The FBI indictment of former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone contains the unsurprising revelation that Stone threatened an associate, and his pet dog, to prevent him from cooperating with authorities. He expressed his threat using the familiar trope of the Mafia movie. “On multiple occasions,” the special counsel reports, Stone told his associate (reportedly Randy Credico) to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” a reference to a Godfather: Part II capo who was prepared to inform on the boss before Congress, before recanting his testimony (and ultimately committing suicide to protect his family from reprisal.)
The Russia scandal has provided us with relatively few Russia cultural references, but a proliferation of mafia references. The fact that Stone expressed himself this way is not mere color, nor is organized crime even a metaphor for the mindset and Trump and his inner circle. It is actually a reasonably literal description of the Trump organization.
In the fall of 2017, a source close to the administration warned, “this investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up. You have to anticipate this roll-up will reach everyone in this administration.” This turned out to be one of the most prescient descriptions of what was to come. A roll-up of an organized crime family generally starts at the bottom, and uses evidence against lower-ranking figures to compel testimony against their superiors, until it ultimately reaches the top of the organization. Mueller has followed this pattern, beginning with indictments against low-level characters like George Papadopoulos and Russian hackers, and working its way up to the inner circle of the campaign and, quite likely, the boss himself.
View the complete January 25 article by Jonathan Chait on The New York Magazine website here.