I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did
It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):
It was underbaked all along
I’ve brought up L.A. Noire before as an example of what went wrong with it on the developer’s side. To not repeat myself a third time, here’s the short version: Australian developer and programmer Brendan McNamara used his experiences working on the 2002 video game The Getaway to open his own studio in Sydney called Team Bondi with the goal of developing their only game L.A. Noire, based on old noir films from the 1940s and 50s. The problems that arose came from McNamara’s corrosive personality, crunch, and, according to ex-developers under his wing, explicit approval of sweatshop hours. Numerous people quit or got sick either physically or mentally of his open berating of “slackers” and loads of people who contributed to the project were omitted from the credits, especially if they didn’t see it to its May 2011 release. Keep in mind, Team Bondi started working on the game in 2004.
Over the course of nearly eight years, Team Bondi lost a lot of people and with a high turnover rate and new people not knowing what their predecessor was specifically working on, lots of stuff was scrapped. It wasn’t until Rockstar themselves made a personal investment in the game’s release, but by the time it released, it never broke even and Team Bondi’s assets were sold off in October 2011. The studio was said to have spent over $50 million on the game, making it one of the most expensive video games at the time, but it only made back less than half, even with all the marketing in the years prior to release.
After 12 years and a series of remasters and graphical upgrades especially on newer consoles, Rockstar clearly has a place in its heart for the game. As for what would’ve been different if more level heads were allowed to direct or manage the project, it’s difficult to say. Maybe someone could’ve reined in McNamara or fired him from his own studio for the toxic sludge he spewed from his mouth. Maybe the game would still be in development with graphics and physics engines changing over time. Maybe it’ll get cancelled and all we’ll have are numb, carpal tunnel afflicted hands to show for it. No one can say for certain at least not until we master interdimensional travel.
As for what should’ve made it into the game, it’s clear to see that some content was missing. Select characters seem to know the protagonist Cole Phelps without a proper introduction for the audience, especially on the game’s ad vice desk which handles drug crimes. Spoilers incoming, there’s also a subplot in the latter quarter of the game tying together (though haphazardly) the fate’s of the characters Cole Phelps, an ex-Marine who fought with him in the Pacific Jack Kelso, and a German immigrant jazz singer Elsa Lichtmann. Part of the subplot is meant to hint at Cole becoming smitten with Elsa and beginning a love affair with her despite him being married with children.
Following this revelation, his partner on the vice desk rats him out due to personal reasons (he lost out on a boxing match and Cole pretty much ruined the fun for him by promising one of the potential victims a ticket to catch a ferry from New York), and he’s demoted for adultery. The scandal makes the headlines and left with no one but Elsa, after a few cases on the arson desk, Cole looks into a personal conflict Elsa’s been looking into for a while: the most likely (read: confirmed) fraudulent death of her friend. This is where Kelso comes in as an investigator for the California Fire and Life insurance company. Elsa’s friend was a construction worker who was contracted in the development of new homes for returning G.I.’s but the house he was working on collapsed and killed him. It’s revealed from Kelso’s investigation that most of the houses were build with subpar wood and brickwork, some of it from shut down silent-era film sets.
I bring all this up because the adultery subplot comes in quite apropos of nothing. Call it subtlety or a hint at the rushed development cycle, but the closest we get to a build up of Cole’s and Elsa’s relationship is him visiting the club that she sings at most nights. The scenes where they get even somewhat intimate are rare and in the last few cases in the game. It also seems that much of Cole’s character development is absent. Throughout the patrolman cases and going to the traffic and homicide desks, he’s portrayed as levelheaded and quite straightlaced, even chiding fellow officers for not sticking to his personal definition of justice no matter how slight, though keeping to himself for some other officers’ personalities.
By the time he’s on the arson desk, he’s back to his old professional ways and he’s still the type to chase a victory, even with the power of slippery slopes, but I personally never saw him as the type of guy to think himself as a hypocrite, nor did I think that his preaching morality was in some way a shield for his own personal conduct. Some moments do stand out, but don’t have that much of an effect on the story, such as his pride in his own job as a cop while his first partner, Stefan Bekowsky, complains about aspects of his tenure on the traffic desk; or his taking the homicides more seriously on that desk while his partner there, Rusty, is busy drinking half the time, and several others.
