It’s undeniable that Steven Knight’s creation — on both big screen and small — has brought investment and tourism to what remains England’s second-poorest local authority. The Japanese ambassador dressed in a peaked cap on a recent visit, and the show has offered opportunities for fan groups to reclaim their working-class identities. Nor does Peaky Blinders’s influence end at Birmingham’s limits. There’s a “Peaky Blinders” unit of the Ukrainian army, while in far-off Afghanistan the Taliban censured four men for dressing in costumes inspired by the show.

This influence is unsurprising. From The Godfather to the Kray Twins, gangsters have always made marketable anti-heroes. What’s not to love about immigrants escaping poverty, creating riches from organized crime, the oppressed becoming the oppressor? Naturally, the banal, brutal reality of gangsterism and its impact on victims isn’t entertaining or sexy, and so is neatly ignored. The same is true of Peaky Blinders. In reality, Birmingham’s gangs were disbanded by the First World War, and were anyway always more street thugs than globetrotting criminal masterminds. Even the titular blinder is apocryphal: early Birmingham criminals wore something closer to bowlers, with these “billycock hats” popular among the city’s working-class Irish diaspora. No razor blades were involved.

More than that, Birmingham’s demography has always been about far more than gangs. This, after all, is a town built on immigrant labor. My own great-grandparents were Ukrainian Jewish refugees who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century. I grew up in a cross-cultural environment, and married into the Birmingham Irish community in the early 2000s. The culture of my in-laws was hardly unfamiliar: like the city’s Jews, Birmingham’s Irish arrived to find work, escaping famine and hardship, and have long contributed to life in the West Midlands. They built factories and canals in the 19th century, and founded pubs in the 20th, while the second- or third-generation Irish Brummies keep the culture thriving.

There are darker connotations here too. Even today, Birmingham lives in the long shadow of the Birmingham pub bombings, especially now that Gerry Adams — who in 2004 said he “regrets” the blasts — is in the news once more. Locals still recall stories of that grim night in 1974. My dad had been in a nearby pub when it happened, and I’ve got friends who were caught up in the blast at the cinema next door. Anti-Irish sentiment in the city soon skyrocketed. Catholic schools held special assemblies to try and calm tensions, and the subsequent grotesque miscarriage of justice for the Birmingham Six forced non-Irish Brummies into a reckoning of conscience.

That perhaps explains why Irish Birmingham enjoyed such a renaissance through the Nineties. The St Patrick’s Day Parade —suspended for two decades — returned as a major event and grew to be the third biggest on Earth: until the cash-strapped council shut it down. Digbeth, long the city’s unofficial Irish quarter, was famous for its boozers, family places with names like The Spotted Dog and Hennessey’s Bar.

As that last one implies, this revival often came with stereotypes, from foam leprechaun hats to fake ginger beards. To that extent, at least, the Peaky Blinders flat caps are nothing new. Nor are Irish Brummies the only cartoon-ified community in Knight’s extended universe. Consider his movie’s Roma characters. Barry Keoghan’s Duke is a mass of uncontrolled violence, feeding victims to pigs and commandeering weapons meant for British troops. Kaulo, Duke’s aunt, is that other lazy stereotype: the magical sexy gypsy, who communicates with ghosts, uses sex to break a curse, and floats about mysteriously, all wild hair and whispers.

And if, like the Birmingham Irish, there’s a blurred line between cinema and the city streets — Birmingham City fans long blamed their team’s failures on a “curse” placed on the team’s stadium when Roma settlers were evicted to build it — neither Duke nor Kaulo do justice to the city’s genuine Roma history.

Suggested reading

Who killed the English eccentric?

By Jack Burke

Reaching Europe from India via Egypt (hence the name), Roma Gypsies first arrived in England in 1505: after being banished from countries across Europe. They were banned here, too, due to distrust of their Catholicism and a general fear of foreignness. By 1554, thanks to the so-called Egyptian Act, simply being Roma was enough to get the death penalty. Some evaded capture or were sheltered by sympathetic residents, and over the next two centuries made a living however they could, becoming by necessity a secretive group.

