I feel like these guys looked around and saw that their people were being treated like shit, and they made a choice - they could either get fucked, like the good citizens who were paying protection money, or they could do the fucking and make money. I think in that is a certain amount of admirability. They didn't want to assimilate, lose their culture, be America's bitch or be the bitch of guys worse than them. They saw what they wanted and took it. Did they eventually become just as bad or worse than the guys who terrorized their civilian fathers and grandfathers? Yes, to a degree. But in the context of that time - the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s - when Italians were basically considered just barely above Blacks on the social totem pole - they did what they had to do. Those were the real gangsters.