Television Review: Fear City: New York vs the Mafia (2020)

New York, a metropolis that—whether justifiably or not—is regarded as the most important city in the world today, was at the start of this decade going what were probably the worst moments in its history, thanks to the global pandemic and its economic effects. Until 2020, however, the worst period for the citizens of the Big Apple was considered to be the 1970s, a decade in which the city with the highest concentration of financial capital and power was burdened by a politically inert administration, incompetent municipal services, an economic crisis, and social problems that—among other things—triggered an explosion of crime on a previously unimaginable scale, so that the average New Yorker had more reason to fear being killed on the street than a citizen of conflict-ridden Belfast or Beirut. Fear City: New York vs Mafia, a three-part mini-series directed by Sam Hobkinson, attempts to show how the unquestioned hegemony of the Italian-American mafia contributed to all of this in no small measure, and how putting that organisation in its rightful place was the beginning of the journey towards a calmer, more decent, better-ordered and happier New York—the New York that would exist until the spring of 2020.

The opening of Fear City shows that the New York mafia based its hegemony over the streets of the world's most important metropolis not so much on the sheer number of its members, its penchant for extreme violence, its superb organisation, strict discipline, or brilliant strategy, as on the skilful exploitation of one prosaic fact. Individual mobsters could "fall" and end up in prison for extortion, robbery, drug-dealing and similar crimes, but the organisation itself remained untouchable, because the bosses could not be proven to have directly participated in those illegal activities. At the beginning of the 1970s, the famous law known by the acronym RICO was passed, introducing new concept to American criminal law, and making it possible for mafia leaders to be held accountable for crimes to which they had given their direct or indirect blessing. Admittedly, it took several years for a group of FBI agents and the federal prosecutors working with them to remember to use RICO as a tool to attack the previously untouchable leaders of the five New York "families". In this, they were greatly aided by the development of modern technology, which made it possible to bypass "omertà" through intensive wiretapping and thus uncover the most closely guarded secrets of the world's most famous criminal organisation. As the years go by, the data thus collected allows federal prosecutors finally to launch proceedings that, in the mid-1980s, lead to spectacular trials and the imprisonment of mafia bosses.

Fear City is quite cleverly conceived, the most important creative decision being to make only three episodes, so that viewers can watch the whole story in a single evening's binge. The second thing that makes Fear City different from most series and films on a similar subject is that it hardly ever shows the mafia from the perspective of the mobsters themselves, but almost exclusively from the perspective of the federal agents and prosecutors who fought against them. This is both a strength and a weakness of the series, given that viewers already know or have reason to guess the outcome of the conflict, so there is no particular tension, and the only thing that could be called "action" is the occasionally ingenious but mostly prosaic placement of hidden listening devices in the cars and homes of mobsters. That does not mean Fear City lacks moments of interesting content, but it all largely boils down to dry testimony from retired civil servants in their seventies or eighties, who only here and there try to "spice things up" with an amusing anecdote. The authors themselves are sometimes aware of this, and allow themselves the occasional digression, such as mentioning Trump in the context of the 1980s construction boom in New York, when the future president, as an entrepreneur in an industry riddled with organised crime, had to be careful about how he positioned himself vis-à-vis the mafia. By an ironic twist of fate, one of the main protagonists of this series is former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, who brought indictments against mobsters and thereby laid the foundations for his mayoral career, and who later made headlines as Trump's controversial lawyer in lawsuits over alleged election fraud. When it is necessary to show how all these events looked from the mafia's perspective, the authors use interviews with mobsters who did not end up serving multi-decade prison sentences and who, by nature, were "small fry".

The most important shortcoming of Fear City, however, is content that is actually inadequate for this story. The series simply ends too quickly; it does not show the events that took place after the trials and that should have given context to the federal operation to remove the untouchable mafia bosses. It completely ignores the generation of new, young mobsters who replaced the imprisoned ageing "dons", among them John Gotti, the head of the Gambino family, who in just a few years became a media star and the subject of countless biopics, TV series and even a reality show devoted to his descendants. Compared to other works that have dealt with the mafia—whether fiction like The Godfather, or even 1980s documentaries like Mob Inc.—Fear City comes across as disappointingly like reheated cabbage.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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