In 1783 the Egyptian Act was repealed — after the diaspora finally started to be understood — though the 1824 Vagrancy Act specifically targeted Roma Gypsies in an attempt to close their settlements. Still, the travelers endured. And, by the 20th century, they’d become an established part of Birmingham’s cultural scene, providing labor or entertainment at events like Aston’s Onion Fair. A celebration centered on Michaelmas, and attracting thousands of spectators, the Roma wowed visitors with their boxing, horses and traveling menageries.

By the Second World War, Roma were designated racial enemies by Hitler, with perhaps 500,000 exterminated in the so-called Porajmos (“Devouring”). In the aftermath, and unlike Jews, Roma were excluded from postwar reparations; remarkably, the West German government argued the community was persecuted not because of their race but because they were criminals. There is no clear data on Birmingham’s current Roma population — but the 2021 census suggests 1,833 locals identified as “White Roma”, the first time the category was included. And, perhaps because they now encompass such a small minority, anti-gypsy sentiments live on in Birmingham, not least around their supposed dishonesty.

Even sympathetic observers slump into stereotype too. To promote his film, Knight did an “ask me anything” on Reddit, where a fan asked about his knowledge of the Roma. The writer’s response? That his research came from attending horse fairs with his blacksmith father as a child: a neat explanation of why, in the film’s closing scene, Tommy Shelby literally declares himself a horse. Yet like their Celtic counterparts, there is another, truer community of Brummie Roma. Certainly, that’s hinted at in the Council’s Birmingham Development Plan. It identifies the need for an additional eight pitches for “Gypsies, Travelers and Traveling Showpeople” by 2031, recognizing that a lack of space negatively impacts their wellbeing, and causes conflict with landowners.

These days, of course, Birmingham’s Irish and Roma communities are relatively small, with discourse in the city more often centered on its large and growing South Asian population. While Peaky Blinders offers glimmers of these older diasporas — and provides the city’s tourism board with much-needed attention — the real Workshop of the World has better tales to tell.

The presumption is that the kind of people who carry out hits are a bit like Eddie Redmayne’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal reboot: mysterious, smooth, deadly professionals, whose employers are criminal masterminds who know how to organize a clean liquidation. But in Britain at least, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is an exchange of real-life text messages intercepted by police as part of an investigation into a planned triple homicide in 2019. The boss of an influential Turkish organized crime group in North London is hiring a criminal broker to arrange the killing of three men. “I’ll pay 150 bro then give u like 5 bricks new year January or something”, he writes. (That means £150,000 up front, plus five kilos of cocaine or heroin on completion.)

The man taking on the contract, formerly a senior member of a local street gang, feels the need to reassure his Turkish paymaster of his credentials, despite their longstanding criminal relationship: “U know I’ve killed about 9 people and made about 4 die bro its fucked up init,” he replies. Then: “First person was in 1st year in school bro kmt bro, after I do the ones on the list I think I’m gonna go into retirement.” Kmt is urban slang for “kiss my teeth”, an expression of contempt or nonchalance.

In this case, the planned murders were prevented before any shots were fired — thanks to the police monitoring these communications as part of a surveillance operation. But in May last year, an assassination attempt linked to the same long-running feud — which is linked to at least 20 murders in two decades — did play out on the streets of North London. A gunman hired by the Tottenham Turks pulled up on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike outside a busy restaurant in Dalston and fired six shots, injuring three members of the Hackney Turks, who were sitting outside. He also accidentally shot a nine-year-old girl who was eating ice cream, leaving her with severe injuries. The bullet remains lodged in her brain.

Last month, a North London criminal named Javon Riley was jailed for life for his role as a spotter and getaway driver in the hit. But Riley refused to name the individual who paid him £40,000 to help the gunman, telling the court he feared for his life. Meanwhile, the hitman himself remains on the run.

