by PTown » Thu Jan 30, 2025 11:27 am
I came across the Netflix Documentary entitled "Fear City" the other day. It's been out for a while, but Netflix is promoting it again. It's about the arrests and convictions of the heads of NY's Five Families during the Commission Trial in the mid-1980s.
I give it a 5 out of 10. The production quality is good. And casual watchers of mob documentaries will like it. I learned a lot about the Concrete Club, a stunningly profitable bid-rigging plan that allowed four of the five families to make big bucks on skyscraper construction, including from developers like Donald Trump.
But it has a bunch of weaknesses too. I found John Alite less than honest. The documentary portrays him as a Made Man, even though he was an associate of Albanian heritage.
Oddly, the documentary calls Paul Castellano "the Boss of Bosses" as shorthand for him being the most powerful. We know that to be a dated, salacious term that hasn't been used for decades.
The documentary plays a lot of the surveillance tapes, but also not enough. Similarly, it kind of explains why RICO was the start of the downfall of the mob, but with little follow through.
Where convenient, it calls men bosses who were underbosses or street bosses. I understand it might have been too much to go into for the casual viewer (even though the documentary is many episodes long) but it would have been more accurate to call these men "highest leadership of the X family" etc.
In sum: it was entertaining enough, and I learned a lot about lesser known mob figures like Tony Ducks Corallo, but at the same time, the inaccuracies were annoying.
[size=150]I came across the Netflix Documentary entitled "Fear City" the other day. It's been out for a while, but Netflix is promoting it again. It's about the arrests and convictions of the heads of NY's Five Families during the Commission Trial in the mid-1980s.
I give it a 5 out of 10. The production quality is good. And casual watchers of mob documentaries will like it. I learned a lot about the Concrete Club, a stunningly profitable bid-rigging plan that allowed four of the five families to make big bucks on skyscraper construction, including from developers like Donald Trump.
But it has a bunch of weaknesses too. I found John Alite less than honest. The documentary portrays him as a Made Man, even though he was an associate of Albanian heritage.
Oddly, the documentary calls Paul Castellano "the Boss of Bosses" as shorthand for him being the most powerful. We know that to be a dated, salacious term that hasn't been used for decades.
The documentary plays a lot of the surveillance tapes, but also not enough. Similarly, it kind of explains why RICO was the start of the downfall of the mob, but with little follow through.
Where convenient, it calls men bosses who were underbosses or street bosses. I understand it might have been too much to go into for the casual viewer (even though the documentary is many episodes long) but it would have been more accurate to call these men "highest leadership of the X family" etc.
In sum: it was entertaining enough, and I learned a lot about lesser known mob figures like Tony Ducks Corallo, but at the same time, the inaccuracies were annoying.
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