Still, if the devs weren’t dodging an interpretive clock or a nasty boss, it could’ve seen a lower turnover rate and some of the original ideas that were cut could’ve been added back, if not in the game itself than as an expansion pack or DLC. The finer points of this implementation can be better explored elsewhere if they haven’t been already, but of the ideas that were scrapped, there were two crime desks that were abandoned: the fraud desk and the burglary desk.
According to McNamara himself, the desks were exactly as described: burglary dealing in thefts and robberies, stuff going missing, and all that entails; fraud would’ve dealt with scams, conmen, forgeries and everything in between. We don’t know who would’ve been the officer in charge of dispatching detectives to investigate these cases, but we have one clue as to who would’ve been partnered with Cole at least on the burglary department: a minor character named Harold Caldwell.
Caldwell was seen getting along famously with Cole. During the final case on the vice desk, he lends a hand to Cole and his vice desk partner, the sleazeball Roy Earle. Caldwell was suggested to have been Cole’s partner on the burglary desk which would’ve had around 11 cases to play, which is the closest explanation for how he has such a good chemistry with Cole at this point in the game. Because the game skips forward six months between the traffic and homicide desks, it’s suggested that the timeskip was supposed to be the burglary desk, but the reason for its omission comes down to formatting and storage.
The PS3 version has the benefit of a large capacity Blu-Ray disc, but there’s no equivalent feature for the Xbox 360 version. Having played it myself after getting it loaned to me by a friend, I remember the game case having a total of three discs. Leaving extra content in the game would’ve necessitated a fourth disc and to my knowledge, few, if any, games would’ve come with so many discs. Without the cut content, L.A. Noire clocked in at a 20 hour campaign depending on your playstyle, but with 11 more cases focused on burglary, who knows how many more hours and gigs would’ve been dedicated to the game?
As for the fraud desk, we know even less. All we have is speculation based on what probably would’ve counted as fraud in the late 1940s since this game was also released in a time before the Miranda rights afforded criminal suspects protection while in police custody along with a defense attorney. It might not be obvious playing it, but if you ever look at gameplay of L.A. Noire or play it yourself, you’ll notice that Cole never reads the suspects their rights. The landmark Miranda rights case was argued in Arizona in 1966, less than 20 years after the events of L.A. Noire, so a lot of what the LAPD could’ve been implied to play fast and loose with in 1947 would’ve largely ceased by then.
Regarding people involved in the fraud desk, that’s also not well known. Who would’ve been the dispatcher? Cole’s partner? Is there a desk that challenges Cole’s lawman philosophy and awaken him to the shades of gray in law enforcement? All of this is up for interpretation. McNamara claimed to have had some levels and concept art for the burglary at least, but I couldn’t find any screenshots of these to verify. Not that I’m calling McNamara a liar, but he was the only public face during the development of the game.
The attitudes and accounts of the disgraced ex-employees of Team Bondi (especially those who left before the game released) may suggest that McNamara had all the cards, so unless an artist or designer snuck away a copy of a potential level, this cut content exists as lost media. Instances of both still exist in the game, but you would only be able to see it in the game’s free roam mode, looking at fliers and ledgers and whatnot.
Would the cut content have made the game any better than what we got? Well, I doubt it would make as big an impact as expected, though it could still change a lot of things. Like what? Probably an in-depth look at how theft was prosecuted post-war or what defined fraud. The examples I listed above are clearly not exhaustive and people smarter and more experienced than me in those fields may have more to add to those, but those would be the more obvious ones to me as I’d never investigated a missing object in any capacity, nor have I investigated fraud. Certainly, Caldwell would join the list of partners Cole has had over the course of the game and likely one of the more respectable ones compared to Roy Earle who takes home loads of allegations of racism and misconduct, even for an America pre-integration.
For formatting and storage, if Team Bondi was able to commit as much as possible to leaving everything in undisturbed, then the game case may look more like a binder or folder with well over four discs dedicated to each case on the Xbox 360 and probably two or three Blu-Rays for the PS3. Subsequent re-releases for PCs would occupy more storage than can possibly fit on an unmodified computer. If I was a part of that alternate reality, I could easily see myself budgeting for more than one high capacity hard drive for just one game or even a series.
