76: Mob
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Back when he was active in the gang, on the street every day, Denny Toro had a routine. Come home from school at three, help his mom out with anything she needed help with. And then, if we went out with his boys, he would sit down and watch a movie. For a while it was Scarface, the 1983 Al Pacino movie about a Cuban gangster who's so tough, he doesn't betray his friends, even when a guy is about to hack him up with a chainsaw. He's fearless, he's lethal, and he wants it all. You know, that kind of was like a motivation movie there. You know, it kind of like got the blood pumping and adrenaline going. I watched it right before I come out, so I'm already there, you know, I'm in that point. I could pick up a couple of my friends and it pumped up. Yeah. Go out like a gangster. If a movie was as good as I wanted it to be, I'd watch it once a day for months at a time. Like Scarface, I watched it over and over and over. And at times when I didn't have time to watch the whole movie, I just watched the first part or the second part, depending on how I felt, you know, what kind of stage of mind I wanted to be in. The movie "The Godfather" begins with a sentence, "I believe in America." And I think any gangster's life is a particularly mesmerizing, parable, of America. Because it contains all the things that we're not supposed to want, easy money, drugs, alcohol, glamorous, feral, sex. Plus all those values that we think of as core American values, loyalty to friends and family, ambition, independence, self-motivation, not taking no for an answer. So it's easy to see why civilians like you and me go to gangster movies. But I was curious what gangsters actually get out of them. For 10 years, Danny Torro was active in a Chicago street gang. He says that the old school gangster films, like "The Godfather" movies, they just didn't do it for him. I watched them once or twice. They were all right, but it wasn't what I was looking for. You know, I was kind of looking for how I live, you know. The way I used to live while I was gang banging was very different. It wasn't so organized. It wasn't so where, you know,
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