The book, which Anastasia authored with CBS Philadelphia Sports Radio talk show host Glen Macnow, ranks the top 100 gangster films to date, which include obvious candidates like "The Godfather" (1972) as well as some lesser-known foreign films.
"This is the most fun I've ever had writing a book," Anastasia said. "I'd interview gangsters and Glen interviewed actors. It was a lot of fun doing a different kind of project."
The book offers something for both Mafia nerds and film buffs as it combines analysis of the films with entertaining metrics such as body count, totaled from statistics on Moviebodycounts.com and Anastasia and Macnow's own tallies of flying bodies.
"In some [movies] we did [try to count the bodies], but take Al Pacino's Scarface' [1983], there's so much shooting you can't keep track of it all," Anastasia said. "If a body drops, is it dead? The counts are often hypothetical guesstimates."
Although there is certainly a difference between the Mafia in the "real world" and the cinematic realm of crime, Anastasia said some movies really do get it right.
"We both agree the most realistic films are Goodfellas' [1990] and Donnie Brasco' [1997]," Anastasia said. "They really capture what the life is like. [The Godfather'] put in a level of nobility that doesn't quite exist."
Anastasia, who wrote for The Dartmouth as an undergraduate, said he got his big break in journalism when the Inquirer sent him to Atlantic City, N.J., to investigate whether legalized casinos would bring the mob to Atlantic City.
"I started writing about the casino movement in Atlantic City and eventually became the crime reporter for the paper for the last 30 years," Anastasia said. "Now I write more about the drug underworld, as the Mafia is kind of a second tier operation [now]."
Despite a long career spent covering dangerous criminals, Anastasia said that a crime ring has only tried to assassinate him once, when the mob boss Stanfa called for his death in the early 1990s.
"I found out a couple years after the fact, in 1994," Anastasia said. "[Sergio Battaglia, who worked for Stanfa,] called me from prison, he wanted to let me know it wasn't personal. I said it was very personal."
Organized crime maintains a lower profile today, according to Anastasia. Traces of the mob can still be found in the unlikely world of reality television, with shows such as "Mob Wives" clearly undermining the values of Mafia secrecy, he said.
"I think the American Mafia has become part of pop culture because of movies and books that have been written," Anastasia said.
Even shows without a direct relationship to mob culture, such as "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" or "Jersey Shore" feed off of the tough-guy persona embodied by the contemporary mob stereotype. While entertaining, many of these shows embarrass the Italian-American community, Anastasia said. "The guys that are in the Mafia now, they're not as smart as the guys in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and part of that is sociological," Anastasia said. "If you look around in the Italian-American community today, there are doctors, lawyers, Supreme Court justices. Guys who were smart and intelligent back then got into organized crime, now [the Mafia is] sort of scraping the bottom of the gene pool."
