8/25/2023 0 Comments Growing up gotti netflixEventually, the billions of dollars the mob pulled in from the construction jobs would become a key piece of evidence in the Commission case, the RICO trial at the center of Fear City that took aim at the heads of the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families. attorney’s office, meanwhile, would figure out how to prosecute the heads of the Five Families via the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO. The mafia would find a way to insert itself into the skyscraper development via the concrete industry. It’s a story about two dramatically changing institutions at crossroads: the city of New York, which had developed a reputation for street violence in the 1970s and was set to undergo a construction boom that would transform its physical and financial landscapes forever and the FBI, which had struggled to build a case against the mob bosses who insulated themselves from culpability. What makes Fear City compelling isn’t just the cat-and-mouse game told from a new vantage point, however. attorney’s office in New York, to conceptualize the fight and also to investigate it and prosecute it,” Liebman says. “To tell the story of the Commission case, you needed to tell the story of how it was put together, which was a collective effort on the part of the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office shortly after the events covered in the documentary, commonly referred to as “the Commission case.” That’s by design, says Jon Liebman, one of the film’s executive producers and a former prosecutor who joined the New York U.S. But Fear City askews any glorified retellings of those stories, instead opting for a seldom-seen perspective. The movie shows flashes of the lifestyle that’s been glamourized throughout media-an early montage talks about cocaine-pushing, disco-era mafiosos wearing polyester waffle-weave bell bottoms and lilac water cologne-and interviews with mob associates John Alite and Michael Franzese help push the story forward. The decision to focus on the likes of Cantamessa, other investigators, and the young prosecutors who would end the glory days of the New York mafia is what sets Fear City apart from other organized-crime movies and documentaries. “My blending technique would depend on the neighborhood, and generally speaking, I’m just a local guy doing his job,” he says with a smirk. It’s a genius plan that would pay dividends that were both salacious and key to building a case.īut in Fear City, Cantamessa’s stories are told with the humor and suspense typically reserved for mobsters telling their stories. Later, Cantamessa is able to implant a recording device in Castellano’s Staten Island home by interfering with the boss’s TV signal, and then showing up as a representative from the cable company. To do so, Cantamessa waits for a legitimate phone problem at Ruggiero’s house, calls off the phone company, enters the home, and puts a tap on the mobster’s line-all while an unsuspecting associate of Ruggiero watches. We first meet Cantamessa, who prefers the title of “Black Bag Man,” as he’s looking for a way to drop a wire in the home of Angelo Ruggiero, a Gambino family captain who “ate a great deal and talked a great deal” and seemed like the best starting point for a federal investigation. Given that he’s bugging the homes of the most powerful mobsters in the five boroughs, that’s essential. And unlike other agents featured in the film, his appearance-in the early ’80s, he sported aviator sunglasses and a lush, shaggy mane-and the demeanor he developed as a self-proclaimed “bad kid growing up” helped him do his job without getting noticed. Introduced just over halfway through the first of the documentary’s three parts, Joe Cantamessa was an agent on the FBI’s special operations squad with a knack for planting concealed microphones and getting through locked doors. The most interesting person in Fear City is a man with a leather bag and a penchant for disguise. It’s not Curtis Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels to combat street violence in his home city. It’s not the capos and soldiers who give on-camera interviews. attorney who oversaw the convictions of the heads of the Family Families of New York. Nor is it Rudy Giuliani, then a young U.S. It’s not John Gotti, the flashy boss who would later order the hit on Castellano and become a tabloid sensation in the 1980s. history, isn’t Paul Castellano, the so-called white-collar don who ran the Gambino crime family like a Fortune 500 company. the Mafia, the new Netflix documentary about the largest federal investigation into the mob in U.S. The most intriguing figure in Fear City: New York vs.
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