Having grown up in Bensonhurst Brooklyn during the 1960s, sad to say that the characters are true to life. This is one of the few movies that captures the argumentative and violence-prone nature of that neighborhood at that time. Goodfellas is another that captured that horrible milieu.
As a youth, every disagreement among the goombahs on my block led to threatened violence, typically settled by the oldest goombah, who was also the toughest fighter. When I reached the conclusion that I was smarter then my "friends" and stopped hanging with them, eventually they sent another tough guy from up the block to beat me up. (It was a stand-off, ended when an older neighbor intervened.)
The mob keeps order by threatened or actual violence, including murder. I know of a guy from the neighborhood who served years in prison for not ratting out the source of drugs he inadvertently sold to a DEA agent. When he was released from prison, he started drinking heavily. One night he walked out of a bar at 2 am and saw a mob boss's son murder someone on the street. Shortly thereafter this guy was kidnapped, shot through the eyes and dumped in the trunk of a stolen car. So don't claim this movie is too meoodramatic or over-acted; it isn't.
And I would be remiss not to mention Joe Colombo, boss of the Colombo "famiily" and one of the founders of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization founded to deny the existence of the Cosa Nostra aka Mafia. On June 28, 1971, Colombo was shot three times in the head and neck by Jerome A. Johnson, with one of the bullets hitting him in the head, at the second Italian Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle sponsored by the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Was that too melodramatic or over-acted? It actually happened.
