Gangsters

Tuesday

James Delingpole

Fans of torture, dolly birds and fat lines of cocaine will love The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie only does one thing but he does it very well: slick, violent, sweary, black comedy capers about the unlikely intersection between toffs and the criminal underworld, invariably starring ex-footballer Vinnie Jones as a loveable tweed-wearing thug. If you were hoping for something different from The Gentlemen, prepare to be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you can never quite get enough of shotguns, stately homes, frantically crowbarred-in but still-quite-amusing one liners, rival gangsters, vast quantities of claret (in both vinous and sanguinary forms), torture, dolly birds, travellers, slightly annoying solecisms, fights, gambling and fat lines of cocaine, then this will be your cup of tea, guvnor, and no

Thursday

Scott Bradfield

Bugsy Siegel — the gangster straight out of a Hollywood movie

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1906, he was still a teenager when he teamed up with Meyer Lansky to become a successful bootlegger and mob enforcer. But when Mayor La Guardia came along in the early 1930s to clean up New York’s underworld, Siegel moved to California, and began dressing the way film adaptations of gangsters were supposed to. He befriended actors who played characters like him, and even filmed a couple of test scenes of himself playing a gangster who was based on a gangster like him. (The studios feared