'Little Caesar'

What is the public's fascination with gangsters?

Whether it's "Little Caesar," "Scarface," "The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Godfather," "Goodfellas" or any of the other six dozen gangster-oriented films or TV shows that are generally popular.

There's a dozen possiblities for this phenomena. The simple answer is that, secretly, all of us straight people want nothing more than to live above the law. To wake up every morning doing something so dangerous that you might not live out the day. We probably also like the idea of doing the bare minimum of work to receive, in turn, the maximum amount of payment. Without paying taxes.

However, I think humans have a "Robin Hood" complex. Robin Hood is an OG. The first gangster in popular culture and we've since written books about his fake life and about four dozen movies and TV shows about his fake life. Robin Hood is the idea of the poor man getting his day.

We enjoy the fact that the uneducated, poor -- however, self-motivated -- immigrant or minority doing something for themselves other than going on welfare. As hard-working Americans, we abhor the Mexican immigrant coming into the United States just to get government handouts. But should that same Mexican immigrant run a heroin line, no matter how much we dislike the drugs, at least he wasn't looking for something easy. Like not breaking the law.

What aids this fascination with the gangster "underdog" is that the film or TV show has made these people inherently likable. Watch "The Wire" or "The Sopranos" and tell me you don't identify with or root for Omar, Avon Barksdale, Tony, Sylvio or Paulie Walnuts.

We forget that these are sociopaths -- they murder, intimidate, deal drugs, guns, kidnap and generally make the United States kinda worse for the wear.

We're closer to Edward G. Robinson than Jimmy Stewart a lot of the time.