“We’re a million miles away from [the high death count] portrayed on TV shows like Mobland and Gangs of London, but these executions do happen,” says Ian Broughton, a former Met detective who advises on court cases involving drugs and firearms. “If it can’t be solved by diplomacy, when all else has failed, murder is the last course of action.”

Still, in the real world, gangsters are actually pretty bad at murder, and organizing an execution can hit the same problems as organizing a legitimate business project: service delivery can be unreliable; outsourcing means no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong; and too often efforts are more performative than results-based. High-level gang hits on Britain’s streets are, mercifully, less frequent than you might think, but when they do happen, they are often brutal, shambolic, and orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

Suggested reading

The old-school horror of Scotland’s gangs

By Dominic Adler

We know this thanks, in part, to a fascinating study into subcontracted violence among London drug gangs recently carried out by Jack Warburton, a researcher at Oxford University who specializes in organized crime. Warburton analyzed 17 contract hit cases, gaining access to closed-case police files relating to a large and detailed surveillance operation into the activities of a North London crime network as it planned three assassinations in 2019. The intercepted phone chats, beginning with the text exchange detailed above, show how the job was offered around the London criminal underworld like a gig on the chore-outsourcing app, TaskRabbit — with one of the three killings ultimately taken on by a low-level drug user who was seemingly incapable of finding his target, let alone killing him.

The job begins with the Turkish gang boss ordering the triple hit. A big figure in London’s drug trade, the Gang Boss is now living in Turkey, where he moved to evade the attention of the police. One of the three men he wanted dead was a member of a rival Turkish crime group, whom he held responsible for the murder of his cousin. Surprisingly, however, the other two were members of his own organization. He targeted one for going to the police, and the other for acting without the approval of senior group members.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the case, however, is that despite his organization’s nationwide reputation for violence, the Gang Boss opts to subcontract out the killings — using a senior member of a local street gang as a criminal broker. The pair trust each other, because the Turkish Gang Boss has been supplying the Broker with wholesale amounts of Class A drugs to sell on London’s streets for several years. Like last year’s attempted murders at the Dalston cafe, the use of predominantly black street gangs to carry out hits has been a regular feature of ethnically Turkish and Kurdish crime groups, enriched by decades operating as the chief gatekeepers of London’s heroin supply. Police have recovered numerous pistols and machine guns that have been passed from Turkish crime groups to black street gangs — who rely on their supply of drugs to make their own money.

The text exchanges reveal the Gang Boss and the Broker identifying the targets and agreeing the fee. However, even though he boasts about his own credentials as a killer, the Broker himself opts to subcontract the hits, asking an Accomplice to help him. The Accomplice is similarly reluctant to become directly involved himself, and so he in turn tries to find someone else to do the actual killing. And as the job moves down the chain, the plot starts to get a bit haphazard.

The Accomplice picks out a Journeyman — low-level drug user and dealer with little experience in carrying out contracted violence — to kill the rival gang member. However, he has no luck finding anyone to kill the other two victims. Frustrated, the Broker casts the net wider, bringing in a trusted relative with underworld connections. It is this Relative (now the fifth person involved in the conspiracy) who recruits the other two hitmen (the sixth and seventh people) from a prominent violent gang from another city.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman sources a gun, and alongside the Accomplice, steals an Audi 4×4 and fixes it with a number plate pinched from a similar car. They hide the weapon inside the Audi before parking it near the home of one of the targets. Little do they know that all of this time, the police have been intercepting their phone messages. The police are aware that one of the targets is in imminent danger — but they also want to continue monitoring the criminal conspiracy. So they decide to steal the Audi containing the gun, making it look like a regular car theft.

The criminals fall for it. Assuming the theft to be an unfortunate coincidence, they resolve to start again. But they find it challenging to source a new gun for the right price, and the plot descends into the kind of cluelessness familiar from Guy Ritchie films.