On that note, there’s also a part of me that sees this as being a series given the same treatment as the multiple expansions for The Sims franchise or Battlefield and Medal of Honor, which probably says a lot about how EA’s design philosophy compared to what was inherited from Team Bondi into the Rockstar family.
The only notable changes for later releases of L.A. Noire is the interrogation going from Truth, Doubt, and Lie to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse. All things considered, what counts as speculation for a different game solely exists in criticisms for what didn’t work or go far enough in the version we got. Then again, it takes a game with enough hard work going into it to spark debates and discussion years after the original developer went under and the closest thing we had to DLC or a sequel was seemingly shelved forever. This video by Real Pixels explains all the faults in L.A. Noire. Based on what I wrote, there’s a lot so take this as a brass tacks examination of L.A. Noire.
Finally, is L.A. Noire even good? It clearly doesn’t live up to its purported expectations and as I’ve explained there’s a lot under the hood that’s missing or what’s left over isn’t perfectly aligned, but considering I’ve dedicated one post to the game and sections within two separate blog posts to the game, I have a relatively high opinion of the game, and so do others given how many people dream about there being a better version of L.A. Noire or even a Whore of the Orient.
We end 2023 with a YouTube recommendation for the channels Business Basics and Geopolitics Daily.
https://www.youtube.com/@BusinessBasicsYT
https://www.youtube.com/@GeopoliticsDaily247
The twin channels cover news coverage and geopolitics across the world keeping viewers up to date on major issues that affect us directly or indirectly, typically from a consequences of conflict standpoint especially in the case of territorial disputes like those of Russia, Israel, and China among other places across the world. Both channels began as business and investment guides before the shift to global events, but do still offer tips and guides for business and investing.
The trifecta is complete
Before we begin, hope you all had filling Thanksgiving festivities for those who celebrate. I went through a slight hiccup with frozen food, but the other stuff was taken care of, so nothing to worry about. Now to the post.
If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “didn’t you do this two weeks ago?” Technically, yes I did. But that was about true crime, documentaries or media next to documentaries about real life crimes that have happened before, i.e. the Five Families, the Winter Hill gang, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and countless other criminal figures of yesteryear, all of them inspiring many of our fictional crime lords and kingpins in other media like Gus Fring and Don Eladio in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, Clay and Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or for this post, most of the GTA and Mafia games’ lineup of characters. These are long-running series with colorful casts so allow me to preview the short version:
If I were a documentarian, I’d put characters like Tommy Vercetti in the bin of “Amalgamation of Prior Characters Seen in Media.” And not just him; other GTA protagonists and/or GTA moments have taken inspiration from movies released in the past. Some of the games take place in a specific time period and thus take inspiration from movies released around the same time. This video from WatchMojo.com lists different examples:
Some of these may be easter eggs, but it goes to show how many fans of [Insert Movie Here] work or worked at RockStar. Call it a tradition to sneak some of these in, but they come in full force in GTA V, coupled with call backs to older games, including but not limited to:
As for real-life inspirations in the GTA series, well, that’s complicated. Vice City provides the easiest example taking inspiration from 1983’s Scarface which is a remake of the 1932 movie of the same name which was about its real-life namesake, Alphonse “Snorky/Scarface” Capone.
From my research, GTA’s influences do call back to high crime eras in American (and sometimes British history), but don’t take direct inspiration from any named criminal or mobster, comfortable to let Hollywood do it for generations before developing a love-letter masquerading as a video game. Sounds like a bit of a letdown, but a series that collects controversy like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards would probably try its hardest to let the games speak for itself, hence why RockStar’s problems weren’t in the headlines until later. Gratuitous cartoon violence was still thought of at the time as limited to Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so facsimiles of someone’s granny legging it after a gun goes off, or rural folk from D[bell noise]k-Fart, NorCal going hog wild thanks to cheat codes would be unheard of in the series’ early days.
I doubt it was much the same for the Mafia series, since that one could sneak past unnoticed, and if it did, the Mafia movie comparisons were proudly warn on its chest like a veteran’s war medals. You didn’t need to convince me that Tommy Angelo was Al Capone or that Mafia II was The Sopranos. It admits that by way of the title, and in stride. The Mafia series also heavily fictionalizes real-life locales, but thankfully offers more than the New York-Miami-Los Angeles trifecta that contemporary media blows its load over. It may just be me, but as a native New Yorker, I could do with a lot less New York. If a thousand monkeys can eventually produce Shakespeare, surely it can take a greater than or equal to number of monkeys to make modern-day Amarillo, Texas more exciting. The Coen brothers achieved that with Fargo back in the day.
