Mafia: The Inside Story

Purporting to give the inside scoop on the underworld kings of organized crime, this five part series on the Mafia opens with The Nuclear Mafia, which explores the connections between terrorists and organized crime, as well as the trafficking in radioactive material and the struggles law enforcement officers face with discrepancies in international law and jurisdiction. Volume two, The Mafia Nations, looks into Mexican government officials who act as puppets for Mafia leaders. Volume three, Killers of the Underworld, discusses the evolution of the Mafia from an internal group who originally only killed one another to an organization where everyone is fair game, as well as exploring the reputed differences in brain physiology between hard-core killers and a “normal” person. Volume four, Gangland Confessions, shows how Mafia organizations of various countries have joined forces and combined resources, a theme extended in the final volume on International Syndicates. The information for this program is supposed to have come from an informer who is in the FBI's witness protection program (and is therefore not identified). Be that as it may, the programs reminded me of a slapped-together research paper whose primary sources were tabloids--it just didn't seem credible. In place of the expected criminal justice historians, and other experts who are actively working in the field, we are shown oodles of dramatizations complete with bloody, battered corpses, but no names, dates, or places are given, and very little hard history. In between these sensationalized segments, the program keeps coming back to a guy smoking a cigar in an office, backlit, so we can't make out his features, but since no attempt is made to disguise his voice, it left me wondering if it wasn't an actor instead. Not recommended. Aud: P. (L. Stevens)