The Broker is meanwhile telling the Accomplice that one of the other three victims is an easy target. He’s recently been released from prison so must wear an electronic tag, meaning he’ll be at a certain address after a certain time every day. “…we should be cashing in tomorrow, this really is light work,” says the Broker.

But it doesn’t turn out to be light work. The Accomplice struggles to find the target or the property he’s tagged to. So the Broker pays £10,000 to a member of a local street gang from the target’s neighborhood — now the eighth conspirator in the plot — to carry out surveillance. When the two assassins recruited from outside London finally arrive to carry out the hit, they find the property is teeming with armed men providing protection. They abort the mission agreeing that they need more guns.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman is back to surveilling his target, who lives in a remote area on the outskirts of London. He carries out four separate surveillance sessions, each lasting between 10 minutes and a couple of hours — and the police know this as his mobile phone connected to the local cell tower. Bringing your mobile with you to a hit counts as a schoolboy error, and shows just how far out of his depth the Journeyman is. And so, with the plot nearing its violent conclusion, police swoop on the gang, arresting and convicting several of the UK-based conspirators.

It’s a case worth dwelling on, because it encompasses several traits that have become common in modern gangland assassination attempts. You would think violence and murder would be an essential in-house capability for an organized crime gang. But subcontracting out murder “makes strategic sense,” notes Warburton. It distances the criminal act from the person ordering it, and allows bosses to get on with the important business of making money. Note how the Gang Boss remained safely in Turkey, where he is less likely to be found by police or by rivals seeking revenge.

The safe haven du jour for European gangsters, however, is Dubai. For years, criminals have flocked to the Emirate to take advantage of its luxurious living, lack of gang violence, and crucially, its lax rules on money laundering and extraditing criminals. In June, British cocaine baron James Harding was jailed for 32 years after plotting to pay a hitman £100,000 to put a rival “permanently out of business” while lounging by a pool in a five-star hotel in Dubai.

Suggested reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

Nevertheless, by operating remotely and subcontracting out hits, British gangsters have surrendered some control over the actual operations — which often come with a distinct air of amateurism. Part of this is down to Britain’s tight gun laws, which mean there are simply not many people around who are proficient in wielding a gun. When gangs are able to source firearms, their lack of expertise means they tend to “spray and pray”. In the space of 24 hours, innocent bystanders Ashley Dale, 28, and Olivia Pratt-Korbel, 9, were killed in totally separate incidents in Liverpool in 2022, with both killed by gunmen hired to murder rival gangsters.

But even hiring trained gunmen is no guarantee of success. In 2021, a serving British soldier was jailed after he was paid to kill a man in Cheshire by a regional crime boss living in Spain. The soldier turned up at the man’s home with a Glock hidden in a pizza delivery box. Despite having a photo of his target, he managed to shoot the wrong man, blasting the intended victim’s stepfather in the legs.

Then there was the case of Anis Hemissi, the killer hired to execute the Swedish-Albanian drug trafficker Flamur Beqiri in 2019. Bequiri was shot dead in front of his wife and children on the doorstep of their £1.7 million home in Battersea. It’s a story that made national news, in part because Bequiri’s sister Misse starred in The Real Housewives of Cheshire. But despite being able to carry out the killing, Hemissi’s methods had a distinct flavor of Inspector Clouseau.

“The media presented [Hemissi] as this kickboxer, this professional killer, but he was the complete opposite,” Warburton tells me. Hemissi, who had flown in from Sweden under his own name to carry out the hit, was identified as the culprit within days because his attempts at subterfuge were so useless. “When he did the surveillance he rode a distinctive women’s bike and was litter-picking wearing a latex mask and a Swedish bin-collector’s uniform, so a local resident, thinking he was crazy, asked him what he was doing, and reported it to the police.” Hemissi was jailed for life in 2022.

