To those who understand how Europe’s underground economy works, these English lilts make sense. Albanian gangs are all over Britain’s £11 billion cocaine market, from large-scale import to street supply. Earlier this year two Albanians were jailed after arranging for over 500 kilograms of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $40 million, to be smuggled into Manchester airport from Mexico In the last few weeks alone, Albanian dealers have been locked up for running street-cocaine sales as far afield as Ipswich and Aberystwyth. In September, meanwhile, an Albanian was jailed after being caught driving down the M20 in Kent with £2 million of cocaine in Lidl bags. It’s a trade that comes with serious health warnings for users: last week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed cocaine has become the leading cause of drug deaths in England and Wales, with fatal overdoses involving the drug quadrupling in a decade. What’s more, Albanians also dominate Britain’s cannabis racket, which fuels a £2.5 billion domestic weed industry.

This narcotic revolution happened remarkably quickly. Ten years ago, police and journalists were only just starting to warn about the growing influence of Albanian gangs in Britain’s cocaine underworld. Albanian mobsters were rumored to be the main suppliers to the Groucho Club, Soho’s infamous celebrity hangout; so much cocaine was snorted there that the upstairs snooker room was sometimes called the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. A few streets away, at the Cirque Le Soir nightclub, an Albanian dealer was said to have sold coke in the presence of Frank “Sheriff of Soho” Partridge, the corrupt Met officer in charge of licensing West End nightlife until his arrest in 2015. 

Yet the question remains: how did the Albanians pull it off, especially in a country famed both for its tough native gangs, and for long-established foreign groups like the North London Turks and the Kinahans from Dublin? 

The answer begins with the fall of Albania’s Marxist-Leninist regime in 1992. After decades of socialism, Enver Hoxha’s former subjects stumbled into an unfamiliar capitalist world. “Organized crime was not a concept people in Albania knew much about before the collapse of the Communist regime,” says Fatjona Mejdini, director of the South Eastern Europe unit at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). “Overnight they faced a capitalist system they didn’t understand. So some turned to organized crime as a way to survive.” By 1997, meanwhile, Albania’s already-fragile economy was brought to its knees after the collapse of one of the biggest pyramid investment schemes in history, when around two thirds of citizens lost their life savings. Add the 1999 Kosovo war to the mix and tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians soon headed west in search of prosperity.

For some, crime was an appealing career path, with Albanian gangsters becoming well-known pimps and sex traffickers in the seedier corners of European capitals. By the late Nineties, Albanian and Kosovan thugs, having a deserved reputation for violence, snatched Soho’s £40 million vice trade from Maltese and East End gangs. By 2001, a Home office briefing found they owned 70% of the neighborhood’s saunas and massage parlors.

Sex was shadowed by drugs. Following the end of communism, huge weed farms appeared across Albania, with exports undercutting suppliers from the Netherlands and Morocco. The cannabis was first smuggled by road over the southern border into Greece, and then by boat to Italy, just 45 miles away across the Strait of Otranto. The Italian mafias, naturally taking their cut, were only too keen to help the Albanians move their product around Europe. As Mejdini puts it, cannabis was “the currency that Albanian traffickers used to connect with other criminal organizations in Europe and gain experience in organized crime”.

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It’s here that Britain re-enters the story. As far back as the Nineties, native gangsters had begun swapping armed robbery for narcotics, with criminals like Curtis “Cocky” Warren importing quality coke directly from Colombia to Liverpool, and the Adams family and their Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate building a thoroughgoing cocaine criminal empire. They were joined by foreign groups too: Kurdish and Pakistani heroin smugglers, and Jamaican Yardies who imported cocaine before turning it into crack. 

Riding high on their conquest of Soho’s sex trade, by the mid-2010s Albanians were wading into Britain’s drug world too. They picked a good moment. Around 2015, after all, a kilo of weed sold for £6,000, roughly three times today’s price. Even better, word on the street was that the police had taken their eye off cannabis farms — which, thanks to budget cuts, turned out to be true. 

Armed with cultivation know-how — and, thanks to lax immigration controls, a pool of trafficked labor from back home — Albanian criminals duly set up cannabis farms across Britain. That last phrase evokes a bucolic air, but don’t let it fool you. Even today, exploited “plant waterers” are stuck in grimy and claustrophobic conditions across Britain, facing beatings or even death as armed gangs raid each other’s farms to steal valuable crops. Not that this puts prospective workers off. As Ada Braho, of the Bakhita Centre for Research on Slavery, Exploitation and Abuse explains, the prospect of earning good money in British cannabis farms is “openly discussed” by young Albanians. 

“It’s pretty normalized,” Braho says. “It’s become like a joke that people are waiting to get on the next boat to get a job in a cannabis house. But they are being duped about the level of risk they are being exposed to.” Braho adds that young men embarking on precarious migration journeys are often backed by their parents as part of what she calls “household decisions” — with the proceeds of crime supporting whole families. 

As some Albanian gangs in Britain got entangled in weed farms, better-connected criminals stepped into the high-stakes world of cocaine. Artur and Klevis Hoxhosmani are an excellent example. Hailing from Burrel, a poor town in Albania’s rugged north, Artur claimed asylum in Britain in 1999, when he was just 16. His younger brother Klevis joined him in Bournemouth, on Britain’s south coast, some years later. By 2013, Klevis owned the Crystal Hand Carwash in the Dorset seaside town, and later a coffee shop. As for Artur, he acquired another car wash, as well as a pair of garages. 

