I think the change has to do with a changed perspective. To
the cops, a
mafia type who won't talk at all is one of those "wise guys"
who thinks
he'll be able to outsmart the system. In a kind of
cat-and-mouse game,
it's a term an interrogating cop could use to put down a guy
whose
short-term self-interest (and maybe long-term) calls for
keeping his mouth
shut.
As it is, gangsters/racketeers/mobsters/mafiosi/"friends of
ours"/LCN
members pick up new names all the time, getting labelled by
the outside
world as often as by themselves. I imagine "wise guys" might
have started
as a kind of inside joke where some of them referred to each
other in the
way cops used the term against them.
Because of its original inside nature, such gangsters could
simultaneously
make fun of the cops who used it.
--Joe Kraus
Bill Hagen wrote:
>1. "wise guys" is usually associated with mafia types,
espec. since
>Pileggi's book (source of Goodfellas movie). Right so
far? But it seems
>to me that hard-boiled novels & movies of the
30s-40s--before mafia
>"awareness"--often used the term for good guys with a
mouth, like Marlowe,
>or anyone with a mouth. So how did the term get
narrowed to mafia
>gangsters who are not usually portrayed as being that
swift with the
>repartee?
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