The sixth and final season of British gangster hit “Peaky Blinders” has arrived. 

Now streaming on Netflix, the season closes out some aspects of the story while leaving plenty up in the air, since there’s a movie in the works, too. This makes it as dramatic as ever, but underwhelming as an end to this story in its TV series incarnation.

Ever since it premiered in 2013, the show has followed the Shelby mob family in Birmingham, England, through the aftermath of World War I, as they’ve risen from the streets to the halls of Parliament, and clashed with various enemies. Led by Tommy Shelby (Cillain Murphy), the family includes his aunt Polly (Helen McCrory), her son, Michael (Finn Cole), Tommy’s brothers Arthur (Paul Anderson) and John (Joe Cole), their sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) and Tommy’s wife Lizzie (Natasha O’Keeffe), who is a former sex worker turned secretary turned society wife.

By the final season, Tommy’s allies include unpredictable Jewish gangster Alfie (Tom Hardy) and his main adversary is fascist politician Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin). Season 5 ended with Tommy failing at his plan to assassinate Mosley.

Although it’s not the show’s fault, there’s a hole at the center of the story in Season 6. Co-star Helen McCrory tragically died of cancer in 2021 at age 52, and the show has adjusted to this by axing Polly.

The choice to kill Polly rather than write her off in a gentle way (she could have run off with a lover) makes Season 6 feel grim. The story begins with Tommy away from his family, making business moves near Newfoundland and speaking French, Michael is gunning for Tommy, blaming him for Polly’s death, Arthur is back to his old self-destructive habits, addicted to opium, Ada and Lizzie are stressed out holding down the fort back in England, Alfie has gotten into opera, and World War II is on the horizon. 

“Peaky Blinders” has always been an entertaining show, full of scenery chewing performances, anachronistic rock music that makes the period-drama feel kinetic, and bombastic action. Season 6 is no different. It holds several delights, including Afie saying, “Speaking as someone who has been dead for a number of years, I can only heartily recommend it.”

But, it doesn’t reach the heights of the show at its best. Although Polly and Lizzie’s arcs have been highlights, the show has always been the weakest at giving its female characters enough to do – and giving them roles that defy the “mob wife” stereotype. Sans Polly, now there’s just Lizzie, Ada, and Michael’s wife, Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy), and none of them get dynamic plots.

As for Tommy, he’s a character who’s compelling even when he’s just thinking. But in the final stretch of a dark drama about an antihero, every story in this genre has to make a choice once and for all about whether to redeem him, or punish him for his actions. “Peaky Blinders” has always been too enamored with Tommy to punish him for long, but it also likes wallowing in his darkness, which leaves the season feeling like it can’t make up its mind on what note to take for his swan song. And since this story will continue in a movie, his fate in Season 6 doesn’t feel like it has much gravity, since it’s not his true final word, anyway.

Ultimately, the season is worth tuning into. But, because of the impending movie, it doesn’t feel like much of a series finale – it just feels like business as usual, by order of the Peaky Blinders. 

This article was originally posted here

June 10, 2022 — The Greek mafia don of Queens, New York, Spyredon (Spiro the Greek) Velentzas was convicted of ordering the gangland slaying of Lucchese crime family associate Sorecho (Sammy the Arab) Nalo, but others point the finger at bosses in the Lucchese clan. Nalo, a world-famous thief and racketeer from Detroit, was gunned down in his travel agency on October 25, 1988, while talking on the phone to Velentzas.

The 86-year old Velentzas has been in federal prison serving a life sentence since 1992 for Nalo’s murder. This past week, he filed a motion for a compassionate release because of an increasingly bothersome series of health maladies.

Hailing from Iraqi descent, Nalo came to New York from Detroit in the 1960s and hooked up with a Lucchese crime family crew led by Christopher (Christie Tick) Furnari, a future consigliere of the organization. Partnering with Rochester (NY) mob associate Bobby Comfort and with the help and protection from Furnari’s regime, Sammy the Arab’s burglary unit pulled off the biggest hotel robbery in history when they stole more than three million bucks from The Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in January 1972.

