It should be clear by now that Goodfellas is not a drama or even really a “biopic” but a black comedy about violent gangsters in New York City very loosely based on a memoir written by a lowlife. Can a movie where there’s a character who other Italian-Americans call “Frankie the Wop” because he’s more Italian than them be taken as seriously as The Godfather ? Or the scene where the guys are eating in the mom’s dining room snickering about how her painting of an old man looks like the dude half-dead in the trunk of the car? Or how Henry’s mother-in-law screams about how her husband hasn’t been able to digest a meal in five weeks? That was borderline antisemitic.
Now declaring that the film isn’t a real drama is not to say there isn’t any real gravitas in it, mainly with how much of a piece of shit Henry is and how his reckless behavior affects those who care about him, namely his wife Karen and boss Paulie. And, under the darkly comedic savagery and nihilism there are its victims, the truly tragic characters such as Johnny Roast Beef, Stacks, Frankie Carbone, Frenchie, and, perhaps the saddest of all, hairpiece salesman Morrie Kessler (top pic left).
The other guys found dead during the montage to the “Piano Exit” movement at the end of Eric Clapton’s “Layla” had known what they were getting into, even if they were dumbasses about it, like Carbone buying the stupid fur coat for his girlfriend and Johnny Roast Beef with the pink Cadillac.
Morrie was just out of his league. He wasn’t Italian, he didn’t grow up with those guys, he was an outsider who should’ve stayed outside. That Jimmy nearly choked him to death with a phone cord for not paying up on a gambling debt maybe should’ve been a sign that, well, he wasn’t really cut out for the mafia lifestyle and should’ve stuck to the hairpiece business. Yet due to greed and/or arrogance he stuck with it and had some level of involvement with the Lufthansa heist – the movie doesn’t make it clear – which would prove to be his undoing. Tommy stabs him through the brain with an ice pick from behind – with zero warning whatsoever – after Morrie would not stop badgering Jimmy for his share of the millions in cash stolen in the heist.
Whether that actually happened to the real-life man on whom Morrie was based is unclear. No official sources know what happened to Marty Krugman (middle in the top pic), they just declared him dead more than seven years after he disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the Lufthansa heist. Overall however it does seem that the basics about Krugman are depicted accurately in Morrie in the film: Krugman was a hairdresser who owned a wig shop – though he moonlighted as a bookie while Morrie just seems to be an average schmuck who dabbled in gambling and that led him into becoming a mafia groupie – that he was nagging Jimmy for his share, as it was Krugman who had tipped off the crew about the cash in the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK, and that Krugman’s wife had frantically begged Henry to help her find her husband after he’d disappeared.
The fictional Morrie and the real life Krugman echo the arguably even sadder tale of a man murdered 96 years ago on this day during Chicago’s infamous St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
(Also consider this the Friday night movie “article”).
The reason why the man on the right of top-most pic is blurry and looking away at the camera is that, unlike the other six victims of the slaughter at the North Side Gang’s warehouse, there is no mugshot of Reinhardt Schwimmer (In fact it’s questionable whether that even is Reinhart Schwimmer, just relying on an Instagram user who claims to have reliable info that it is Schwimmer at the 1925 funeral for Irish gangster Dean O’Banion). This is because Schwimmer had never been arrested for bootlegging or gunrunning or stabbing some other guy in the eye or anything.
He was an optometrist with a retail establishment, not terribly far off from Morrie and Marty’s wig shop when you think about it. Fucking hilariously the most in-depth article available about Schwimmer is a space-filler from the February 14th, 2011 edition of trade magazine “Optical Connections,” titled “A Deadly Connection.” Just going to print this in full:
They say career advancement is all about networking – meeting the right people and making the right choices. And the people with whom we associate will partly define our professional standing. But one US optician made some very bad career choices indeed. So bad, that the consequences were to prove fatal to him one morning in February 1929. In his business advertisements Reinhart Schwimmer styled himself ‘Dr R Schwimmer, optometrist and eyesight specialist’ even though he apparently had little or no medical training. His practice was at 625 North Avenue, Chicago, opening hours supposedly 10am-8pm. In fact he was an inveterate gambler, running up large debts; and he spent more time at the racetrack than at his work, causing his practice to founder. His gambling also brought him into contact with the more unsavoury types in Chicago society, and so began his fascination with that city’s Prohibition-era gangsters.
Pretend gangster Schwimmer was never a gangster himself but liked to hang out with members of George ‘Bugs’ Moran’s North Side Irish gang for the thrill of being associated with those characters. He liked to boast to his friends that he was in the illicit booze business, spinning them tall tales of importing alcohol from Detroit, and would claim that, with his connections, he could have anyone ‘whacked’ should he wish it.
These fantasies, and his gambling, also contributed to a convoluted private life. Reinhart Schwimmer’s birthdate is usually given as December 1 1900 (the date shown on his headstone), although his birth certificate says 1899. His first name is normally spelt ‘Reinhardt’ but is engraved without the ‘d’ on the headstone. He was certainly born in Chicago and married Fae Johnson, whom he divorced in 1923. He then moved into the Parkway Apartments but, when his debts accumulated, he was asked to leave. Having found a rich widow, Mrs Risch, to marry, he was able to move back into the Parkway on the understanding that his gangland associations were finished.
When she divorced him in 1927-8, he went back to spending his days with his North Side friends. Schwimmer might have stayed on the periphery of gangland violence were it not for his penchant for emulating the dress style and appearance of his hero, ‘Bugs’ Moran. One of Moran’s main rivals for business was the South Side Italian gang, led by a certain Al Capone. Capone was mad at Moran for the North Side’s frequent hijacking of his Canadian alcohol en route to Chicago, as well as for their execution of South Side gang members. On Capone’s orders, a plan was devised to lure Moran to the North Side’s hang-out, where Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn would carry out the hit.
The commonly held theory is that Moran was to expect a delivery of cut-price whiskey to the North Side headquarters, the SMC Cartage warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street at 11am on 14 February. Schwimmer wanted to come along for the ride, and accompanied gangsters Frank and Pete Gusenberg, James Clerk, Adam Heyer and Al Weinshank to the warehouse, where gang mechanic John May was working on a car. Moran was to meet them there.
At 10:30 am, tipped off by lookouts who may have mistaken Schwimmer for Moran, a police car pulled up outside the warehouse. Four men emerged, two in police uniform, and entered the building. The ‘policemen’ frisked, disarmed and lined Moran’s men up against a wall.
The gangsters were unconcerned with this as they were well used to a police rousting and assumed that, if arrested, their connections would soon gain them their release. Schwimmer was probably looking forward to having his name in the newspaper reports as vindication of his bona fide gangland connections. The fake officers now signalled to their plain-clothed accomplices to enter the room with their Thompson sub-machine guns which they proceeded to fire at the seven men, spraying them with 70 bullets.
Only Frank Gusenberg, despite 14 bullet wounds, was not killed outright, although he died three hours later still claiming, ‘Nobody shot me’. The two ‘policemen’ made a show of escorting the killers from the building as if under arrest and escaped in the police car. The hit was a failure in that Capone didn’t get Moran: some say he was simply late showing up, others that he saw the police car and coolly drove on. So ended what became known as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. But the unfortunate fantasist and sometime optician Schwimmer would surely have approved of the Chicago Police Department’s homicide record’s description of him as ‘One of the seven Moran gangsters…’
In conclusion only a stupid jerkoff with a death wish would want to hang out with gangsters.