David Remnick on the gangster myth

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)