Paul Castellano shot dead

The other week a British exhibition opened in Washington and the other day there was an American crime in New York. Together they represent beautiful – well, not beautiful but most vivid – examples of the big gap between a regular American preconception about Britain and a regular British preconception about America.

The exhibition in Washington is called 'Treasure Houses of Britain'. It's at the national gallery which has practically done itself over so as to provide the visitor with a continuous tour from Tudor times on of Britain as seen through a succession of some of its great houses. The rooms were redesigned so that, beginning with the Tudors, you go in succession through a Jacobean setting, a Stuart room, Carolinian, Georgian room and so on with, all in place, the appropriate period treasures which have been lent by scores of old families or at least the tenants of noble houses.

And it is agreed by one and all that nothing like it has ever been seen anywhere. The Duchess of Devonshire said it was absolutely stunning, that she could not have imagined an exhibition done with such taste and imagination. The exhibition will go on through the winter and its success has been such that there's talk of taking it to – where do you think? London! A wry case of polishing up lumps of coal to look like jewels and then transporting them to Newcastle.

The exhibition will give great joy and reassurance to American Anglophiles whose view of Britain as the most civilised and orderly of societies gets badly bruised from time to time by such bafflingly, un-British items as soccer match riots and ferocious violence during episodes of industrial action or what are still called in America by the stark old name of strikes.

So, all in all, I don't think there's any doubt that the 'Treasure Houses of Britain' brings relief and reassurance to Americans who want to go on believing in Britain as a courteous, lawful country with, still, in the placid countryside, marvellous decorations in the shape of aristocratic mansions and doodads.

By the same token, the Americans who like to go on thinking that Britain is not yet a democracy or, at best, that it is run by large and noble landowners, by, as Lord Halifax used to put it when he was ambassador here, 'by aristocrats whipping the peasants', these people will, alas, take the exhibition as proof that their antediluvian view is correct, which can't be helped. People who have an instinctive or built-in prejudice against another country will always find evidence to support it.

Now, as the movie directors say, we cut or segue to East 46th Street in New York – as rude a jump cut as there has ever been in the history of the movies. I'm looking at a picture, a photograph, in the New York Times, of all unsensational sheets. It shows half a dozen people pointing and/or gaping at what in Britain is called a pavement and what, in America, is called a sidewalk. By the way, a pedant from Cornwall writes to me and says, 'Why can't Americans call a sidewalk a pavement just like us?' The answer, dear sir, is that this would lead to great confusion since the pavement, in America, is the roadway you step off the sidewalk on to. Right?

So, a man is pointing to a spot on the sidewalk on East 46th Street near Third Avenue. Several passers-by have stopped passing by and are following his index finger to the edge of the sidewalk and a smear of something or other on the adjacent pavement. This is it! the man says. Other men are leaning over and a girl, well-wrapped up against the 18-degree temperature is gazing in awe at the smear.

The smear is, in fact, almost certainly an oil dripping from a recently parked car, but the onlookers, including a Japanese television crew, are not there to believe it. Not certainly a sound man from the Nippon Television Network. He is one Shoji Hiroyuki. 'This', he says, 'is a big story in Japan. We have our own Mafia in Japan now. Japan is becoming very Americanised.'

In the very left corner of the picture is an awning. It has printed on it the legend, Sparks Steak House and whether it likes it or not, Sparks Steak House from now on will be an immortal memorial, a tourist stop. Already to the despair rather than the gratification of the owners, people are bustling along 46th Street looking for that sign and going in there to lunch or dine because it is, was, the scene of the crime. What crime?

Well, if nothing is more British than a ducal mansion, what could be more American than the bumping off of a gangster? Last Monday afternoon, a car, a limousine, pulled up outside Sparks Steak House just before five-thirty and two men got out. If nothing more had happened, they would have remained two anonymous, respectable, middle-aged men going into a steak house, but they had no sooner stepped out on to the sidewalk than three men in trench coats approached them, suddenly drew out semi-automatic weapons and, at close range, let off a barrage of gunfire.

