FEar City: New York vs. The Mafia, Netflix’s three-part series about the police’s quest to bring down the New York mafia in the 1980s, begins with a sequence taken from a high-level episode of the Law and Order: “Five untouchable Mafia families hold the city in their hands,” says one title card. A bloody body lies on the street; A newscaster reports that an abandoned rail tunnel contained a mob grave for more than 60 people. The tone is urgent, climactic, appropriate for a theme that has been so obsessively mythologized and grounded in American cinema and pop culture.
But while Fear City occasionally leans on sepia-toned flashbacks of mafia power, its recreations, interviews with former FBI agents, and the replay of old wiretaps put into practice long-range, profit-driven practices. mafia in the methodical, although often mundane. , legal strategy to dismantle them. “Most of the mob stories are told from the gangsters’ perspective,” Fear City Director Sam Hobkinson told the Guardian. “We wanted to tell our story from a law enforcement perspective,” with an emphasis on the complicated and unappealing job of handling digital surveillance technology in its early stages, to make the show “a spy thriller as much as a series of Mafia” .
New York in the 1970s and early 1980s was deeply entangled with five Italian mafia families: the Gambino, Colombo, Bonanno, Lucchese, and Genovese clans, who had become neighborhood extortionists and extortionists. century in black market institutions with tentacles in the essential elements of the city. functions and business. In the late 1970s, the mob was “the most organized group within the United States at the time in terms of criminal business,” Joe Cantamessa, a former FBI agent for organized crime in New York, told The Guardian that carried out covert missions against the mafia. . Families were rigidly hierarchical, bound by a code of violence, with levers in every major city union: garbage collectors, truckers, transporters, food vendors. And as the 1980s progressed, they collectively made hundreds of millions of concrete businesses essential to the relentless construction of the city.
“To say that they controlled or infiltrated businesses is really an understatement,” said Cantamessa. “They had their hands on everything. And that’s something no one seemed to embrace until the instructions from above began to take their place. “
Those top-down directions, the ability, and the willingness of the police to hunt down family leaders rather than their numerous subordinates, is where Hobkinson found room for a new angle toward a widely-used genre. The three-part series, two 45-minute episodes and an hour-long finale, illustrates the reach of criminal mafia ventures, but remains, for the most part, embedded with law enforcement: FBI technical experts well versed in the Cold War eavesdropping of wiretapping and hidden tape recorders, judges willing to sign the surveillance, prosecutors who bet heavily on a heavy case for bosses.
Fear City attempts to change the script about whose work is glamorized in the history of the mafia, converting the legal code that allowed the prosecution of the mafia bosses (Racketeer’s Corrupt and Influential Organizations Act, known as Rico, passed in 1970 ) in a sacred word. The strategy of teasing a wise man’s house becomes a tense recreation. The mobsters (two of whom, Johnny Alite and Michael Franzese, have made subsequent careers as informants, attest to the charm and pride of the mob life in the film) are relegated to, as Cantamessa put it, “just one group of normal guys running businesses with pretty good organization and structure and rules, “which were” relatively easy to investigate once we discovered the formulas. “
To rebuild the investigations, Hobkinson and his team analyzed hundreds of hours of tape, hundreds of thousands of pages of unsurpassed transcripts, looking for incriminating or interesting sections. There weren’t many, just like FBI agents 40 years earlier, investigators carefully studied mostly unimportant conversations at home, confidential information revealed in code dotted with F-bombs, in accents indistinguishable from Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. .
The series recounts investigations directed at the heads of each family, and finds its most convincing sequences in the account of covert operations to locate and collect surveillance in high-level gangsters, the moment when Cantamessa, for example, breaks into a restaurant to plant a recording device in a lamp at night. In a particularly tense sequence, he masquerades as a cable repairman to gain access to Gambino boss Paul Castellano’s Staten Island mansion, coordinated the fake static on his TV and planted a bug on the set, while a mobster was holding his flashlight, no less.
Family investigations were transformed in the 1980s into a single case directed at the “Commission,” a coordinating committee among families, that essentially turned them into a massive criminal unit, prosecuted by the Southern District of New York. The story encompasses, at opposite ends, two figures now ubiquitous: Donald Trump, whose real estate deals in New York in the 1980s put him in contact with the mafia; and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s flattering attorney who, in an earlier iteration of his career, spearheaded Rico’s case against the Commission. “Obviously, we knew that he is a polarizing figure right now,” Hobkinson said of Giuliani, now known for frequent mistakes in the cable news. “But there was never any doubt that we would not interview him, in the sense that he is an absolutely key figure in this story.”
In the series, Giuliani relates stories that he has undoubtedly told many, many times before: his old hatred of the mafia as an Italian-American, how Rico presented an unmissable opportunity to target the heart of the Hydra of organized crime instead of their heads. replaceable and proliferating, to convey what was, in fact, his leading role in bringing the so-called “Mafia Commission Trial” to court in 1985. Giuliani is “someone who understands the great gesture,” Hobkinson said. “I think what he understood then was that that’s a great gesture that will make headlines, that will be in the newspapers, that will be on television.”
Still, the gesture required skillful legal maneuvers and investigative skills to carry out, as explained by the three young SDNY attorneys in the case: Michael Chertoff, John Savarese and Gil Childers, and the numerous FBI agents whose work helped secure the convictions of the bosses.
Fear City finally tracks a dizzying scale operation, from the nerves of implanting the right mistake in the right car at the right time, to systematically tracking billions of shady mob profits in the city construction business. The main attraction of revisiting the legal wars against the mafia in the 1970s and 1980s was that scope, Hobkinson said: “the opportunity to tell this panoramic New York story, from the streets to the highest levels of government.”