Nalo owned a popular Middle-Eastern themed nightclub called Port Said, which catered to a gangster crowd and became a known hot spot for Lucchese and Genovese crime family bigwigs. He began doing drug deals with other Iraqi mob figures in his hometown of Detroit in the late 1970s and by the mid-1980s, had established a Colombian cocaine connection through Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel, according to DEA records. His gambling affairs began pushing into the Astoria, Queens neighborhood overseen by Spiro Velentzas, a Boston transplant that ruled Astoria’s rackets.

Federal prosecutors convinced jurors that Spiro the Greek reacted to Sammy the Arab’s infringement onto his turf by placing a murder contract on his head. Velentzas has long claimed he was merely a pawn in a power play launched by Lucchese boss Vittorio (Little Vic) Amuso and then-Lucchese capo Peter (Fat Pete) Chiodo. Sources inside the Lucchese organization, both current and former, support Velentzas’ claim. Chiodo was Amuso’s liaison to Spiro the Greek’s crew and turned government informant.

This article was originally posted here

Page Six reported at the end of April that OK! — the celebrity weekly launched by brash British publisher Richard Desmond — is set to stop publishing after a 17-year misadventure, making it perhaps the most expensive catastrophe in magazine history.

And to think it all began with a Taser to the nuts.

Desmond’s inauspicious foray into America began when he agreed to advertise phone-sex lines owned by New Yorker Richard Martino in the mainstream publications of his stable of British porn magazines, which also included such esteemed titles as Barely Legal and Readers Wives.

Regrettably, Martino turned out to be a high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family. And when the deal went sour, he allegedly had two men carjack one of Desmond’s executives on a New York business trip in 1992.

They jumped into the executive’s limo and “pistol-whipped him, slashed his face with a knife and applied a Taser-style stun gun to his testicles,” the Guardian reported, quoting court documents.

“If your boss sets foot here, he’s a dead man,” one of the goons reportedly said, as the shaken exec tearfully later recalled.

For his part, Desmond dismissed the whole episode, as described by the FBI, as “fantasy.” Testicular torture or no, the porn-rich publisher was intent on going legit and making it in the US.

“Dirty Des,” as the British press called him, sold his racy rags and stunned Britain by snapping up two of its oldest newspapers, the Daily and Sunday Express. He contributed generously to charities and became friends with celebrities, particularly David and Victoria Beckham and Roger Daltrey of the Who.

A representative for Desmond didn’t respond to a request for comment on the specifics of his ownership of OK!

The original edition of OK! launched in the UK in 1997, copying the successful society-and-royalty magazine Hello! down to its almost-identical logo, but taking a more populist bent. Desmond courted Britain’s large corps of cheap and accessible household-name soap actors and reality TV stars, buying exclusive rights to cover their weddings, births and a Hallmark store’s worth of other occasions. 

All that money also gained him entry into the celebs’ cocktail parties and country estates.

But then Dirty Des set his sights on a bigger fish: America.

He started OK! in 2005 at the apex of the Golden Age of Celebrity Weeklies. Brangelina was ascendent. Jennifer Aniston was on the rebound. Paris and Lindsay were at large. It would be another year until most Americans would hear about Facebook for the first time.

Weeklies were the only magazines where single-copy sales at newsstands and grocery stores, not subscriptions, are what really count. The editor, using the cover as bait, has to seduce the reader anew every week. There are few masters of it.

Desmond had a perfect pick. Nicola McCarthy had worked at the UK edition of OK! but left to become the executive editor of Us Weekly. He lured her away — and landed in court before they even began the first issue, when Us sued over McCarthy’s contract. A judge in 2005 forced OK! to pay its rival’s hefty legal fees and banned Desmond from using McCarthy until her contract ran out — months after OK!’s planned launch.

She was replaced by another UK transplant, 29-year-old Sarah Ivens. Desmond and Ivens stood on that bold new horizon with a combined zero-year experience in the American market.