Each man was the target of something like half a dozen shots in the head and upper body. Both fell dead on the instant beside the still-open doors of their limousine. The three men took off for the corner of the street at Second Avenue, leapt into a car waiting for them and were gone, leaving behind them, in the Times's sombre phrase, 'a grizzly tableau of underworld murder'. As I speak, they are still in limbo.

It came out very soon that the two victims were Paul Castellano and a friend or associate, Thomas Bilotti. Mr Castellano is, was described as 'the reputed' – it's always reputed – 'leader of the most powerful crime organisation in the country', but a Mr Ronald Goldstock, who is, has been for 20 years, the director of New York State's organised crime task force, identified Mr Castellano as the head of the Gambino family, one of the five families of what are always described in print as 'the leading criminal organisations in the country', based in New York City. To the rest of the country, they are known as branches of the Mafia.

Mr Goldstock and the New York City police department don't mince words. They were the source of what looked in the Times the next day like a genealogical table – a box, listing the five families, each with members of between 100 and 250. They are the Gambino family, Mr Castellano's empire, the Genovese family, the Colombo family, the Bonanno family and the Lucchese family. As any old aficionado of the 1930s Warner Brothers movies could tell you, such people are involved in drugs, prostitution, extortion, gambling machines and, more recently, in the very profitable business of marketing pornography in its manifold forms, from dirty postcards to mail-order exploited children, now to producing and distributing video cassettes and controlling porno movie houses.

But in 50 years, times have changed and so have the scope of organised crime and so has the appearance, the public image, of the criminals. The police department lists, for instance, among the profitable activities of the Gambino family, food outlets, entertainment, jewellery and the ownership of pizza parlours in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Some of the other families are busy in cigarette smuggling, bankruptcy frauds, in real estate agencies, in food catering establishments, in undertakers, in motorcar sales agencies, motion picture studios, in restaurants and in the distribution of wine and liquor.

At least three of them have, to put it mildly, a powerful voice in the unions that control the trucking industry, the building industry, the New York garment industry, without which New York City would go bankrupt, the labour of the waterfronts – the piers, the freight handling, the whole shipping labour from Boston or New York down the coast all the way to New Orleans.

The crime investigators, the city and state prosecutors, not to mention a whole army of FBI men, are at work night and day tracking down this enormous and widespread criminal empire and alert at all times to some infringement of the actual law which can be pinned on an associate, preferably the head of one of these five families.

Two things, two facts, elements, make it very difficult to prosecute them, especially for their main involvement in such vital businesses as trucking, waterfront labour, freight carried to and from the airports. First, they have intensely wary, clever lawyers but, in the main, they run tight and very efficient ships. In other words, for what seems in any given instance a pay-off of rather paltry protection, the business will be run, the trucks will thunder through the night, the cargo will be delivered with no fuss.

Its only from time to time, when one family moves in on another's monopoly of a profitable sideline that there's trouble, meaning murder, at the top, though, in this instance, Mr Goldstock believes that the leaders of the other four families gave the nod for Mr Castellano's murder because he was having legal problems that endangered all of them.

Well, this squalid rattle of gunfire on East 46th Street has, at least, opened up not a can of worms, but a whole warehouse of snakes and given unenviable publicity to the names of Castellano, Genovese, Bonanno, Colombo and Lucchese.

You'll have noticed, of course, that right in line with the most cherished prejudice about the Mafia, they're all Italian names, which greatly disturbs Governor Mario Cuomo of New York. He hates the word 'Mafia'. He refuses to believe it is an organisation. It is one element of organised crime, he says. The word is an insult, he says, to millions of decent Italian-Americans. So it is. Governor Cuomo is one.

Nobody has blamed him or disputed him because, one American in about 13 has an Italian name and Governor Cuomo is a likely, perhaps the likeliest, Democratic candidate just now for the presidency of the United States.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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