By "You have that fucking two hundred in my hand tomorrow. If you ain't got the two hundred in my fucking hands tomorrow, I'll break every fucking bone in your body." This phone call is the chilling opening moment which kicks off Netflix's latest crime series, a taut three-part documentary about the "Golden Era of the Mob."
The series explores the chokehold that the Five Families' of the New York Mafia – Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Luccese – held over the city throughout the Seventies and Eighties. These Five Families have been the inspiration for Mafia and mobsters in popular culture for decades, from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, to HBO series The Sopranos and even the characters of Grand Theft Auto.
In Fear City: New York vs The Mafia we come to understand the scale of the operation which the FBI mounted in order to take these families down. The series director is Sam Hobkinson, who also helmed The Kleptocrats, the 2018 documentary about the stealing of $3.5 billion from a Malaysian government fund. Here he interviews law enforcement officials and ex-Mafia associates to show how their control of unions, high-rise construction and other industries netted billions for organised crime.
The docuseries features previously unheard surveillance recordings which crackle with static, vintage news footage and archival material alongside time-aged photographs. There's also new interviews and reenactments which keep the pace going and bring to life the sprawling influence of these nefarious criminals across the city.
While firmly grounded in the Scorsese tradition of threatening mobsters with a penchant for colourful language, what sets this documentary apart is its focus on the case which ended the criminals' reign over the city, and the ways in which the FBI used Rico (the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act) to go after the men who had been terrorising the population. They even used covert techniques on the families which feel borrowed from the Mafia playbook, including at one point accessing one of the mobster's houses to gain surveillance on him by pretending to be a TV repair man.
The documentary details how there was a squad investigating each of the five families and how the FBI were instructed to close all of the cases they had been building on minor members of the crime organisations to instead go after the head honchos.
This investigation, known as "The Commission Case", was a landmark prosecution in New York City in the Eighties and essentially dismantled the criminal empire of the Mafia in America. Time Magazine called the case "the most significant assault on the infrastructure of organised crime since the high command of the Chicago Mafia was swept away in 1943".
It is through the case that we are are introduced to Rudy Giuliani, the then-New York attorney leading the prosecution who can be seen showing off about how he was responsible for curtailing corruption, the irony of his going on to become Donald Trump's right-hand man hard to ignore. Trump gets a mention in the series, too, featured due to his real estate work which meant he crossed paths with the Mafia several times during the Eighties.
While the title of the series refers to this landmark case brought against the mob families, there is also a sense from watching that it is also about how the whole of New York was up against the Mafia. The documentary shows the ways in which all of the people in the city suffered as these criminals infiltrated every area from rubbish collection to the food industry, their domain everywhere from hair salons to boxing gyms.
"We were untouchable. Who's gonna stop us?" says former Gambino crime family associate Johnny Alite at one point. By the end what feels more shocking is not the power these families had but that anyone was able to bring it to an end.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
