil Sollozzo and the Tataglia family) outside of the New York hospital that Vito was at after the attempted hit on his life. Just thought I'd bring that up.

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After La Eme hired the Aryan Brotherhood to attack that all Black nightclub in Compton which was a "sent" message to the BGF to stay away from their drug territory. I've wondered if La Eme also put a hit on Scagnelli and also hired the AB to carry out that hit as well. Because if you look at it, after the failed drug alliance between both La Eme and Scagnelli and especially after the death of Tony, Jr. while he was in prison(this, of course, was carried out by La Eme as well), Scagnelli ended up alligning himself with the Compton Dope Exchange which was an affiliate of the BGF. After the heroin OD's in East L.A.(of course, Neto was one of those victims) and the attack on that house by the BGF, La Eme eventually alligned themselves with the AB to send this message. But let's just say that if this hit wasn't carried out, I wonder how Scagnelli would have reacted to the attack on that nightclub. This hit was pretty racial which was something Santana and J.D. were talking about at Little Puppet's wedding and J.D. also noticed Santana's supposed weakness that was starting to present itself within that conversation. But I guess we'll never know if such a hit was carried out on Scagnelli or if it was a deleted scene from the movie.

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dude, go outside and get some sun, it's a friggin movie, for pete's sake!! ^^

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You're making an apples and oranges comparison between a brutal West Coast prison gang and more sophisticated racketeers operating on the East Coast and Midwest. Assuming the story isn't just fictitious period, it's certainly possible that the Mexican Mafia could have gone after the son of a West Coast godfather in PRISON. And that's not going to start some crazy underworld war between mafiosi and gangbangers. He'd probably retaliate exactly like did in the movie--dump a bunch of uncut heroin into their neighborhood and get another prison gang (the Black Guerilla Family) to retaliate for him.

Whether organized crime could take on a HORDE of disorganized gangbangers in head-to-head battle is not worth arguing because there is no reason it would ever happen. Their paths COULD have crossed like this though and what happens in this movie isn't implausible, compared to say, Wesley Snipes shooting the heads of all five families while they drink espresso together at an outdoor cafe in "New Jack City". Now THAT was some stupid bullsh*t.

"Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream"

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