An offer James Murdoch can't refuse – a Mafia reading list

MANY OF US crammed our knuckles into our mouths and bit down hard, trying to stifle roars of incredulous laughter, on hearing James Murdoch tell Tom Watson MP yesterday that he wasn't an aficionado of the Mafia and that he didn't know what omerta meant.

We were, of course, fools, trapped by our own poor grasp of logic. Omerta is the "code of silence". You don't know, and you certainly don't tell.

We all know that. We've read about it in books. We've seen the movies. And if someone says "Do you know what omerta is?", of course we say "Yes! Yes!" and launch into a long, excitable explanation involving Sicily, Mario Puzo, made men, consigliatori, Berlusconi, Frank Sinatra and various legendary capofamigliari, like Vito Genovese, 'Charlie the Wop' Carrollo, 'Legs' Diamond and 'Bugs' Moran.

Or, indeed Al Capone, whose name may even strike a faint chord with the lovably innocent Young Mister James.

James is a naturalised American citizen who went to school in America, and studied film (much of which is American) at Harvard, which is in America.

Consequently he definitely has absolutely no reason ever to have heard of the Mafia, which is one of the most famous things in America, or, therefore, to know anything about omerta. Nor has his American wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, who has been photographed with Mayor Daley of Chicago, a city which is famous for having had no connection with the Mafia, ever.

But... suppose you not only knew about omerta but subscribed to the code. One of the things that you would be honour-bound never to tell was that you knew about omerta. It's a bit like our own Official Secrets Act; when you sign it, you undertake never, ever to tell anyone you've signed it.

So it becomes like the Cretan Liar paradox. "All Cretans always lie," says the Cretan; is he telling the truth?

The answer to the paradox - and, although it has no bearing whatsoever upon Mr Murdoch's appearance before the Commons culture committee - is that if he tells the truth, he's lying, and if he lies, he's telling the truth.

In other words it's not a paradox at all, because it can't be resolved in the normal world of normal logic. But nobody ever said the Murdoch famiglia ever lived in the normal world. For this, we must pity them, and help them if we can.

My own small contribution is to offer a reading list for Young Mister James.

He could start with Mario Puzo's The Godfather and its lead character Don Corleone, later played by Marlon Brando, an actor, in The Godfather, which was a film, and you could see it in the cinema, and now you can buy it on a DVD or rent it via Netflix or even probably download it onto something called a "computer" which is another American thing that hardly anyone uses to access News International's paywall content.

Puzo also wrote Omerta and The Sicilian, which contains a big clue in the title.

James Lee Burke - who, for my money, which isn't nearly as much as Young Mister James's money, is perhaps America's finest living author - also produced one hell of an organised crime novel, Rain Gods, as did John Grisham in The Firm, about a legal outfit controlled by the Mafia.

Nicholas Pileggi approached things from the other end in Wise Guy, the apparently true story of a Brooklyn street hood in thrall to the Luchese family.

And what about one for Don Ruperto? Perhaps we should go back to Puzo, then writing in his mid-seventies, and The Last Don, the story of a young pretender who forgets the one piece of advice the old capo has given him, and blows the whole game.

Just in case neither Young Mister James nor his cute, WASP-y wife has any time for reading, there's the movies - everything from Things to do in Denver When You're Dead to Some Like It Hot via A Bronx Tale, Pulp Fiction or maybe Chinatown.

Or what about Breakshot, the memoir of a Japanese-American gangster? It's not out yet. It's under consideration. By Fox TV. Part of the Murdoch empire. Surely Don Ruperto has mentioned it... or perhaps it's just another case of omerta. ·