Still, criminals are capable of learning from their mistakes. One of the main concerns crime experts now have is their increasingly sophisticated use of technology, with tracking devices increasingly preferred to human spotters to monitor targets’ movements. In 2022, Koray Alpergin, a Turkish radio DJ, was tortured to death in a disused bar in Tottenham while his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak was forced to listen to his screams. The Tottenham Turks wanted him dead over a drugs-related feud — and the thugs they hired captured him after attaching a tracking device to his car.

Nevertheless, such killings remain extremely rare. There are no detailed statistics on how many attempted and successful hits are carried out in Britain each year, but a College of Policing study estimated that 5% of annual homicides in England and Wales are linked to organized crime groups. That would equate to 28 of 570 killings last year. More general gang-related killings, including teenagers attacking each other with knives and machetes over petty beefs, were roughly twice as frequent.

But that stands to reason. Killing is bad for business in the criminal world, as it attracts reprisals, extra heat from the police, and impacts revenue. And despite their fearsome reputation, British organized crime groups are much more money-making machines than killing machines.

The underworld is, after all, a distorted mirror of the world we live in. As in the legitimate business world, crime organizations are now run by remote and unaccountable leadership, often based offshore, hoovering up the proceeds; there is a chain of harassed middle management giving everyone plausible deniability; and then there are the undertrained, underpaid workers actually doing the jobs. On the rare occasions they succeed, it’s almost always these hapless individuals who get caught — and almost never the person who bankrolled them. As in the business world, the reputation of the people at the top must be preserved at all costs.

Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.

Much like the country itself, English organized crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.

More from this author

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offenses, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favorite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.

In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.

Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organizational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focused on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organized crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.

Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalization of Somalis or Kurds.

Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organized and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.

Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.

And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalization’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognize.

This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honor” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honored pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.

Then there’s corruption. Organized crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.

As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organized Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavor of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.

Suggested reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organized crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specializing in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.

Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organized crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cozy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighborhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.

A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.

In the first decades of the last century, Arnold Rothstein, described by one social historian as “the JP Morgan of the underworld”, is widely regarded as the founder of American organised crime. Later Bernard Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as the odious Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein have carried on this grim tradition, albeit with usually less lethal means.

Today, America’s most prominent malefactors are more those of privilege than products of mean streets. Their evolution is epitomised by Bankman-Fried, a graduate of MIT, who was described by the Jerusalem Post as the product of “an upper-middle class family of Jewish academics”, raised in a $4 million home near Stanford amid the elite culture of Silicon Valley. Like many would-be tech moguls, Bankman-Fried revelled in his “outsider” image — as demonstrated by his pervasively sloppy dress code — but he was also an insider whose large contributions to the Democrats won him access to White House officials even as FTX was collapsing around him.

The complex nature of Jewish economic life was shaped by history. With their homeland destroyed by the Romans in AD70, Jews, already scattered throughout the Mediterranean world, were forced to employ their smarts and connections to survive. Once Christianity became the state religion, Jews faced greater restrictions, eventually barring them from most economic activities and service in the government or army. They were, notes historian Yuri Slezkine, “a cohesive tribe of professional strangers”, as opposed to most peasants, who were not literate, knew little about how the cash economy worked and often lived their entire lives within a relatively small perimeter. With the rise of capitalism, however, these habits born of exclusion turned out to be advantageous, as originally observed by both a sympathetic Max Weber and more hostile Werner Sombart. Jews may not have been the originators of capitalism, but as the Jewish historian Ellis Rivkin has argued, they were “best positioned to benefit”.

It also helped that Jews were literate, sometimes in more than one language, with contacts and family dispersed across numerous geographies. Before the Holocaust, Jews made up the vast majority of Eastern Europe’s factory owners, bankers, lawyers and physicians. By the 1880s, Jews accounted for a bare 4% of the population of the Austrian Empire, but comprised 40% of Vienna’s gymnasium students, a pattern seen throughout Eastern Europe. They also dominated the professions and the stock exchanges. A handful rose to prominence as global banking families, most obviously the Rothschilds, who played a preeminent role in the rise of the modern European and then North American economies.

