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David Remnick on the gangster myth
Why are we so fascinated with mob stories?
David Remnick and the poster for the 1931 American mobster movie “Little Caesar.”
Jeff Morgan 04/Alamy Stock Photo, Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo
From “Little Caesar” to “The Godfather” to “The Sopranos,” American pop culture is obsessed with the gangster myth.
In this interview from 2002, The New Yorker editor David Remnick tries to decode our fascination with organized crime.
“If you have an ordinary family, you’ve got what we all have,” Remnick tells Kurt Andersen. “If you have a mob family, you have an ordinary family to the nth degree, where loyalty is outsized, where retribution is outsized.”
(Originally aired October 5, 2002)