I could waste the bulk of this review describing what happens when Ross Kemp does his documentaries about violent criminals, but if you’re reading this, then you probably have a strong idea what Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain is going to be like. The ex-EastEnder has a question about something dodgy, talks to some experts about hard men, talks to some hard men, talks to some other hard men about hard men, looks off towards the horizon like a shooting-cap-wearing Philomena Cunk, then asks another, bigger question, setting off the whole chain of hard-men-on-hard-men once again.
But his bombastic style of documentary-making passes an hour very quickly, and Kemp and his team have found a fascinating subject to explore: do or did the mafia ever operate in the UK, despite a persistent belief that one of the oldest organised crime groups in the world never really got a foothold over here? He begins by going back to the early 80s, and the discovery of a body hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in the middle of London. I know about this case, having once taken family members on a tourist boat trip down the Thames, where we quickly learned that our cheerful tour guide was more interested in giving the full details of what is now assumed to have been a gruesome mafia hit than he was in pointing out Big Ben.
In 1982, Roberto Calvi, a former financier known as “God’s banker” owing to his work with the Vatican, appears to have crossed the wrong people. Peter Bleksley, an ex-Scotland Yard detective who was around at that time (and also one of the coppers in Channel 4’s Hunted), reveals that Calvi had bricks in his pockets, over £10,000 in mixed currency and a false passport on him when his body was discovered. It is thought that Calvi stole money that was being laundered on behalf of the mafia, and also had apparent links to a former Masonic brotherhood known as P2, or “the black friars”. “There was some symbolism to what happened here,” says Kemp, gravely, for those struggling to keep up at the back.
The case remains unsolved, but the question of why Calvi was in London in the first place opens up another avenue of investigation, which leads, intriguingly, to a caravan park in Preston. In a parallel universe, it seems that Tony Soprano could have been gobbling up Lancashire hotpot instead of Carmela’s baked ziti. In the early 00s, a mafia captain called Gennaro Panzuto was arrested in Preston. Kemp meets Panzuto’s old neighbour Mick, who describes him as a charming man with swagger, who liked to host barbecues for friends who regularly flew in from Italy.
It isn’t until Kemp uses one of his contacts to track Panzuto down in Italy that we learn what one of these barbecues entailed, and it’s fair to say it wasn’t warm lagers with a four-pack of quarter pounders and melty plastic cheese. The revealing interview with Panzuto is the centrepiece and highlight of the episode, as the former captain explains how he got involved with the Neapolitan Camorra as a teenager, and admits to his role in some of the city’s bloodiest conflicts. Kemp tilts his head, frowns and, when the violence being discussed is particularly extreme, occasionally stares off into the distance. But Panzuto opens up to him, as many tough men have done in the past. When Kemp asks what it is like to know that so many people still want him dead, Panzuto says that death would release him from his inner turmoil.
Why could these gangsters hide in the UK? Because nobody would have thought to look for the Godfather in Preston. Having discovered that mafia operatives could live in and work in Lancashire, Kemp’s next question is whether there was ever a fully operational cell in the UK. He heads to Aberdeen and finds the strange case of Pavarotti’s Italian restaurant, owned in the 1990s by Antonio La Torre, a Camorra clan boss who made the most of the city’s oil money and hid his non-hospitality line of work by living in a modest flat above a butcher’s shop. And then, inevitably, it all leads back to the Kray twins, 1960s casinos and the arrival of the American mob on British soil in the middle of the 20th century. The rest of the series will take Kemp to Philadelphia and Miami, having got through the unglamorous location work in episode one, though Woking does threaten to make a late appearance.
This is, in many ways, a Kemp documentary that sticks to the familiar blueprint. It carries that faint air of Cunk-iness that it doesn’t ever quite manage to shake. Yet you know what you’re getting from a series like this, and it delivers on what it sets out to do: hard men on hard men, mafia-style.
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