AN Italian journalist of a certain age was telling me about his first trip to Little Rock. ``I recognized it immediately,'' he said with a wry smile. ``The closed atmosphere, the reluctance to be seen talking to an outsider, the background fear . . . just like Sicily.'' He had spent years covering the Mafia in his own country, and he was quick to recognize the similarities between the Sicily of his youth and the Arkansas of his maturer years: Bill Clinton's Arkansas, whose methods and mores have been so brutally and effectively imposed on Washington in the 1990s.

It's a shame that the tandem of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo has not given us its vision of our present condition, for Clinton and his political/business ``family'' are right out of The Godfather. Just as the Corleones started in a tiny backwater town and eventually became a vast international criminal organization, so the Clintons have moved from Hope, Arkansas, to exert their corrupt influence on a global scale. The climactic moment of The Godfather, when Al Pacino looks deep into the eyes of his beloved to tell her a bald-faced but comforting lie, has been reprised to the point of monotony by Bill Clinton.

Just as Don Corleone and his sons bought, blackmailed, or extorted the favors of businessmen, politicians, judges, and journalists, so Clinton's tenacious survival of a series of mortal threats to his Presidency is intimately linked (as was his initial rise to power) to the successful manipulation of business, political, judicial, and journalistic institutions, beginning with the spectacular purge of all the U.S. Attorneys at the outset of the first term, and culminating so far with the intimidation of potentially damaging witnesses, probing journalists, and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. And just as real-life mafiosi often maintain Jewish consiglieri, so the Clintons have their Nussbaums, Landows, and Blumenthals.

It should not surprise us. Small-town politics always have a bit of the mafia about them, particularly in the south, whether it be southern Italy, southern Germany or the Southern United States. Life in the South is more sensual and languid than in the North, less imbued by the Puritan ethic in bedroom or workplace, and less open to inquiring eyes from without. Southern societies are more secretive, and are more often dominated by small groups -- whether you call them mafias or the good ol' boys, it's the same kettle of fish -- than the more transparent and meritocratic northern ones. Mafias rest on a dual code of absolute loyalty to the family and tenacious refusal to cooperate with the broader society and its values.

The Clinton family's contempt for conventional rules was recently pointed out by the Administration's own expert on the subject. In the course of hearings on illegal foreign funding of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Dan Burton asked FBI Director Louis Freeh whether he had ever been involved in a case in which so many witnesses were unavailable. Freeh instantly responded: ``Actually, I have. . . . I spent about 16 years doing organized-crime cases in New York City, and many people were frequently unavailable.'' Mafia family members owe loyalty only to the family, never to outside organizations, as Democratic Party regulars can attest. Clinton's organization is his alone, which helps explain this President's notable lack of coattails in election years. Indeed, Clinton's main effect on his party has been to drive hundreds of elected Democrats to become -- Republicans. The centrality of the family was seen in the first months of the Administration, in the classic takeover operation known as Travelgate. Civil servants were replaced by Clinton's relatives so that the profits would be kept in the family, and when the victims refused to go quietly they were accused of the very thing the Arkansas mafia intended to do: make money out of the government travel business.

The greatest threat to a mafia is betrayal from within -- hence the rigid code of silence (omertà). For the code to work effectively, all members must be guilty of serious crimes, so that any betrayal will doom them all to extended prison terms, or worse. The presence of a single honest man could be fatal to the organization by breaking the ties of reciprocal blackmail, which perhaps explains why Al Gore was made the Administration's ``solicitor-in-chief'' and the bag man in the Buddhist-temple caper. Once he had been publicly corrupted he couldn't turn in the others without subjecting himself to the same punishment. The code has been extraordinarily effective; in the classic tradition, Clinton family members have refused to provide information about their chieftains, even when -- as in the cases of Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell -- they must serve time.

For outsiders who pose a danger, more explicit threats are required. Anyone acting against the family must be destroyed (as the White House brags it is doing to Kenneth Starr), but at the same time the Godfather invariably offers such people a corrupt way out: cooperation is rewarded.

These practices have been adopted with regard to Monica Lewinsky (now getting her a high-paying job, now threatening her career by portraying her as an unstable sexual predator, all the while denying any involvement with her), and in the matter of Kathleen Willey. Mrs. Willey's mugging by the President was first confirmed by her friend Julie Steele, who then changed her story after a conversation with family fundraiser and consigliere Nate Landow, and a cash offer from a national tabloid. Here again, The Godfather provides us with the model of one witness who retracts his testimony before a Congressional committee just when it appears the Don is about to be indicted, and another who is killed when he refuses to cooperate.

When Michael Corleone expanded the family empire, he created a series of strategic alliances, and the Clintons have done the same. The Clinton mafia was created by the marriage of two urban families: the Arkansas group that had grown up around the governor's mansion in Little Rock, and the Chicago family associated with Richard Daley Jr. This fusion brought Rahm Emanuel to the White House, Richard Wilhelm to the leadership of the Democratic Party (and then to manage the re-election campaign in '96), and finally Daley himself to the Labor Department. The choice of Chicago was perhaps prompted by actual family ties -- it is Mrs. Clinton's home town, after all -- and the alliance with the Daley machine gave the Clintons an entree to yet another powerful family: the Teamsters.

The mafia has always preferred corruption to conflict, because warfare is bad for business, and so it has been with the Clinton family. Even before coming to Washington, the Clintons established financially profitable ties to Asian families like the Riadys, and this provided the model for American foreign policy toward China under the cover of ``free trade.'' Why risk conflict with the People's Republic when there is so much money to be made by doing business with it? And why worry about such trivial matters as national security when, by selling dozens of supercomputers to the Chinese, family friends in the electronics business can make millions of dollars?

Finally, looking at the Clinton Administration as a mafia helps explain the President's rising popularity as the American public learns more about his corrupt actions. When I first saw The Godfather, the audience burst into cheers when Michael lied to his bride and told her that was the last time he would answer such questions. But that was only a movie. Who could have imagined that it was a prescient look at the future of American politics?

For more penetrating analysis and incisive commentary on the pigsty known as the Clinton Administration, click here.

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