USA TODAY International Edition
AMC’s ‘McMafia’ franchises global crime
If Goodfellas and The Sopranos signaled a wheezing, dying ItalianAmerican Mafia, AMC’s McMafia presents organized crime as a robust global franchise business.
The eight-part miniseries (premiering Monday, 10 ET/PT), based on Misha Glenny’s 2008 non-fiction book, traces a network of corruption linked in cyberspace and often fueled by seemingly legitimate sources from the international banking system.
“If you look at The Sopranos, there’s this notion of a criminal element on its last legs. What comes out of Misha’s book is the sense that it hasn’t died but has been reinvented into this manyheaded hydra exporting itself around the world,” says co-creator and director James Watkins.
Crime on this level needs access to the financial system, and that’s provided by Harvard-educated investor Alex Godman (James Norton, Grantchester), who has one foot in London’s high society and the other in an immigrant family with Russian Mob connections.
Today’s organized crime is “a different beast,” Norton says. “The traditional sense of the Mafia is that it’s incredibly cruel and corrupt but there’s an honor and a romance. The Mafia McMafia paints is really just to do with money.”
Alex lives with his girlfriend, Rebecca Harper (Juliet Rylance), a high-minded proponent of ethical capitalism. He’s devoted to her cause but is eventually drawn into crime by his family, echoing The Godfather’s Michael Corleone.
“The Godfather is the talismanic giant that hangs over everything in the gangster genre,” says Watkins, who filmed the limited series in 12 countries over 150 days. Italian-American Michael Corleone and Anglo-Russian Alex Godman are outsiders seeking social acceptance, and each is “trying to escape his past and is in some way unable to.”
Alex, who becomes a pawn in a skirmish between his family and Russian rival Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze), saves his business by accepting an investment from Semiyon Kleiman (David Strathairn), a cultivated Israeli businessman who oversees an underworld empire.
Alex’s descent into corruption begins in a genteel manner as he clicks a mouse to transfer Kleiman’s money, which will move through offshore entities and eventually finance drug smuggling in Mumbai and sex trafficking in the Middle East.
“His arm is twisted and he’s forced into this journey,” Norton says. His motives include “revenge and protection of his family, himself and his business assets. He uses those to justify his actions. (But) he loses track and, at a certain point, the audience stops understanding his justifications.”
Alex is “in this gray area between hero and villain,” he says. “Like anyone, he’s open and vulnerable to temptation. But he has a darkness and conflict about his Russianness and his family’s past and criminality. He’s a wonderful, complicated mess.”
Glenny says a system of gang franchising was described to him as McMafia (patterned after McDonald’s), illustrated by stories of the notorious Chechen Mafia franchising its name to other Russian gangs, as long as “they paid a tribute and upheld standards, (including) ruthlessness in the face of competition,” he says. “I saw a lot of parallels to global corporations” that act legally.
McMafia features stories from Glenny’s book, including an Eastern European woman kidnapped and forced into the sex trade and a hacker who infiltrated a major port’s computer system to facilitate smuggling.
It also parallels the real world of digital connection and opaque financing where the Panama Papers revealed potential illegal acts, Russia digitally interfered with the U.S. presidential campaign and world leaders have been accused of corruption.
“A lot of stuff vindicated us. We were really being chased by the zeitgeist,” Norton says. “As Semiyon said: ‘These wars are no longer fought in the streets. Your weapon is not the gun or the knife but the ability to move money.’ Criminality is so much bigger than families like The Sopranos.”