Remembering 'Mob Candy,' the Mafia Lifestyle Magazine Beloved by Prison Inmates

The media is becoming more and more condensed. Giant conglomerates rush to cover the same things every day and are trying siphon enough social traffic to stay alive. A publication like Mother Jones can spend $350,000 to uncover a broken private prison system and make a miniscule $5,000 back on the banner ad. This media game is damn near impossible to win, and it takes a precise combination of ego, nostalgia, and money to bring an idea to the fore that has any kind of staying power. Enter Mob Candy, the self-proclaimed "Underworld Magazine of Mafia Politics, Pleasure, and Power," which had an odd and somewhat impressive run in the mid-aughts and is now being primed for relaunch.

It all sprang from the fertile mind of Frank DiMatteo, a guy raised in the life and witnessed his first mob murder at the ripe age of five. DiMatteo grew up in the Gallo crime family and made a lot of money in the 70s and 80s publishing porn magazines. But he was always compelled by the thought of building a periodical that capitalized on America's multi-generational fascination with the Mafia. So in 2007, he struck a partnership with a clothing label of the same name to finally see his vision through. The first edition of Mob Candy the magazine came with a fold-out poster of John Gotti and a definitive feature excoriating a long line of alleged FBI informants, (the title, perhaps unsurprisingly: "50 Years of Rats.") Finally, all the wiseguys and fake wiseguys around the world had something to read at the dentist.

Nick Christophers is a longtime journalist and writer who got his job editing Mob Candy after schmoozing DiMatteo at a New York club. He says the magazine was split between authentic, flesh-and-bone coverage of Mafioso history and other, semi-adjacent content like "book reviews, interviews with celebrities in mob flicks, music, and restaurant reviews, as long as it is related to the mob." The business model attempted to attract people interested in the "Mafia lifestyle," which makes more sense than it sounds. Organized crime, especially Italian organized crime, might be the only universally cherished evil in American culture. Getting a handful of true crime fans to sign up for four issues a year seems like pretty easy calculus, but ironically, Mob Candy found a niche much closer to home. "The majority of our subscribers are guys in prison," says Christophers. "A lot of guys on the inside want to know what's going on. There's a friend of mine who's doing a life bid for murder in Pennsylvania, and he said he liked the magazine because it makes them feel at home."

Mob Candy doesn't report on the front lines of La Cosa Nostra—you won't find any information in the magazine that isn't public domain—but it's still enough for incarcerated mobsters to feel like they're back out on the street. Christophers maintains that the brand wasn't initially aiming for a demographic that lived behind bars, but sometimes highly specific imprints find highly specific audiences. "I was expecting enthusiasts, like a bunch of mob film buffs," he says. "Frank and I never thought that people on the inside would want to buy it. If anything, we thought that they'd be against it." There was some inevitable pushback to Mob Candy when it debuted. A few readers kicked up some dust about the magazine's tacit reinforcement of Italian American stereotypes, and that was joined by the usual moralist bellyaching whenever anyone creates anything that glorifies organized crime. But Christophers says the publication also caught the ire of a few notable gangsters. "We got resistance from the Gotti family, we got some resistance from some guys that Frank grew up with, but what are you gonna do?" he says. "They didn't understand why we were doing it, but we weren't exposing anything that wasn't previously known." It's hard to imagine Mob Candy would be a controversial property if it was operated by a couple pinstriped chuckleheads with a Scorsese fetish and absolutely no connection to the life itself. That hypothetical publication would be a lot less interesting—and carry far fewer stakes—than the magazine we have. Both DiMatteo and Christophers grew up around the Mafia. Their interest in it today is capitalistic but also extends beyond any cursory fashionability. Mob Candy has been on hiatus for about two years, and the duo plan to relaunch it soon under a new name, President Street Boys; both a reference to the crew DiMatteo used to run with and the title of his recently released memoir about growing up in the Mafia.

"Advertisements were a bitch," says Christophers of the name change. "They were a difficult thing to manage. I don't know what it is, maybe the image. People don't want to advertise in a mob magazine." The hope is "President Street Boys" won't fall as badly on advertisers' ears than "Mob Candy."

In the meantime, Frank DiMatteo is promoting his book and trying to unload a recent shipment of 100 illicit Cuban cigars. Nick Christophers runs his own PR company and is working on a book with John Gotti's ex-bodyguard.

"Doing that right now is intertwined with the past ten years working on the magazine," Christophers says. "It was an awesome experience, it was a lot of fun, I've met so many interesting people, and it also opened a lot of doors to a lot of other things."

Wiseguys don't go away easy.

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