Last week I saw "American Gangster," which I thought was a great film. It deals with the rise and fall of black gangster Frank Lucas, and also explores the inherently corrupt (and corrupting) nature of the Drug War. The lead character, played by Denzell Washington, was a thorough Machiavellian who mastered not only a novel heroin distribution technique (I won't spoil the plot), but astutely played on white racist assumptions like a chess master. Because he had never been more than a black chauffer for a Harlem gangster, it was natural for the cops (and the white mobsters) to assume he was working for "The Man." In reality, he was working for himself!

Even though I generally don't review the films I see, I highly recommend "American Gangster."

What prompted this spontaneous plug was reading Annie Jacobsen's report that a group of DEA agents are claiming that the film has libeled the DEA:

The day after Thanksgiving, a New York lawyer named Dominic Amorosa wrote a letter to NBC Universal--the film studio behind American Gangster --threatening a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents. The way in which DEA agents were portrayed in the film, the lawyer said, was "destroying the reputations of honest and courageous public servants."

It's a bizarre premise for a lawsuit; what Hollywood film involving federal agents doesn't portray at least one of those federal agents as corrupt?

But Amorosa's threatened lawsuit took on an even flimsier footing when the New York Post reported last week that the would-be plaintiff was a "retired federal agent" named Gregory Korniloff.

But now, a man I had never heard of before (and never want to again) is claiming that the film made him look like a bad guy:

Dominic Amorosa's current charge is that the Korniloff character is portrayed in "the most awful and corrupt manner" in the fictional film. He says that his client's "honest and courageous" reputation has been intentionally made bad by the movie studio. Amorosa says the public deserves the truth and, on behalf of public servant Korniloff, demands that Universal studio re-cut the end of the film--or else.

I thought I'd better check the imdb list of characters. Guess what? The name "Korniloff" does not appear.

So how was this man defamed?

By filing the lawsuit, he's invited public scrutiny, and Annie Jacobsen explores a litany of complaints against Korniloff, including:

.... tampering with evidence, threatening people with violence, tampering with evidence, and destroying government property to a degree that makes real life seem far stranger than fiction. Had Korniloff neglected to step into the limelight last week, perhaps none of this would have come to bear. But Korniloff put the cameras on himself. On the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Korniloff gave an exclusive, live telephone interview to FOX News (from inside his Department of Homeland Security office which, incidentally, is against federal policy). This self-promoting act triggered a landslide of news reports. Suddenly, the relatively unknown Gregory Korniloff was a household name as far away India, Vietnam and Russia.

And there's a lot more. Read the whole thing. If even half of it is right, it's a crying shame that a rogue agent like this is still permitted to drink from the public trough. Jacobsen reports that his attorney was rude, Korniloff refused to answer questions, and that this looks like a classic case of a glass house:

Corruption is a serious charge. It means, "dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power." That Korniloff is charging the studio behind "American Gangster" with libel because they make him look corrupt seems like a man in a glass house throwing stones.

Truth is a defense.

Who knows? The lawsuit might even help the film.

The lawsuit (thanks to Annie Jacobsen's excellent reporting) has certainly helped motivate me to give the film a plug.

So I'll conclude by plugging it again. "American Gangster" an exciting, action-packed film, with something for nearly everybody, right, left, or center, communitarian, libertarian, pro-Drug War, anti-Drug War, and even those in the "Not Sure" categories.

I especially recommend it to those who think prohibition works.

Right. They took down Lucas in 1975, and that ended the heroin problem.

This will sound counterintuitive, but since I'm on the subject of the Drug War, I'll end on a note of pessimism about optimism. I think America's failed (though constitutional) experience with prohibition of alcohol had the paradoxical effect of causing the old guard (the cops who'd been around long enough to recall the hopeless corruption, and the folly inherent in waging war against the human appetite for pain-avoiding pleasures) to throw up their hands, and remark the obvious -- that the Drug War was similarly doomed to failure. What this did was generate a determined new optimism among the "young turks" of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom tended to see the Drug War as a Culture War (something Prohibition tended not to be, although it would have been impossible to start without anti-German hysteria). These new "optimists" introduced a number of (IMO) foolish ideas -- one of which was the meme that relegalization would be a "surrender" (and therefore immoral and cowardly), and the other was the even more irrational idea (a perversion of optimism, IMO) that "we can make prohibition work this time." Generation after generation of neo-socialists have made the same claim (which is made today), despite the fact that socialism does not work. In both cases, closed loop systems of circular thinking prevail, in which everything that happens, and every statistic that can be found or manufactured, is seized upon as evidence in support of the master plan. Either there are signs that they are winning (in which case the efforts must be redoubled -- "this is no time to let down our guard") or else there are signs that "we are losing" (and therefore must redouble our efforts.

Thus, my worry is that prohibition may be as ineradicable as socialism.

Which is more corruptive of the human soul is beyond the subject of this post.

But don't miss "American Gangster."