10 Mob Movie Actors Who Were Actually There
5. James Caan - The Godfather
James Caan is (maybe) the coolest actor to have ever lived. Boasting a rugged masculinity that provided an indelible mark on whichever production he ventured, Caan's most definitive turns came arguably in The Godfather - where he portrayed the hotheaded Sonny Corleone - and Thief, Michael Mann's masterful neo-noir debut that saw the actor cast in the role of a criminal yearning for a normal existence that remains painfully out of reach.
Caan, who sadly passed away in 2022 at the age of 82, was speculated for years to have had mob connections. The actor is said to have modelled his performance as Sonny on Andrew "Mush" Russo, a member of the Colombo family who Caan knew of in New York and who later became Godfather to Caan's son Scott. Numerous accounts of The Godfather's production also state that Caan hung around with Carmine "The Snake" Persico, who frequented the set of the film while being surveilled by the FBI - enough that Caan was reportedly mistaken by the law enforcement agency as a Colombo associate.
Stories of Caan's mob associations only get wilder from there. As per his obituary in The Guardian, one of the most infamous examples of the actor's criminal links occurred in the 1990s, when he and his close friend Anthony Fiato - who was a notorious hitman for the Los Angeles crime family - arranged a meeting with the kidnappers of Caan's brother Ronnie, initially under the guise of paying a ransom. Instead, Caan, Fiato, and a number of their associates arrived armed with "guns and baseball bats". Caan was also accused of arranging for Joe Pesci to be assaulted over an unpaid $8,000 tab the actor ostensibly racked up at the Miami hotel of one of his friends.
Are you that surprised that the hard-as-nails persona wasn't just for show?