Yet such success led some to suggest Jews were by nature manipulative and dishonest, a view common among European Christians for most of the last two millennia. Two dominant archetypes emerged in terms of Jewish image — one elevated, the other despised. “From Moses the lawgiver to Madoff the shyster”, writes University of Michigan historian Jeffrey Veidlinger. “Jews have figured prominently in European myth for some 2,000 years.” They were seen either as unmatched moral exemplars or “feared and despised as imagined worshippers of the Anti-Christ, political conspirators, financial manipulators, child murderers, and threats to racial purity”.

In reality, like any ethnic group under assault, some felt compelled to break the law. As early as the 10th and 11th centuries, Jewish leaders worked to fight criminals in their communities, most urgently when the scams inspired antisemitism from outside. But Jews also sometimes were persuaded to protect those who ran afoul of secular governments, in part due to the clear antisemitic bias of such regimes. Jews arriving in America or Britain, argued historian Irving Howe, entered a new environment that was more free but they still carried attitudes from their past. “The Torah tells us to do business honestly and follow the rules of the country,” notes Rabbi David Eliezrie, a prominent Chabad author and intellectual. “But we all too often lived in countries where the rules were impossible to follow.”

More from this author

The collapse of the progressive economy

By Joel Kotkin

Not surprisingly, Jewish community leaders have tended to downplay the criminal element of their tribe. It’s understandable that they prefer to focus instead on Jews’ extraordinary portion of Nobel Prizes (accounting for well over 20% of all winners between 1901 and 2022 while comprising just 0.2% of global population) than engage in discussions about gangsters and schemers. The Holocaust has also tended to dominate community consciousness, given the impact on many of our families. But focusing on Jews largely as martyrs and moral exemplars constitutes, as the author Dara Horn notes, a preference, if you will, for dead Jews — as long as they provide “a service to mankind” — over living ones. Martyrdom and intellectual achievement have been elevated as the centrepieces of Jewish identity, says Steven Windmueller, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, but “there’s an embarrassment about economic success”.

In reality, of course, Jews included not only saints and savants, but also criminals, hustlers and the marginal, unmoored luftmenschen (in Yiddish a person who seems to “float on air”). In the early 20th century, Jewish gangs flourished in cities such as London, where “the Kosher nostra” competed with other ethnic gangs for control of downscale areas like the East End. Much like the Lower East Side, London’s poorer areas had filled with recent Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, living amid what one contemporary described as “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery”. Some resorted to crime, like the gangs that featured in Peaky Blinders, although the vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic plodded on legally, and ultimately with good results.

Like East London, Brownsville, located in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn, served as an incubator for crime syndicates like Murder Incorporated, which essentially preformed hits for organised crime, particularly the Italian mafia. My late mother, who grew up there, charmingly described it as “a shitty place then, a shitty place now”. Raised in poverty, the New York gangsters, like Detroit’s Purple Gang and parts of Chicago’s potent underworld, engaged in protection rackets, bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking and gambling.

To a large extent, community leaders ignored this aspect of Jewish life. Even the worst of them still occasionally attended high holy days and frequently supported synagogues and Jewish causes, including Israel. Few community icons spoke about this criminal past — even as they collected money from them. They knew about them, for sure, recalled one Detroit community leader, but “we were afraid to admit it”.

