oh holy shit its basically a new season of 'suburra blood on rome'.

not gonna bother spoilering this because its very unlikely anyone will really care and im not going to get into any major plot stuff but.....

for what it is, its fine. the director worked on gomorrah and he manages to borrow some of the style / tension building / sound track vibes and obviously thats a good thing.

and thats the good news.

the bad news is the actual plot. its just basically nonsense. there are so many side deals and betrayals and shifting loyalties that its exhausting to keep track of whose fucking over who. and it gets worse from there; theres such a basic absence of common sense and logic to so many pivotal elements to the plot that it starts to feel like even when you do understand what the actual story is, none of it makes actual sense.

like the whole thing takes place with this weird in-world logic where the shortest path between two objectives is the one never chosen. oh youre a crime family 50 deep getting fucked over by 4 fisherman? welcome to a world where the absolute last thing on anyones mind is to simply drive up to their place of business and shoot them. its just fucking stupid.

and after 7 of the 8 eps i was like well im sure somehow this will all make sense / come together in the next 42 minutes and guess what, not by a long shot. almost nothing gets resolved. basically the whole fucking season is a nothing but a set up for future seasons.

also honestly there was absolutely no reason at all to not make this Suburra season 4.

i mean seriously fucking none.

i have no answers honestly. obviously im going to watch whatever they churn out because theres a gomorrah sized hole in my heart im desperate to fill but man does this feel like a fast food cheat meal compared to the admittedly luke warm suburra.

https://www.freightcaviar.com/italys...-cocaine-port/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...rangheta-mafia

I think that fishermen bit was a remnant from old cigarette smugglers first moving hash and then cocaine, but that's all mostly 70s-90s. Heroin mostly came by land routes. Ecstasy was from legal precursors usually cooked and pressed into pills in Netherland. Speed similarly travelled the longest distances as legal precursors and was cooked where it was sold or in a neighboring country.

​

Coke routes from some years ago. Suburra was based in Rome and it really makes zero sense to move anything there by sea.

There's few other ports in Africa besides Tangiers, but that was the biggest port in Africa. North Africa produces hash, but far as i know for almost everything else it's/was just convenient way to move stuff from South-America. TBH it's possible some Heroin also comes from that route, but it's a newer development related South-American poppy fields. There's also some Khat that's smuggled from Africa, but fairly sure only migrants/refugees care about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_clans

It was mostly a Spanish/Portuguese thing. That whole 10 miles from Africa bit and almost risk free routes by land to move almost anything to everywhere in mainland Europe. There was still Italian smaller independent operators, but that might have almost completely stopped sometime in the 80-90s.

For random reasons Spain has been a retirement home for criminals from every part of Europe since the 80s. For hiding, semi-retairment, permanent vacation or just middle men from pretty much every organization. It's has to be at least 10k+ expats with questionable background. Finland is pretty small in grand scale, but 10 years ago there was 50-100 criminals just from here. Local president of Hells Angels used drink at a short lived bar my friend owned in Spain. My friend himself was hiding from debtors and screwing over too many people here.

Some random article from few years ago...

MARBELLA-BASED FINNISH EXPAT CHARGED AMONG 53 OTHERS AND POP STAR IN FINLAND’S BIGGEST EVER DRUG TRAFFICKING CASE
NIKO Ranta-aho was part of the Marbella elite.
The handsome entrepreneur once owned the popular Teatro in Puerto Banus, a restaurant-cum-performance venue which welcomed such stars as Tyga and Ja Rule.
With a property development company, bikini-fitness girlfriend Sofia Belorf and a huge mansion in the exclusive Guadalmina Alta – home to the likes of former prime minister Jose Aznar – life seemed perfect.
That all came to an abrupt halt last July when he was arrested in Helsinki, accused of drug trafficking and money laundering in what has become the country’s biggest scandal in recent memory.
Now six months later, he has been formally charged alongside 53 others – including girlfriend Belorf.
The group are accused of smuggling a wide range of substances into Finland, including more than 200 kilos of amphetamines, 60 kilos of hash, 15 kilos of cocaine, more than 30 kilos of MDMA, over 100,000 ecstacy tablets, 20,000 LSD tabs, two kilos of crystal meth and around two million pharmaceutical pills.
Belorf is believed to be accused of money laundering.
Sofia is accused of money laundering by Finnish police
According to Ilta Sanomat, the long list of the accused includes entrepreneurs, high-profile family members and the usual suspects from the crime underworld.
Helsinki District Court has yet to reveal the full list of offences and who they correspond to, but the charges have been divided into four categories.
Hell’s Angels kingpin Jarkko Laakso, former president of the Cannonball gang Ari Ronkainen and Finnish bodybuilding champ Kimmo Niemi are also among the charged.​

...apparently it's worth it to move speed now. Police/Customs have been going after precursors for a while, but i assumed there was enough loopholes where you could just use legal fronts that could get chemicals in bulk. Ja Rule was an amusing mention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Carminati

The real life Samurai that's still alive and out of prison. But yea the show does the lazy thing where they use stuff from the past and just move it to present day without really changing anything. There are few shows about Spanish fishermen that are set in the period when they were active.

Suburra movie was more focused on organized crime links to politicians and the Vatican. And the first season was a stretched version of that movie, with more focus on characters that really weren't that interesting. Some random Romeo and Juliette thingie with bonus gay stuff.

Also from that Samurai wiki...

He was charged with fraud, money laundering, embezzlement, and the bribing of public officials. In 2017, Carminati was sentenced to 20 years in jail. The sentence was revoked in 2018 and he is free since 2020.

...seems like Italy has finally solved their minor corruption issues. 3 years out of a 20 year sentence is still pretty good by Italian standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Zaza

Apparently in the 60s the cigarette smuggling routes were from Yugoslavia and Albania to Italian ports. They just scaled up so fast that fishing boats became irrelevant. It didn't make any sense to me that small boats would be used that far east when there's so many safer routes in the west and south of Naples. Most big cities in Italy are on the coast and traditionally southern Italy was poor. Fishing might have been the biggest industry for a good while. There's similar thing in Morocco. Sort of natural connection with fishermen and smuggling.

In the 90s 'Ndrangheta basically built their own port. Calabria is south of Campania. There's a small sliver of land that separates them. Camorra is from Campania and 'Ndrangheta from Calabria. Both have clans that are allied with each other. For 'Ndrangheta clans still mean blood relatives. For Camorra clans that idea was scratched pretty early on. In general Camorra pretty much just means slightly older criminals from Campania. Clans are very loosely associated with some other clans on any given time. With 'Ndrangheta if you're good with one clan, usually you're good with every other clan. With Camorra being in good terms with a single clan really doesn't mean anything when it comes to other clans.

tour de force. gotta believe we have some clutch content in the pipes.