The 1972 film *The Valachi Papers* occupies an intriguing yet underappreciated niche in the annals of Mafia cinema—a genre forever altered by Francis Ford Coppola’s *The Godfather* (1972), widely hailed as the definitive cinematic portrayal of Italian-American organised crime. *The Godfather*’s mythologising of the Mafia—its blend of familial loyalty, power struggles, and poetic fatalism—has indelibly shaped public…