From these humdrum beginnings, Albanian prosecutors say the brothers became a powerful cocaine trafficking cell. How? Because they had the proverbial golden ticket: direct connections to a rapidly growing network of Albanian cocaine gangs across Latin America and Europe. More than that, the Albanians developed what one expert has called a “sustainable partnership” with the ‘Ndrangheta — the most powerful Italian mafia centered around Calabria, the poor, rocky region in the toe of the peninsula’s boot. Among other things, ‘Ndrangheta bosses helped Albanian cells embed themselves along key points in the world’s cocaine-shipping network, from ports in Ecuador to transit countries like Sierra Leone and The Gambia. These cosmopolitan links have proved useful in other ways. Unlike most white English gangs — whose members are decidedly monolingual — the average Albanian trafficker might speak four or five languages. 

Partnering with Albanian criminals in Antwerp and Rotterdam, the Hoxhosmanis first smuggled in tons of cocaine from across the Atlantic, bribing customs officers and port officials to ensure things went smoothly. From there, they moved the coke by lorry to France, and then into the UK via the Channel Tunnel, where the brothers picked it up and distributed it to British wholesale suppliers. Police intercepted messages between the gang, which prosecutors say linked them to five tons of cocaine seizures over just eight months, and to powerful associates based in the money-laundering hub of Dubai.

These successes catapulted the Hoxhosmanis into glamorous circles; when they were arrested in Albania last summer, Klevis was in a much-publicized relationship with Kejda Ajazi, daughter of a former Albanian government minister. The brothers also hung out in places like Monaco, and owned a string of villas on Albania’s booming coast, as well as a yacht in Dubai. They now await trial charged with conspiracy to traffic £335 million worth of cocaine from Latin America to Britain and the EU. 

That word “cells” is important here. There is no single “Albanian mafia” in Britain. Instead, Mejdini explains that its coke-trafficking gangs largely consist of small, ultra-loyal kinship groups, almost always formed of brothers or in-laws. A second layer of the cell is usually made up of “associates”, who hail from the same small rural towns as core members. That gives Albanian crime cells a strong glue of shared community and trust — with dire consequences for family back home if anyone proves treacherous. For obvious reasons, that helps prevent police infiltration, especially when newcomers require vetting and references. 

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It’s also true that Albanian gangs in Britain are careful not to ruffle too many feathers. Despite their brutal reputation, outfits like the Hoxhosmanis didn’t displace existing outfits, nor do they now dominate their industry by force. Rather, they eased into Britain’s criminal ecosystem using a mix of know-how, efficiency and fair business practices: ironic given the bewildering scale of corruption in Albania itself. “Albanian groups have a reputation for reliability and delivery,” says Frank Stewart, threat lead for Western Balkans organized crime at the National Crime Agency (NCA). “In general, they are good at working with others and have established a reputation for delivering what they say they will on time and according to the agreement made.”  

Gangland shootings linked to Albanians are rare in the UK. In fact, despite having the least to prove, white British crime groups remain the most aggressive around. Tony Saggers, an international crime consultant and former head of drugs at the NCA, says there’s a reason Albanian gangs figure less in Liverpool than other cities — its cocaine trade is too violent. Trigger-happy gunfights clash with the “violence is bad for business” credo followed by Albanian cocaine gangs and indeed their mentors the ‘Ndrangheta. On the rare occasions that killings do happen, they tend to be carried out when targets are back home in Albania. After a 50-kilo shipment of cocaine went missing in England in 2018, bosses waited to ambush the suspected thieves in Albania, gunning them down when they were driving home from a family dinner.

As older Albanian criminals retreat into the semi-legitimate world, investing cocaine money into nightclubs and restaurants, a new generation of dealers is now stepping up. These younger criminals, many of whom were born in the UK, could pose a greater threat than their elders. More familiar with Britain’s modern underworld, Mejdini notes that they’re better at evading the law, not least around using sophisticated money-laundering schemes to hide their criminal assets.  

Some local Albanian gangsters are able to throw their weight around in their communities, with unsubstantiated rumors of “protection rackets” in the North London suburb of Southgate. A lot of fuss has been made about the “Hellbanianz”, an Instagram-friendly East London Albanian street drug gang with a penchant for well-produced rap videos. Now, though, its leaders are either in jail or back in Albania, and there’s little evidence, from either police investigations or criminologists, that their success in the drug trade translated to real power on the streets of Britain.

The same can’t be said for Albania itself. Ongoing street riots in the country were sparked by the $120-million sale of protected coastal land by Artur Shehu, an Albanian businessman and suspected cocaine trafficker, to Jared Kushner. Donald Trump’s son-in-law hopes to turn the wildlife sanctuary, home to flamingos, turtles and seals, into a massive luxury hotel complex. Certainly, Albania is now so deep in laundered coke cash that the resulting property boom has screwed the country’s economy. House prices have risen to unaffordable levels, and, as drug money has strengthened the local currency, exports are becoming more expensive, weakening sectors like garment manufacturing and agriculture. 

Stemming illegal migration may well help combat Britain’s Albanian gangs. But Mejdini suggests the Government’s efforts could be more targeted, for instance working with the Albanian authorities to identify known criminals. Britain might also cultivate closer links with the UK’s law-abiding Albanian diaspora, improving routes into education, employment and legitimate business, thereby reducing the appeal of crime. For now, though, with those Rolls Royces and Bentleys acting as shining adverts for the bounties of Britain, the road from Blloku to Bournemouth remains wide open. 

Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

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From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

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As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.