Even when I was growing up in New York and Long Island, this ambivalence remained. After all “the tough Jews” were known as people who, at a time when millions of European Jews were about to be exterminated, fought American Nazis in the streets, while their counterparts in London battled Mosley’s blackshirts. Most Jews remained law-abiding, but even in my own family, my father told me, we had both a gangster as well as a New York cop. The garment industry, which employed much of my family both as workers and owners, operated in resigned cooperation with the mob, a nagging part of everyday business. As one such individual memorably told the father of one of my high school friends: “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

In recent decades, the nature of Jewish crime changed. Violence, noted Meyer Lansky, has always been “a poor substitute for brains”. Crooked Jews looked for more “respectable” ways of relieving the unwary of their money; there were few multi-generational Jewish crime families. The new wave is personified by Madoff, Bankman-Fried, Weinstein and Epstein, all creatures of middle-class suburban families. Of the leading Jewish malefactors of the 20th century, only the corrupt British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell — a survivor of the Holocaust, a military hero and father of Epstein’s partner Ghislaine — came from the truly school of hard knocks. Maxwell, a former Labour MP, died in 1991 at sea, perhaps by suicide, just as the extent of his fraud was being uncovered.

Like their more violent predecessors, these inheritors broke the rules, but not by blowing up safes, bootlegging or beating up deadbeats. Weinstein used bullying, particularly towards women, to get his way. Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell used the enticements of sex on a world of powerful figures and investors which, although it included many Jews, extended to distinctly goyishe figures like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

Suggested reading

Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma

By David Samuels

Then there was Bernard Madoff, an ambitious but not particularly well-educated financial hustler who defrauded investors of around $65 billion. Madoff was shameless, basking in the glow of Wall Street respectability as he ran a massive Ponzi scheme until he was nailed by regulators long asleep at the wheel. Critically, Madoff’s rise grew from exploiting Jewish ties. He raised money heavily from Jewish investors and served as chairman of Yeshiva University’s business school, among other institutions; the school’s investments with Madoff cost it an estimated $100 million. Madoff also scammed major Jewish charities such as Hadassah and Elie Wiesel’s Foundation for Humanity. Overall, noted The St. Louis Jewish Light after his death in 2021, Madoff’s activities constituted an “American Jewish catastrophe”.

This contradicts the conspiratorial notion that Jews get rich at the expense of Gentiles. In reality, much Jewish crime, like ethnic crime in general, preys on their own community. Just last month, an Israeli man allegedly bilked Orthodox Jews in LA and New Jersey out of an estimated $47 million. Such revelations, however, feed antisemitic memes at a time of rising hostility to Jews across wide parts of the population.

At his height, worth over $20 billion dollars and already crowned by the New York Times as “crypto emperor” in his early thirties, Bankman-Fried personified an elite background that was less ethnically tribal. Although he likely defrauded some Jews, he seems to have engaged in little of the traditional tribal schmoozing favoured by Madoff, Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein. Instead of bilking country-club parvenus, Bankman-Fried dabbled in progressive political memes, much like his parents. He did contribute to the Democratic Majority for Israel and United Democracy Project, both supporters of Zionism. But his connections as a major Democratic donor — just like Madoff, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein — fitted him into a regime characterised by ultra-loose Federal monetary policies and lack of SEC oversight, a perfect terroir for his scam. He is also reportedly being investigated for making large, illegal political contributions.

No doubt some reflexive antisemites will refer to Bankman-Fried’s ancestry to explain his behaviour, but this misses the changes he represents. Bankman-Fried, if he is to be considered in his Jewish context, reflects something far less distinctly ethnic than Meyer Lansky or even Bernard Madoff. He is not a product of the ghetto or of the struggling middle class. He may fit the profile of malicious cleverness, but in ways more reminiscent of the new tech oligarchy than of the old tribal traditions. Like everything else, crime gradually is losing its distinct ethnic flavour. Years of acceptance and upward mobility have merged our people with our surrounding communities, and will make our failings less reflective of our heritage and more part of the general decadence of the age.

But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.

We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).

The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.

Suggested reading

Tony Soprano: villain or victim?

By Rob Henderson

But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.

The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.

Runyon’s narrator trades in nicknames, neologisms, mock-formality, a language devoid of contractions and a perpetual present tense. When he tells us that “when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing, the guy very often does not come back”, the threat is softened by the stilted idiom — but not too much. The same goes for the cracking line, “I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”.

