With the summer theatrical blockbuster now a remnant of the pre-pandemic past, streaming services of every corporate stripe have rushed in to fill the void. And since the true crime genre has long been a surefire way to keep those eyeballs glued to screens, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a slew of docuseries suddenly come to a Netflix/Hulu/HBO/Amazon, etc. near you. So with the hot, dog days slowly subsiding, here are a few stranger-than-fiction, true crime picks well worth the episodic viewing.
As someone who spent my high school years both listening to punk rock and loathing jocks, I would not seem to be the target audience for Austin, Texas-based filmmaker Pat Kondelis’s (HBO’s The Scheme) Outcry. After all, any story starring a Tom Brady-type high school football star with a devoted cheerleader girlfriend is really not my cup of tea. So the fact that Kondelis’s five-part series for Showtime had me both riveted and rooting for the railroaded protagonist is really saying something.
The docuseries follows one truly disturbing case of criminal justice gone awry – starting when the aforementioned athlete, Austin all-star Greg Kelley, is accused of child molestation. Despite no hard evidence, and with only two dubiously elicited accusations, Kelley’s NFL dreams suddenly become a surreal nightmare as he’s swiftly convicted and sentenced to 25 years, no chance at parole. And things only get increasingly infuriating. Luckily, Kondelis’s camera is there to take us along for the ride as this ultimately exonerated felon and his growing base of supporters do battle in a years-long fight to right a heinous wrongdoing. And to find out what really went on behind the hidden prosecutorial scenes.
At the other end of the spectrum lies Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia, a tale of criminal justice done right. Sam Hobkinson’s three-parter for Netflix goes back in time to 70s/80s NYC, when “Fun City” was refashioned as “Fear City,” due to the rampant lawbreaking and general atmosphere of tinderbox violence that permeated throughout the five boroughs. And into that chaos stepped the Five Families – Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese, otherwise known as The Commission – to exert some murderous, highly profitable order.
In addition to making deft use of both archival footage and FBI surveillance tapes, juxtaposed with cinematic reenactments, Hobkinson also interviews many of the key players in the cat-and-mouse chase between organized-crime investigators and the ruthless Mafioso they eventually brought to heel. (That takedown occurred through a game-changing use of the RICO statute, masterminded by none other than the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time – former Mayor and still current lunatic Rudolph Giuliani – who also appears, surprisingly sanely, in the series.) It’s a portrait of a bygone era – when a handful of billionaires controlled every industry, from drugs and prostitution, to unions and construction. Or maybe an era not so bygone.
“I actually liked some of these guys more than the guys I worked with,” retired DEA special agent Hector Berrellez sincerely notes in The Last Narc, reflecting upon his undercover days infiltrating Mexican drug cartels during that same lawless era. (Berrellez, who posed as a cold-blooded sicario, even goes so far as to express remorse for having to shoot and kill one of the traffickers whose trust he’d gained.) Directed by Tiller Russell – who seems to have an affinity for documenting the good, the bad and the batshit insane (see 2018’s Operation Odessa and 2015’s The Seven Five) – this four-part docuseries is, true to form, one heck of a surprisingly twisted saga.
With Berrellez as our unconventional guide, The Last Narc delves deep into the true true crime behind the 1985 kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena – a case familiar to fans of Neflix’s Narcos: Mexico, and which the real-life, former faux hitman was eventually tasked to lead. Stranger in substance and form than its fictionalized counterpart, the series sees Berrellez unspooling through contemporary interviews what amounts to a tale of good (and bad) guys fighting to do the right thing against the bad (and “good”) guys trying to stop them. It’s no wonder Berrellez sometimes preferred the company of the clear-cut thugs.
Though not necessarily that of the remorseful baddies who ultimately came clean to Berrellez, and who Tiller similarly spotlights in chilling interviews (all conducted in safe house-sparse single rooms). These were the bodyguards on the Guadalajara Cartel payroll who also happened to be Jalisco State policemen, tasked with protecting the big bosses Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. (Of course this was back when El Chapo was merely one of their “dormidos,” responsible primarily for murder and body disposal maintenance.)
Fortunately, The Last Narc does provide some rays of disinfectant sunshine, most notably from Camarena’s widow, the passionate conscience of the series, and from several of Berrellez’s respected law enforcement colleagues, all quick to vouch for the former agent’s sordid and bizarre story. What at first might be dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theory – involving everyone and everything from the president of Mexico, to the CIA, to the Reagan administration and Iran-Contra – slowly morphs into a pretty plausible hypothesis. Who killed Kiki Camarena? To paraphrase one of those state-sanctioned bad guys, Who didn’t?