So getting away from the usual three, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven’s titular city is meant to be a fictionalization of Chicago in the 1930s, during and after Prohibition. Mafia II takes place in the mid-1940s and early-50s in Empire Bay, a fictionalized version of several East Coast cities, but having the trademark Mid-Atlantic accents that later defined New York and, depending on who you ask, Baltimore. Mafia III comes right out of left field by throwing the player into the Deep South in the 1960s, stuck between the counterculture movement at home and Vietnam abroad. Specifically, it creates a more in-depth though still fictional version of New Orleans, this time known as New Bordeaux, complete with all the neighborhoods that are said to be in New Orleans, though as I’ve writing, I’d never been. I wouldn’t mind a trip though, I hear Mardi Gras is a hoot.
So while the RockStar series is content with pure fiction, the Mafia series uses history as a jumping ground. Having said that, crime games have proven to be more imaginative than just these examples; I just have a lot of expertise in this field as an avid player of both GTA and Mafia. I believe I said this a few weeks ago, but this isn’t exclusively an American or British thing. Throw a dart on a map, and the country the dart lands on may have something next to a fictional depiction of organized crime–even if it’s beat out by a more popular neighbor. Consider how the western populace learned about organized crime in East Asia or the former Soviet Union, or how crime and law enforcement probably goes back even further than Hammurabi and Babylon.
And obviously not all crime games put you at odds with the law; sometimes it’s you flashing the badge instead of blasting away at the guys who do. Followers already know about my love life with Max Payne, but I’ve definitely watched more crime drama shows and played more games where you are the law. One of the earliest games I played called back to Max Payne: may I present to you Stranglehold:
Full disclosure, I have this game (I don’t remember how I got it, it might’ve been from a bargain bin at Target or Game Stop), but I don’t recall ever finishing it. I’d play it again, but I need to check if it’s backwards compatible with the Xbox One before I try, or failing that, emulation or a YouTube Let’s Play can be found to catch me up to speed.
All I remember is that famed Hong Kong cinema director John Woo was contacted by Midway Games, makers of NFL Blitz and Mortal Kombat, to help produce a Max Payne clone with the likes of Chow Yun-fat reprising his role as Inspector Tequila from the 1992 film Hard Boiled, which I haven’t seen. Not that seeing the movie first would put me in the right head space to play the game since I started with the game, but if it helps me get an idea of who Tequila is supposed to be then it’s a good thing it’s in my long-ass watchlist because I’ve got some time to kill.
Traditionally, video games based on movies have been notoriously terrible, but some select developers have tried their best with the material given, sometimes even expanding on the formula established. I know that RockStar paid homage to the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors with a 2005 video game based on the movie, and I remember having fun with Stranglehold, so not all of them are crapshoots.
A more memorable game featuring Hong Kong-based Triad groups came out a few years later. We all know it as Sleeping Dogs, developed by the now-defunct United Front Games and published by the still-in-business Square Enix.
This one does have the Max Payne style of combat and maneuverability. In fact, it’s not comparable to Max Payne aside from the fact that both the respective protagonists are law enforcement officers deep undercover in an organized crime syndicate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s meant to be a spiritual successor to the True Crime series.
Sleeping Dogs is set in contemporary Hong Kong where the protagonist, former San Francisco police officer Wei Shen is transferred to the Hong Kong Police Force to go deep undercover in the Sun On Yee. This presents an interesting dichotomy for Shen as he’s caught between two loyalties: the Triads and the law. I’d elaborate even further, but this ventures into spoiler territory and from what I recall the latter half of the game doesn’t stay as close to this as it originally set out to. This review has more insight.
Then there’s L.A. Noire, which I’ve mentioned at length or featured videos and articles that have mentioned it at length before, especially the development side of things.
The gist of all this would have to be that life influences culture, I guess. This all had to come from somewhere and the North Side Gang wasn’t gonna emerge from the dirt like Adam in Genesis. But it’s a generally good way to comment on contemporary society. Other times, people just wanna tell a story and whether a million people find it mediocre or one hundred start a fan club around it, the primary focus of entertainment had been fulfilled.
