Hollywood and the Mob: movies, mafia, sex & death Tim Adler Bloomsbury, 278pp, £17.99 ISBN 0747577234

Ever since the gangster movies of the 1930s, there has been a prurient fascination for the Mafia’s involvement in Hollywood. In his account of this unholy relationship, though, Tim Adler foregoes such well-trodden ground as Frank Sinatra’s association with the mob and concentrates instead on the corruption the Mafia brought to Hollywood’s economics and politics.

For Adler, the history of Hollywood is not so much one of competition between studios as a battle between the Chicago and New York Mafia crime families. The families shared control of Hollywood’s unions, then extorted millions of dollars from the studio bosses in exchange for suppressing union strikes and their members’ demands for higher pay.

The co-dependency of Hollywood and its hoodlums provokes Adler’s best writing. He never loses enthusiasm for the twists and turns of a relationship, that, at times, is as difficult to disentangle as spaghetti. Nor does Adler fall into the trap of romanticising the Mafia in the style of The Godfather. These days, Hollywood is a conglomerate business answerable to parent companies with their books open to public auditing. It is to Adler’s credit that the change seems a welcome one.

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