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It’s puzzling that during these do-nothing days while the Conrad Black jury is out more of the visiting Canadian and British press corps isn’t ducking into the “Family Secrets” trial. I mean, you’re in Chicago already, seize the day! “Family Secrets” involves the Chicago mob, spiritually descended from Capone, in all its rancid glory, and how can any reporter who wallows in cultural cliche resist? You foreigners dissecting the ineffable lower-middle-class charms of Black’s jury–don’t pretend you don’t.
Dimanno smartly alerted her readers that among the crimes figuring into the Family Secrets trial was the murder back in 1986 of Anthony and Michael Spilotro, “themselves Mafia assassins. Martin Scorsese told their story in the movie Casino, one of them played by Joe Pesci. The film got some details wrong–the brothers were beaten to death a week before their bodies were found in an Indiana cornfield.” Thus she one-upped Leonard Doyle, a Washington correspondent for Britain’s Independent who’d written about “Family Secrets” a few days earlier and made his own allusions to Casino, the Spilotros, Pesci, and that Indiana cornfield but had failed to point out where Scorsese went astray.
