Remembering Mario Biaggi

I'm currently watching the Paramount+ mini-series The Offer and it's ... highly mediocre.

It's a 10-hour retelling about the making of the 1972 classic The Godfather, told mostly from the perspective of the producer Al Ruddy. Ruddy is played decently by Miles Teller and he's made out to be a hero, the genius behind ones of the greatest movies ever made (but my favorite performance is by Matthew Goode who does a great job portraying fellow Riverside Drive native Robert Evans, the flamboyant head of Paramount in the early 1970s who was responsible for overseeing the production of Love Story in 1970, The Godfather in 1972, and Chinatown in 1974 -- three movies in four years made that him a legend forever). The Offer would have you believe that somehow Ruddy is the reason for The Godfather's greatness, never mind that Francis Ford Coppola is the one who actually made it, and that Ruddy never produced another movie in his career that was anywhere near as good.

Also, The Offer is actually longer than all three Godfather movies combined!

Anyway, there's a minor character in The Offer that caught my interest -- the late Congressman Mario Biaggi who was the grandfather of Alessandra Biaggi, the former State Senator who destroyed the IDC in 2018.

Back in the early 1970s Biaggi was at the height of his prestige and power, a big-shot politician, a gregarious personality, and easily the best constituent-services Congressman NYC had the time. He was beloved, always won his elections easily, and seemed destined to become mayor. He also had strong connections to the real-life mafia, a "finger in every pie" kind of guy. 

And he hated The Godfather.

Biaggi thought that it demeaned Italians, made everyone think they were all gangsters,  and he did everything he could to stop it, including getting the movie's permits pulled so that the production couldn't shoot around NYC. Obviously he failed, but The Offer makes clear what a headache he was to Ruddy and Coppola, and how he was brought to heel by Joe Columbo, once he cut a deal with Ruddy to get the word "mafia" removed from the screenplay. 

This profile of Mario Biaggi ran in New York magazine in December 1972, the same year The Godfather was released and just before he ran for a mayor in 1973 -- a campaign he would ultimately lose to Abe Beame. Biaggi would continue in congress until 1988 when he resigned and was ultimately imprisoned for corruption. He died in 2015, still a beloved if somewhat controversial figure -- but he was the kind of old-school politician who was, at heart, a public servant, a man passionate about his community and city, a guy who did a lot of good -- even if he sometimes feathered his own nest and tried to derail a cinema classic.