We’re just shy of fifty years since Richard Nixon growled his most famous oath—I am not a crook. Less than a year later, his presidency and political career were over. Perhaps things would have turned out differently for him had he owned rather than denied his illicit inclinations, for as we’ve come to learn (or perhaps always knew but didn’t want to admit), America loves a criminal. Even, on occasion, in its president. “I think it’s the wish fulfillment,” Don Winslow, author of over twenty acclaimed crime novels, told Esquire a few days before the release of his latest book, City on Fire. We were discussing why people—who ostensibly have no desire to be victim nor vendor of crime themselves—have such an affinity for Mafia stories. “It’s a fantasy. You watch the first ten minutes of The Godfather, right? Here’s this guy sitting in this chair; people come to him with problems and he fixes them without ever getting out of the chair. I think most of us would like to have that instant solution. I think it’s the fantasy of that kind of power, the thing that we would probably—hopefully—never do in real life.”City on Fire—the first installment in a trilogy that will, perhaps, be Winslow’s final work of fiction—centers around a character who is forced, reluctantly, to exercise exactly this sort of crooked power. It’s a theme as old as storytelling itself, and it should therefore come as no surprise that this protagonist—an Irish mobster named Danny Ryan—was… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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Don Winslow Saw Right Through Our Mafia President
