Fear City: New York vs The Mafia, Netflix’s new addition to their ensemble of crime documentaries, showcases the tussle between The Mob during the 1970s and 80s, and how The Feds brought them down with the help of a federal statute called Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
What, When and How of the docuseries
Helmed by Sam Hobkinson, Fear City explores and gives intricate details about how New York City, also famously known as The Big Apple, was run by The Mafia during the decades of 1970 and 1980. The limited series shows how the feds rounded up the gangsters and entire mobs and crime organizations, using the federal law Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which eventually led to the five major crime families to go to war with each other for the control of New York City.
The series exposes how the inadequacy of the feds during the decades of the 1970’s and ’80s and how that allowed criminal organizations to run their operations in New York City without any fear of the law. After attending a seminar by a criminal justice professor at Cornell, which explained to the feds how they could use the statutes under the RICO Act to wind up criminal organizations, the feds then started working towards winding up the five criminal families that ran New York at the time.
The series comprises interviews with former members of the criminal families along with interviews of federal officers that worked on the case at that time. It shows how the feds exploited the vulnerabilities of the families by going after members that were exposed and easy to target, and how they had to pretend to be cable guys and phone guys to bug the houses of the mafias to gather information on all the criminal activities that were taking place.
The three part series details how the feds slowly yet steadily made grounds into The Mafia’s criminal activities and brought them down from within, bringing down with it all of their organized crimes, prostitution rings, drug mafias, and anything and everything that those organizations had under their control. Famous anti-crime activist and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa is also an integral part of the docuseries.
The show is now available to stream on Netflix and if you are a fan of the crime thriller genre, you should definitely check it out.