April 7, 2026

NICK GILLESPIE: “The Godfather Likened Big Business and Big Government to the Mafia.”

Since I linked to the video of Ben Stein on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1979 discussing the TV tropes of the era on Saturday, I found a copy of the book he was promoting during his appearance, The View from Sunset Boulevard, in the Wayback Machine. It’s a sort of conservative version of Todd Gitlin’s 1983 book Inside Prime Time, or a first draft version of Ben Shapiro’s 2011 book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. In any case, it’s a fascinating time capsule, a look inside the worldviews of the people who brought you 1970s network television, such as All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and Starsky & Hutch. At one point, Stein discusses the obsessive belief of liberal television producers and writers that “big business” (as if they weren’t supplying product to one of the biggest of big businesses of the decade) went hand in blood-soaked glove with the Five Families. Here’s a ChatGPT transcript of the relative passage:

A dimension of the TV writers’ image of business, and of big business in particular, is the writers’ insistence that it is closely connected with the Mafia. That concept was entirely new to me. It first surfaced spontaneously at an interview. When I included a question about the link between business and the Mafia as part of my questionnaire, and even when I specifically mentioned businesses on the scale of U.S. Steel, I found near unanimity on the answer.

A producer who had worked for many years on adventure shows set all over the country (and recently on two shows set in the Depression in different locales) laid out the matter most baldly: “If you don’t believe that the Mafia is running big business, you must be blind.”

The late Bruce Geller, a writer and executive producer on “Mission Impossible,” “Mannix,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” and “Bronk,” among many others, and then an executive in charge of production at Twentieth Century Fox, got down to cases:

“Of course the two are connected. It’s a very shady area. Organized crime has massive amounts of money that is put in extremely legitimate enterprises.” Geller pointed out that, in his opinion, many parts of show business are financed by underworld money. “It’s understandable in my business where financing is difficult. In any circumstance people tend to take money where they can find it.”

Gary Marshall saw the connection plainly. “There’s definitely a link between big business and organized crime. There has to be a link to make big business work.”

Bob Schiller gave the most popular answer to the question about big business and the Mafia when he said that he saw a link not only between big business and the Mafia but also between government and the Mafia, and between labor and the Mafia.

Again, however, there was less than total unanimity about the situation. Mort Lachman, for one, saw a link but said it was nothing to feel paranoid about. Several people who preferred to remain anonymous simply could not be made to respond to the question as it was asked. They read it as, “Do you personally receive money from the Mafia?” and all denied receiving any.

Not everyone saw the Mafia in bed with IBM and William Blinn, one of the biggest guns in TV writing and author of one or more episodes of “Roots,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “The New Land,” “The Rookies,” “Bonanza,” and “The Interns,” gave a unique and unequivocal answer: “There is a conscious, deliberate un-relationship [sic] between big business and organized crime. They tend to leave each other alone. It’s mutually understood that they have their own territory. By not competing, they actually help each other. They allow each other to thrive in their separate fields.” But the comment of Stanley Kramer that “the Mafia is part of the entire corporate entity now” is far more representative than Blinn’s.

To some extent, the allegation that the Mafia is linked with business explains why businessmen are shown to be such bad people on television. If the businessman is really a Mafioso, then we could hardly expect him to be anything but a bad man. Even if the businessman is a silent partner of the Mafia, he is still a different person from Horatio Alger’s businessman. But that leads to another question.

Why is there such widespread belief in the link between the Mafia and the business world? The belief itself is a phenomenon I had never encountered before.

Part of the answer may be that it is true—the Mafia might be an integral part of the corporate structure. It may be that TV writers have simply discovered something I did not know. Certainly they have often led fuller lives than I have where business is concerned. But a larger part of the reason why so many people think the Mafia is linked to business comes, in my opinion, from the prevailing conspiracy theory of history. In Hollywood, almost nothing is explained except on the basis of conspiracies and cabals. It is here, for example, that serious, intelligent people believe that the world is run by a consortium of former Nazis and executives of multinational corporations.

Why Hollywood should be wedded to the conspiracy explanation of human events is beyond my knowing for certain. It probably has something to do with the unpredictability and randomness of human life in Hollywood, especially in terms of success and failure. It is difficult for people to come to grips with the randomness of events, and rather than do so, they often invent complex reasons for phenomena. Perhaps my reasoning in itself is an example of the prevalence of conspiracy explanations. At any rate, for some reason, people who write for television believe that there is a definite link between the Mafia and business, especially big business.

Fortunately for all concerned, Harvey Weinstein eventually showed up and declared himself “the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town,” finally cleaning up his industry for good…

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll