It's a real Mafia sleeper

Joe Pistone, the mob-infiltrating FBI agent better known as Donnie Brasco, insists that nothing - not "The Sopranos," not "The Godfather," not any other movie - has ever captured the experience of being inside the mob like the two-part National Geographic Channel documentary that begins tonight.

If that's true, then gangster life is a heck of a lot less interesting than Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and David Chase have led us to believe. Despite on-camera reminiscences by Pistone, other FBI agents and a number of "former gangsters," some videotaped in shadowy lighting and inadvertently comical hats, "Inside the Mafia" is surprisingly dull. In some instances, it's dull because of them.