Black Maria

My family fought, bled, and died to take their country back from the fascist movement that nearly destroyed the world over, yet when my grandparents immigrated to the U.S., they were vilified for their funny sounding accents, their slicked back hair, and their manner of dress; they were denied long term employment, equitable pay, and forced to live in low income tenement housing. After three decades of living the American dream they owned nothing, and they never crawled up from under the bottle. For us, the dream was not about individual success, but survival. My grandparents were forced to repress their sense of identity just to get by a little easier in this country, so growing up, the perception of my heritage was almost exclusively defined by film and television. Here I learned that people like me could never be trusted. In time, we would all stab each other in the back, cheat on our partners, beat our wives, and marry off our daughters to the first piece of scum with a dollar in his pocket. Organized crime was the only path up the socio-economic ladder. Italians ourselves remain divided: some seek to shake off any connection they might have to Murder, Incorporated. My family clung to this sense of identity. It was our only lifeline to legitimacy and control, it helped us feel powerful in a society that continually reminded us that we are not. We consumed it all. The same malevolent, patriarchal gangster story pre-packaged and sold to audiences three dozen times a year, that spoke not to the psychological makeup of the world’s most violent men, or the sociological factors that allow these groups to thrive, but like the dime store novel before it merely exist to satisfy our carnal appetite for brutality. After 25 years, I could not take it anymore. As the saying goes, “dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes.”

While visiting the island nation of Malta (a country developed and maintained to this day by a rising tide of Sicilian syndicates), I set out to unshackle the gangster story from the confines of the past. We are not interested in what is true, or what the public believes to be true, only what is honest. Black Maria became an opportunity to create a new kind of family, a uniquely American tale, a multicultural coalition of misfits and castaways raised by a powerful matriarch, who escaped from the most devastating conditions a person can be forced to endure--yet this trauma did not corrupt her natural grace, her sense of propriety. That Maria’s organization vehemently opposes sex trafficking and prostitution is not a terribly difficult leap to make when you bring the gangster back to Earth. We wanted to project a different kind of strength–not violence for violence’s sake, but a constant struggle to retain one’s sense of decency in this dark little corner of the world. It felt preternaturally dull to explore the psychology of those who kill without conscience, who cheat on their partners, and abandon their duties as fathers and husbands to live out the decadent depravity of their ill-gotten gains. I had my own questions. How does a good man cope with the psychological torments of murder? Can you maintain your principles in an environment that promotes drug addiction, death, violence, and despair? How can you live up to your own expectations… and how do you protect the ones you love? Surely, it is sad that any man should die, but it is sometimes funny how a man should die for so little. I had to know more. I wanted to meet a different kind of gangster. I wanted to bring murder out of the backlot, and drag it back to the alley where it belongs.