The gangster story is the dark twin of the American dream. It takes the same raw material, ambition, loyalty, family, the will to rise, and shows what happens when you pursue it with no rules at all. That is why the genre is so seductive and so damning at once: the mob offers belonging, power and respect, and charges your conscience for every bit of it. We are drawn to the family precisely because we know it will devour its own.
From Coppola's operatic tragedy to the cartels and the council estates, the form has spread far beyond New York, but the engine never changes: a person climbing a ladder that turns out to be made of other people.
Essential Mob Stories
The defining films, shows, games and books about crime families, syndicates and the men who run them.
The family always eats its own
The best mob stories are tragedies dressed as crime sagas. The Godfather is about a good son becoming a monster to save his family, and The Sopranos about a monster who cannot understand why he is unhappy. The violence sells the ticket. The slow moral suffocation is the real story.
The great gangster films
From Coppola to Scorsese: the cinema that built the mob myth and then tore it apart.
Worldwide rackets on film
The mob is not just an American story: Naples, Rio, London and the Russian vory.
Games let you climb the ladder yourself, from the careful period crime drama to the sprawling open-world empire, and the appeal is exactly the same: the rise is a thrill, and the genre always makes you pay for it.
Crime families on TV
Long-form mob sagas, from Tony Soprano's couch to the cartels and the Shelby empire.
Run the family yourself
Build the empire, work the rackets and shoot your way up the organization.
And the page is where much of it began, in the novels and the true-crime reporting that the screen adaptations were built from.
The mob on the page
The novels and true-crime reporting the screen adaptations were built on.
More empires built on crime
Drug Cartels
Explore the Drug Cartels guide →The mob sells you a family, a code and a way up in the world. The gangster story is the long, brutal receipt for everything that costs.