Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain review – it’s amazing he can get gangsters to open up like this | TV

I could spend most of this review describing what happens when Ross Kemp makes his documentaries about violent criminals, but if you’re reading this you probably have a pretty good idea of ​​what Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain is going to look like. The ex-EastEnder asks a question about something dubious, talks to some experts about hard men, talks to some hard men, talks to some more hard men about hard men, looks out to the horizon like Philomena Cunk in a shooting cap, then asks another, bigger question, which sets the whole chain of hard men on hard men going again.

But his bombastic documentary style only lasts an hour, and Kemp and his team have found a fascinating subject to investigate: did the Mafia ever operate in the UK, despite the persistent belief that one of the world’s oldest organised crime groups never really got a foothold here? He begins by going back to the early 1980s and the discovery of a body hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in central London. I know about the case because I once took family members on a sightseeing boat trip along the Thames, where we quickly learned that our cheerful guide was more interested in regaling us with the details of what is now regarded as a gruesome Mafia hit than in pointing out Big Ben.

In 1982, Roberto Calvi, a former financier known as “God’s banker” for his work with the Vatican, appears to have been running afoul of the wrong people. Peter Bleksley, a former Scotland Yard detective who was there at the time (and also one of the officers on Channel 4’s Hunted ), reveals that Calvi had rocks in his pockets, more than £10,000 in mixed currencies and a false passport on him when his body was discovered. Calvi is thought to have been stealing money laundered on behalf of the Mafia, and also had apparent ties to a former Masonic fraternity known as P2, or “the Black Monks”. “There was a certain symbolism in what was going on there,” Kemp says, gravely, for those struggling to keep up in the back.

The case remains unsolved, but the question of why Calvi was in London in the first place opens up another avenue of inquiry, which, intriguingly, leads to a caravan park in Preston. In a parallel universe, it seems Tony Soprano could have been tucking into Lancashire hotpot instead of Carmela’s baked ziti. In the early 00s, a mafia captain called Gennaro Panzuto was arrested in Preston. Kemp meets Panzuto’s old neighbour Mick, who describes him as a charming, swaggering man who enjoyed hosting barbecues for friends who regularly flew in from Italy.

It’s not until Kemp uses one of his contacts to track down Panzuto in Italy that we learn what one of these barbecues entailed, and it’s fair to say it wasn’t hot lagers with a four-pack of quarter pounders and melted plastic cheese. The revealing interview with Panzuto is the centerpiece and highlight of the episode, with the former captain explaining how he became involved with the Neapolitan Camorra as a teenager and admitting his role in some of the city’s bloodiest conflicts. Kemp tilts his head, frowns and, when the violence under discussion is particularly extreme, occasionally stares off into the distance. But Panzuto opens up to him, as many tough guys have done in the past. When Kemp asks what it’s like to know that so many people still want him dead, Panzuto says that death would release him from his inner turmoil.

Why were these gangsters able to hide in the UK? Because no one would have thought to look for the Godfather in Preston. After Kemp discovers that mafia agents can live and work in Lancashire, his next question is whether there has ever been a fully operational cell in the UK. He travels to Aberdeen and finds the strange case of Pavarotti’s Italian restaurant, owned in the 1990s by Antonio La Torre, a Camorra clan boss who made the most of the city’s oil money and hid his non-hospitality work by living in a modest flat above a butcher’s shop. And then it all inevitably leads back to the Kray twins, 1960s casinos and the arrival of the American mafia on British soil in the mid-20th century. The rest of the series takes Kemp to Philadelphia and Miami, having endured the unremarkable location work of episode one, although Woking does appear to be a bit too late.

In many ways, this is a Kemp documentary that sticks to the familiar blueprint. It carries with it a faint hint of Cunk-ness that it never quite shakes off. Still, you know what you’re getting from a series like this, and it delivers what it sets out to do: tough guys versus tough guys, mob-style.