Fear City review: how the new Netflix documentary about the mafia failed

Rudy Giuliani, dressed in a navy suit with a flag on his lapel, sits in a glassy conference room talking to a camera. “I was a tough kid. I was a boxer. They taught me not to be afraid of anything, “he says.” Could I have been a wise guy? Of course I could have. But in the 1970s, I became an assistant to the United States Attorney. “

Surprisingly, it’s not in a campaign ad. Giuliani is an important and exalted figure in Sam Hobkinson City of fear: New York against the mafia, a new three-episode documentary series on Netflix. Of course it is. After all, Giuliani played a major role in the legal strategy that helped law enforcement break the dominance of the top five mafia families over the economy and culture of New York City in the early 1990s. 1980. It would be strange to make a documentary about the time without including it.

But Rudy Giuliani around 2020 is not the same cultural figure that he was back then. Nor is he, for that matter, Donald Trump, whose connections to the mob at the time and the apparent adoption of mob-like tactics are no secret. City of fear – A true crime story for the “law and order” crowd, mixed with nostalgia for the good old days – accomplished some wild feats of lazy filmmaking in its narrative. And the wildest of all could be an almost complete absence of any recognition that the past is hardly in the past, when it comes to this subject.

Imagine making a documentary in 2020 about New York City, the mafia, and the 1970s and 1980s with as little reference as possible to the current President of the United States, who, whatever you think of him, is a completely relevant. (The small reference in this series comes at the beginning of the third episode, when someone says that if you were a New York real estate developer in the 1980s, you had to deal with the mob. City of fear It shows some images of Trump while mentioning Trump Tower as a major development from a major developer, and plays a bit of a tape where a mobster mentions him. Okay, but: How did Trump deal with the mob? Up to what point? Was it your criminal actions? Don’t expect an answer. City of fear has already moved on)

Or contemplate decision-making that includes listing Giuliani, Trump’s future attorney, as a dominant presence and main issue, along with New York attorneys and the FBI agents he worked with, almost all of whom are interviewed. in equally brilliant settings, with everyone accounting without questioning as the film’s most trusted storytellers. The more colorful voices of the old gangsters (mostly boys who met the time or became state witnesses) become less significant once Giuliani and company. enter image – a job title for City of fear could well have been How Rudy Saved New York City From Bad Boys: And That’s Why Law Enforcement Is Good. I had to scan the credits to confirm that the series was not funded by the Justice Department.

Others may speak better than I do to the historical accuracy of City of fear Was RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), the congressional law that gave law enforcement the ammunition they needed to finally indict the mob bosses, as unmistakably good as it sounds? How well do ancient gangsters and FBI agents characterize those cat-and-mouse years hold up against history? I have no idea, but his lack of voices outside the people directly involved in the cases leaves me skeptical.

Netflix

I’m not here to argue City of fear at the level of the facts, however, or even politics; What surprised me was how bad it is as a documentary.

City of fear it is shallow, toothless and dull

It’s a boring option to tell a story like this from the point of view of FBI agents. His perspective is well trampled on television and in movies. And New York’s relationship with the mob is not exactly a hidden story.

It’s also overwhelmingly boring to adopt the official narrative of what New York was like back then as the film’s de facto worldview, proposed in on-screen text (unfortunately punctuated) at the start of the first episode:

1970 NEW YORK

A CITY WITHOUT RIGHT PLAGUED BY DRUGS, VIOLENCE AND MURDER

That is not entirely wrong, of course. New York was in bad shape in the 1970s, and almost bankrupt.

But if there was something else in New York at the time, you wouldn’t know it from City of fear, which provides little or no context. He also wouldn’t know how ordinary New Yorkers were really affected by the state of affairs, except through the words of the mobsters and FBI agents interviewed. in the movie.

There is a lot of talk about the mafia’s control over the unions, but no former union worker seems to talk about it. We hear stories of exploited grocery store owners, but never hear of grocery store owners. And women don’t seem to exist in this world at all. (Very few women speak throughout the series; the most interesting female voice is former FBI agent Charlotte Lang, who was the only female agent on the mob team, and only appears halfway through the third episode. City of fear it would have been much more convincing if he had reoriented himself around him.)

What we get with City of fear it is not “New York against the mafia”, as the subtitle promises; it’s “the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office Against the Mafia,” which boils down to talking a lot about the specific ways the bosses were molested, and doesn’t offer an idea of ​​how New York was involved in all of this.

But the worst sin City of fear can you commit is to be … tedious? Something as pulpy and cinematic as police chasing criminals should be loaded with juicy stories. City of fear somehow he manages to be overly simplistic and completely lost in his own weeds. Seeing him made me feel like an intruder in a conversation that a group of guys were having as they relived their glory days for each other, only to realize 10 minutes that neither of them was a particularly good storyteller. The movie spends a lot of time talking about bothering the mob, which is quite interesting at first, but then it goes on … and on … and on … and just when you think it’s finally moving to a new topic, it dates back to.

Netflix

Documentalists can only work with the facts they have available, of course. But they make decisions, like other filmmakers, about what goes into their movie and what doesn’t. They choose the voices that they think are important and leave out the ones that don’t matter, and they adopt narratives and choose which facts to use to tell their story.

The story told in City of fear Ultimately, it’s about heroic law enforcement and the lawyers chasing the mob. It’s also about how glamorous and fun it was to be in the mob. (Drinking champagne appears frequently.) It is not emphatically about what factors led to organized criminals becoming so powerful in New York.

It’s not about what kind of men were attracted to the mob and why. He’s also not interested in the ethics of spying on civilians suspected of criminal activity, or curious about why women were consistently marginalized (a question that mafia godfather Martin Scorsese explored last year in his film). the Irish). He is only concerned with why someone, such as Rudy Giuliani, would choose not to be a “wise guy” and instead become a lawyer. (In part, it seems that he and others hated what the mafia had done to the Italian-American communities, which would have been another great thread to pull.)

City of fear It’s also not about why this particular moment in history matters, beyond its potential for entertainment value (if you’re very interested in the mechanics of error-making or the construction of legal strategies). But you don’t tell a story like this for no reason. At the end of City of fearThe film half-heartedly points out where some of its interviewees landed: jail and state witness status for mob boys, New York Mayor for Giuliani, no note from the other agents and attorneys.

Then it becomes ominous. The last scene is a file from a newscaster who ends the story by saying, “Who will be the next generation of bosses and what kind of shady crime games will they play?” The footage shows an image of lower Manhattan, with the prominent Twin Towers. Let’s go to the credits.

You can remove any number of messages from that director choice, but Occam’s razor suggests it’s a link between what we all know happened to the Twin Towers and how Giuliani brought down the mob. Giuliani has made political use of his government during September 11 and its aftermath, particularly since he became President Donald Trump’s attorney in 2018, somewhat City of fear not mentioned at all (again, it seems relevant!).

It doesn’t matter: the link is established. City of fear He plays better as an extended attempt to remind us that the good guys were the good guys and Giuliani was the smartest in the room, no matter what he’s doing these days. He is not interested in how the presence of the mafia in New York shaped the future of the city, or what the events of the past reveal about the twisted present; Not interested in New York. It is a reinforcement of accepted ideas, not a test of history.

Sure, there is a place in the world for uncomplicated nostalgia for the old days. But it should never be as tasteless or boring as City of fear.

City of fear it is broadcast on Netflix.

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