Last year, I was astonished by a restaurant in Dnipropetvosk called Al Capone’s. Located in the heart of the city of proletarian rocket builders, its criminal name seems out of tune with the city that for a long time was the cradle of the former communist elite of the Soviet Union.
You can imagine my surprise when, upon my return to Kyiv. I realized that the capital boasts a club, a pizza place and a restaurant that feature the same name. When I found a namesake restaurant in Vinnytsia, I realized it’s a trend.
As Wikipedia will tell you, Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone was an early 20th-century American gangster of Italian descent who headed a criminal syndicate. In particular, his gang ran an alcohol contraband operation during the prohibition era from 1919-1933.
Capone was behind the most outrageous murders in the criminal world: The 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day massacres of seven mobsters in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.
Now the name of this bloody and immoral murderer is featured on venues beckoning our youth to rest and relaxation.
This is what the Dnipropetrovsk nightclub advertises on its website: “The Capone bar will submerge you into the atmosphere of 1920-30s America, the epoch of adventures and the Dry Law. … The cuisine of Capone bar is Italian, since most mafiosi in Chicago were Italian. The big menu features the famous gangster’s favorite dishes. Our restaurant also holds gangster-styled parties and mafia games where everyone can feel like a participant of the events of the ‘mad 20s.’”
I do not believe that every visitor of Al Capone’s is an amoral person inclined to break laws and exhibit anti-social behavior. But I am convinced that any attempt to turn criminals into heroes, or presenting criminal activities as mundane and entertaining, does nothing for educating our citizens about good and evil in society.
Nevertheless, I first thought that the opening of restaurants named after a famous gangster is a matter of fashion, of attracting customers and the desire to make money by attaching to a famous name. That was until Ukraine got a wide network of restaurants of Italian and Japanese cuisine called Mafia, carrying the motto of “family values.” There is a score of such venues in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk.
Had it not been for the motto, the name would not carry such a deep ideological meaning. In essence, one of the most emotionally loaded channels – the food channel – is being fed with a signal that Mafia is something good, tasty and cozy. That it’s about family values.
The reality is the opposite. The world only knows two types of collective actions: with horizontal connections between more or less independent actors, or vertical connections with relations like master-slave, or lord-vassal.
History has shown that the most effective societies are those where the first type of connections dominates. The United States and other countries where the Anglo-Saxon system of law dominates, belong to the first category. The second type is more prevalent in Latin American nations, for example.
These countries gained independence and started building civic institutions roughly at the same time. The economic and social success of both types of countries prove the superiority of the first type of social arrangement as a more modern and open, as opposed to the closed and effectively feudal, one.
So the propaganda of family values, Mafia-style, is nothing but molding the masses into thinking that equal and independent citizens do not form the community, but rather families and clans created in the image of criminal gangs. They are the secret of success. This is the message sent to society by those who choose Mafia for a name of their restaurant.
A quick analysis of our TV also testifies that criminalization of our minds is good for someone. Every day we are offered criminal dramas and soaps popularizing figures from the underworld. It even affects law enforcers, and the singing of Murka (a prison song) by a famous prosecutor at a private party, which was then broadcast on one of the leading TV channels, is testimony to that.
So, if you choose feudalism, lack of freedom, submissiveness to the boss, cover-ups and gangster-style shootouts, then Mafia is for you!
Yaroslav Pylynskiy is an expert on Ukraine and has a PhD in Slavic Studies.