Comedy lowers the reader’s guard and enables the writer to slip in other things. We get unexpected moral complexity, in the story The Lily of St Pierre, in which a tragic woman suffers a death “that happens to a million dolls before and will happen to a million dolls again”. And there is a truly psychopathic viciousness in Sense of Humour, which begins with the aptly-named Frankie the Ferocious killing the family members of an associate who played a practical joke on him, and gets worse from there.

Suggested reading

How The Office ruined comedy

By Gareth Roberts

Runyon used comedy as a balance to danger, then; his inheritors developed this, using it as a source of danger, too. In the famous scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s Tommy turns laughter — “Do I amuse you?” — into blood-chilling fear. Like Runyon’s stories, like any good portrayal of the good bad guy — like any good art — it operates in multiple registers.

Connected to this is another strength of Runyon’s good bad guy: he is real. Runyon certainly knew the world he wrote about, both from his work as a newspaper reporter covering sports, politics and murder (which he called “the main event”) and from personal connections: he knew, among others, Al Capone. His portrayal of gangster culture in his stories was an exaggeration, usually for comic purposes, but it’s the authenticity that provides the frisson: Runyon’s biographer said any decent New York detective would recognise most of the crooks in his fiction, from Harry the Horse to Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

And so reading about, or watching, a good bad guy is like a rollercoaster ride: a brush with danger within a safe environment, all the more so when we are strapped to his viewpoint. We can’t help but come round to his way of thinking when we watch the serial killer’s serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter, or read Alex’s own words in A Clockwork Orange. After all, to paraphrase one Runyon character, many legitimate guys like you are interested in the doings of tough guys.

More from this author

Why does the literary world mistrust success?

By John Self

The guys and dolls come and go in Runyon’s stories, but his world is held together by that constant narrator, a bystander to the action (“I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around”) who rubs comfortably alongside the criminal underworld, even if he is not strictly part of it, and gently expresses theoretical disapproval of, say, kidnapping. “Snatching is by no means a high-class business, and is even considered somewhat illegal.” (Then again, we get the sense that he would help out if they were busy, and occasionally he provides a turning point in one of Runyon’s clockwork plots.) But the intimacy of the first person narrative makes us want Jo-jo and Spanish John and Dave the Dude to succeed — because reading is an act of empathy, but also because we see them within their own community, where they don’t seem so bad at all. They are, like Puzo’s mafiosi in The Godfather, bound by their own code of honour, however twisted.

The novelist Howard Spring summed up this appeal by describing Runyon’s people as “jungle-dwellers, hateful and horrible men and women, who yet please us because they are alive and completely integrated.” Fictional violence, in other words, is thrilling, and all the more so when we’re made to care about the characters dishing it out. In The Sopranos, the most simultaneously beloved and bloodthirsty of Tony’s henchmen was Paulie Walnuts, who murdered more people than anyone else, but was also a comic figure, cladding his furniture in plastic and forever repeating his jokes to impress Tony. In Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, when Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher delivers a theatrical “Whoopsy-daisy!” as he “misses” while chucking his knives at Cameron Diaz’s Jenny, we feel the same sense of uneasily disrupted danger that Runyon detonates in his darker stories.

In capturing the Broadway gangster era, Runyon created it, just as Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age — which operated at the same time but in a different world. But Runyon’s influence goes even further: he prefigures the wisecracking Noo Yawk idiom of countless sitcoms. And by offering a gangster environment that was fundamentally comic in nature, he opened a gap between his creations and the traditional villain for others to fill, and fill it they did, forming characters who flatter our appetite for complexity by being good only in parts.

After Runyon’s death in 1946 — from a lifelong smoker’s throat cancer — a plane was flown above Manhattan and his ashes were scattered over Broadway, the avenue he dusted with his own peculiar genius. It was a tribute befitting either a city grandee or a legendary crime boss — and therefore perfect for the man who in straddling both worlds created his own, and laid the path for ours.