For crime dramas, that succeeds in spades taking home more gold than the original California 49ers. Part of the downside to the crime drama is that it’s come under scrutiny before for inspiring similar crimes, and not just the true crime genre. Violence in media is heavily scrutinized and when it’s in a video game, it’s a media circus that brings more attention than what was previously projected. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I feel that it bears repeating. Sorry to leave on a sour note, but calling back to a video put out by Alternate History Hub: the news should stop glorifying and perpetuating violence. It’s shown time and time again to do more harm than good.
Last thing, before I properly close off: I wanted to make a post about the fourth chapter of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, but Thanksgiving preparations kept me from properly preparing the notes. I’ll try to get one out sometime in the next week, ideally before next week’s post.
My third favorite genre
There’s no question by now as to what I like. Most of my posts here have a video game or animanga focus, but let it be known that I have more in store than Japanimation and rhythmic button-pressing. It’s the title of this post which I should clarify. While I used to gravitate mainly mobster/organized crime centered media, for the most part the characters and organizations therein were largely fictional or fictionalized. Stop me if this sounds familiar: mobster movies tend to require a bigger commitment compared to video games like the Mafia series, select GTA games, or the video game version of The Godfather. All solid series and franchises in their own right still, but even within a genre we each have our preferences.
But obviously fictional media interpretations of the Mob didn’t come from nothing. Crime fiction as a genre’s always been there, just look at the westerns. Lawmen, gunslingers, outlaws, big names like Billy the Kid, Bass Reeves, the Earp brothers. Whatever the criteria is for crime media, if it involves someone stepping on the law to get to a goal while someone else representing the law is stopping at nothing to stop them, then by all accounts it’s a crime movie… which probably means Lord of War falls into that too by my standards.
Yuri Orlov may as well have been Major General Smedley Butler: they both had rackets on three continents.
And this is quite apt, as Yuri Orlov was said to draw inspiration from the real life Merchant of Death Viktor Bout. And he’s not the only fictional criminal to be based on a real mobster. Sometimes the real life mobster themselves is fictionalized. If you know anything about Prohibition, you no doubt know about Al Capone and his ability to fool the cameras at least until St. Valentine’s Day. And since that time and following his death, countless movies have come out with him as the prime inspiration.
As for how I got to this genre, that’s really hard to say. At first, I thought it was from the GTA series, but looking back that’s probably inaccurate in my case. Movies? Kind of… my grandma does have The Godfather trilogy and numerous westerns, but I didn’t see some of these until I was at least 12. TV? Definitely not, my mom barred me from watching Family Guy until I was a teen due to sexual content. So in lieu of a true origin, I’ll explain some of my favorite media pieces from this genre. Starting with a game that puts you in the same boat as the law instead of against it.
Post-WWII, Los Angeles, war hero turned LAPD lawman Cole Phelps fights crime in the City of Angels. This is how it starts, but later in the game a conspiracy spearheaded by some of the city’s top officials is underway. The game gives the player glimpses of this in a string of newspaper clippings that can be found during gameplay, coupled with an interspersing of Cole’s service in the Marines during the war. Once everything is put together by the end, you have a near-perfect storyline.
I say near-perfect because the development of this game bogged down its own potential. A video game director who’s behavior would be welcomed in a Brazilian junta; a poorly populated 1940s rendition of L.A.; a finnicky motion capture technique that made interrogation impractical; a piss-poor implementation of a penalty system; and most disturbing of all, a dead studio.
Mechanically, it had great and interesting ideas, and if given the room to spread (read: taken out of McNamara’s hands at the time), these ideas could have inspired future developers for the better. Instead, it and the firing of Jason West and Vincent Zampella of Call of Duty fame unearthed a culture of toxicity that the video game industry is still trying to shake off. No matter the intention, eight years in the inferno for a paradoxically half-baked product tells anyone reading up on Team Bondi all they need to know about how things were handled from beginning to end.
To my knowledge, we haven’t had a story that nightmarish before or since then, but there’ve been several close calls. Needless to say, the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded at Bondi is why I put L.A. Noire so low on my personal tier list. Without the crunch and a better management of time (and perhaps sacking McNamara), L.A. Noire could’ve turned out better than what we got in our timeline.
