Richard Speck

Is America more violent than any other nation? The fact is that the United States is a violent place. As a nation, it was brought into being by violence as much as by statecraft, suppressed an entire people through slavery, re-earned its nationhood through a terrible civil war, then celebrated that unification through the systematic, genocidal decimation of its Native American peoples. And it hasn't stopped there. Consider the rampage of Howard Unruh in September 1949, in Camden, N.J.

HE IS, IN THE simplest terms, not a New Yorker. Reared in the shadow of Al Capone and schooled in Chicago-style realism, Joseph Anthony Mantegna is a counterpoint to the American tradition of celluloid heavies. Among the Brandos, Pacinos and De Niros, Mantegna is an actor's alternative to that brawling, Lower East Side Italian tough guy: a Pinteresque con man with a sharkskin suit and the soul of an ice pick.