Gov fumes at Fredo family slur-cus act
Gov. Cuomo on Monday went all Sonny Corleone on a reporter who dared criticize him and his brother over what the journalist called their misconceptions of Italian stereotypes.
Cuomo — channeling the hotheaded character from the Mafia classic “The Godfather’’ — claimed he had only seen “parts’’ of the movie classic, sniped that “Italian Americans are not Mafia’’ and even questioned the Albany writer’s own cultural background.
“I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, ‘In “The Godfather,” who are you, which one are you, which character are you?’ ” Cuomo seethed on Albany’s WAMC radio.
“I have seen parts of it,’’ the governor claimed, referring to the 1972 film.
“My father wouldn’t watch the movie because it was anti-Italian,” he said of his late dad, former Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Cuomo was ranting in response to a column by Albany Times-Union Managing Editor Casey Seiler last week in which Seiler took both Andrew and his younger brother, Chris, a CNN anchor, to task for what he called their lacking interpretations of Italian-related slurs.
Chris Cuomo was caught on video earlier this month launching into a profanity-laced tirade against a heckler who called him “Fredo.’’
Chris said being called Fredo — the dimwit son of Mafia chief Vito Corleone in the “The Godfather’’ — was as offensive to Italian-Americans as the N-word is to African-Americans.
“While Fredo Corleone is indeed of Italian descent, his name is commonly used as an insult against the member of some kind of family dynasty who’s viewed as the most useless. This jape cuts across ethnic groups,’’ Seiler wrote.
Seiler added that last year, Andrew incorrectly said the slur “wop’’ referred to Italian immigrants entering the US through Ellis Island “without papers.’’
Seiler wrote, “Cuomo subsequently stopped offering this history lesson, perhaps because it isn’t true: As anyone with Google and five seconds can tell you, ‘wop’ derives from guappo, the Italian word for dude or dandy.”
Andrew retorted Monday, “I was told ‘wop’ stood for ‘without papers.’ I was told that by my father.
“Seiler says, ‘Well, if you Google “wop,” it says something else.’ First of all, you didn’t have a Google in the 1940s in South Jamaica,’’ Queens, where Mario was born.
The governor added, “Seiler, he’s from Kentucky, and maybe he doesn’t really know New York or he doesn’t really know the sensitivity of the ethnicity. He was an entertainment reporter, and he was enamored, uh, by the actors and the actresses or whatever the heck.”