For a series I’d put firmly in the middle:
So far, I’ve had three different hot takes:
We’ve got another on the list: The Godfather is Mid. And depending on who you ask, this is either sacrilegious or moot. It’s an influential novel and movie trilogy. It adds nuance to otherwise dastardly characters. It’s a source of inspiration for numerous directors on the big and small screens, but to me, much of this is a little lost in translation. It’s like playing GTA III after reading a list of all the game that have drawn inspiration from it, narratively or mechanically.
It’s not so much that I think it’s unbelievable (as in the laws of logic would never allow it), or that I think it’s terrible (clearly false), or that I’m saying it’s overrated, though others have said that before. It’s more like before and since The Godfather, there’ve been truckloads of mobster movies that I think did better than The Godfather. It might be the emphasis on subtlety that bogs it down for me, but a visual medium like film–while capable of telling instead of showing–should still show instead of tell, or in this case, show more than it tells. From what I remember it was 2/3s tell and 1/3 show.
But it does its job phenomenally well. Inspiration, references, inside jokes (even bad ones); I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t heard of the franchise in one form or another. It took the tropes of the old 1930s and 40s noir films and put new spins on them while also inventing some of their own. Watch a mobster movie or TV show made in recent memory, there’s a good chance that it’ll draw at least one thing from Mario Puzo’s novels or Francis Ford Coppola’s movies.
At this point, I’ve thrown shade at a big movie, suggesting I think there’s something better. Well, not exactly better but more so one I like a whole lot more than The Godfather:
For this one, I was a bit late. The other stuff I’d known about for years; I was first introduced to Black Mass the year it’s film adaptation released.
In the lead up to the release I read the book by Boston Globe journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, intent on getting the full story of it’s star, James “Whitey” Bulger. Interestingly, the movie released a few years after the F.B.I. closed in on him in the summer of 2011 after 12 years on the lam. At first, I thought that the idea was exercised shortly after his arrest in California, but ever since the book was published in 2000 (and of course re-released 15 years later for marketing purposes), different ideas were thrown around to get an adaptation off the ground, but they didn’t exactly take off until 2015.
For my take, I’m sort of glad we got the final product that year as opposed to, say 2005. The movie mostly focuses on Whitey’s activities between 1975 and the mid-80s, but the epilogue detailing Whitey’s and his associates’ fates after the fun’s over is what sticks with me. Some of them snitched and got comparatively lenient sentences, others were thrown in jail for life or were sentenced with lifelong shame for colluding with Whitey Bulger himself, and the rest of the snitches were released earlier than the others for cooperation and continual good behavior.
As for Whitey himself, well as previously mentioned, an unnamed source warned the F.B.I. field office in L.A. that he was seen in Santa Monica, and he faced the consequences of his actions to the tune of two life sentences plus five years and a civil asset forfeiture of his riches totaling $25.2 million and another $19.5 million in restitution. Unfortunately for him, he’d fully serve these sentences on October 30, 2018 when he was bludgeoned to death by another inmate. Seems it was only fitting that his end was as grizzly as his life and leadership of the Winter Hill Gang.
As it stands, this is really the only mobster story that concerns an Irish mobster instead of Italian ones, and I’m always looking for stories on other mobsters the world over, not necessarily Cosa Nostra style. As of writing this, I’m trying to do some research on the Triads and the Yakuza for a story idea I have set in East Asia and concerning some of these characters. Fingers crossed, the research I do on these serves me well when I open a new Word document and get to typing. And it’ll also serve me when it comes to researching organized crime in other parts of the world. I know that they’re all there, it’s just that perhaps that I’m a New Yorker, a resident of the city where arguably the Mafia started and thrived, the origins of the Mafia and subsequent media genres thrives in this city, and most mobsters here being Italian or Jewish (see Kosher Nostra/Jewish-American organized crime for more details) sort of colors my view and at times my expectations of organized crime rackets, even fictional ones I hear about or create myself.
I also want to give a few honorable mentions to a few other properties I either haven’t seen but heard were good or I have seen but haven’t given them a proper ranking yet.
Quite a list to try and rank properly. Maybe I’ll come back to this in the future.
Opinions on Entertainment 