Thuganomics and the psychology of organized crime

With the passing at 69 of mob turncoat Henry Hill there have been some positive things to say about the fellow from people who should know better.  His main claim to fame/celebrityhood is that he was the main inspiration for the mob classic Goodfellas and the Ray Liotta character yada yada and the eulogies go on.  Hill was a drug trafficker among other things and was involved in the infamous Lufthansa heist at JFK.  You know the rest and I think it's a fair social comment to make that we've romanticized, glorified the life of the gangster and this probably goes back to Mario Puzo and The Godfather book and movie.  By all accounts The Godfather (Parts I and II, forget the 3rd) is a superb film from a cinematic standpoint but my friend had a rather oblique take when he said how many lives taken is the movie responsible for? by which he meant how many joined the Club because the life portrayed in the movie inspired them to?  Actually this may not be that far off the mark as a key member of the now defunct young gangsters known as the Tanglewood Boys in Yonkers admitted to the late NY Daily News columnist Mike McAlary that they watched Goodfellas a number of times and it was sort of their inspiration.  Here's the deal for me though, take any level gangster or thug and let's say he led an independent life of crime, killings, robberies, general mayhem Society would level at him that he's a bad dude, a psycho, a criminal, a mutant, a deviant and needs to be taken off the streets pronto and go to the Big House for a long long time BUT take the same psycho and have him working as part of a GROUP operating in concert for some unified ends, a hierarchy, a criminal bureaucracy so to speak and it's somehow respectable, even glamorous.  Read two cases in the paper recently of a Mafia member putting out a hit on an average non-criminal man for the sole reason of going out with or marrying the mobster's ex-wife, this was two separate situations and let's say he wasn't a member of Cosa Nostra and did the same thing he'd be universally condemned as an obsessed psycho, a stalker yada yada but because he's a member of organized crime there really isn't the usual social and reportorial commentary you'd expect in such a case because hey that's what gangsters do.  Organized psychos is another way of putting it and the usual psycho/anti-social labels are dropped because it's an organization, a group, a conspiracy, a secret society and so it's somehow rational, none of the member's self-esteem will suffer because we're in this thing together and hey we're selective, we ain't bumping off old ladies crossing the street.  Serial killers and rapists bad, gangsters good, that's our social mindset/collective moral philosophy and we simply don't know Right from Wrong anymore, never really did.  The media wants to keep the theme going though with more books from former mob wives down the pike and some new tv shows with mob themes even though it's a passe genre by now, bloodsuckers is where it's at.  We love the desperado but hate the psycho even though they may be one and the same:)