Still, they pulled off a coup: signing up Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey for an unheard-of $1 million multi-cover deal. But then publishing execs printed the first issue on the almost-newspaper-size paper that the UK version used — unaware, apparently, that US retailers display magazines in pockets several inches smaller than OK!’s pages. So the million-dollar cover was either folded in two and shoved in the pockets, or not displayed at all.

They forged ahead, hosting a bedazzled LA launch party attended by Simpson and Lachey with Sean Combs as the DJ. To the surprise of the staff, the next issue’s party pages were jammed with pictures of Desmond and pals, including Daltrey. To the new US editors, it seemed “crass.”

The young staff — including this author, who worked there for over two years — embraced the party lifestyle, too, and could reliably be found getting bottle service with the cast of “Entourage,” partying at the same clubs as Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton or palling around with an almost-famous Kim Kardashian (then a “beauty editor-at-large” for the magazine).

Perhaps because it existed in a cocoon of Desmond’s bank account, there was a woozy sense of unreality around the Midtown offices. The true passion of an HR exec was a side gig as an author of erotica, writing under the pen name Mystique Allure. Desmond, quite illegally, smoked up a cloud of cigar smoke in the office.

His henchmen, schooled in Fleet Street newsrooms, screamed and swore at employees. A female executive referred to herself and Desmond in the third person as “Goldie and the Panther.” One staffer who relied on the job for a visa was capriciously fired, gave up his apartment, sold his furniture and bought a ticket home — only to be rehired. As he frantically scrambled to get his furniture back, he was re-fired weeks later.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears’ birthday cake sat in the snack room freezer for years, like a celebrity-weekly version of a picture of Dorian Gray for the Botox Age.

Desmond had failed to spot a crucial difference between the UK and US markets. The former relies on the principle that if any given person is put in front of a camera for long enough, they will eventually become famous. With this Dunkirk-spirit approach to célébrité, Britain has turned all manner of hairdressers and disgraced politicians into bona fide bigshots. (Helpfully, the British also think soap stars are actually stars.)

The US, however, had a pantheon of untouchable Hollywood A-listers — and a smattering of TV actors and one-time Top 40 singers living in the sweet spot: accessible enough to buy up, famous enough to shift copies.

Magazines like In Touch, Star and Life & Style solved this problem with a guerrilla approach. Instead of paying for expensive exclusives, they got their cover fodder from paparazzi shots and intel from a network of deeply connected Hollywood sources.

But People and Us Weekly were a little more nervous. Until then, stars often gave exclusives to People for free because it got the most eyes on it. Us was used to writing relatively small checks.

Us complained when People kicked off the big-money bidding wars by paying $75,000 for a set of paparazzi shots of Jennifer Lopez. But suddenly it was People that found itself paying above the odds.

“Last year, we lost a couple of weddings because OK! magazine was willing to spend more money than we thought made sense,” said People’s then-editor Larry Hackett in the New York Times, adding that, if it continued, “they’re going to get traction, and I don’t want any competitor to get traction where I can stop it.”

Two years in, the Times of London wrote that, “After a troubled start, [OK! is] flying high.” The magazine was hitting 850,000 weekly sales. With People around 3.5 million, Us at 2 million, Star about 1.5 million, In Touch around 1 million and Life & Style at 600,000, that sounds impressive. The problem was that OK!’s cash firehose was only good enough to keep up with the competition — not to sink it.

In fact, the only real winners in the weekly war were the celebrities. The watershed $1 million that OK! paid Jessica Simpson was soon dwarfed by the amount People reportedly paid — over $2 million — Jennifer Lopez for baby pictures in 2008. “We loved it,” said a celebrity publicist.

But Desmond had lost patience with losing a half-million dollars a week. The pressure on Ivens to deliver big sales without spending big bucks grew, and the sound of screaming British voices became a more familiar sound around the offices. Multiple editors told The Post they had trouble sleeping the night before the bi-weekly sales figures were published, fearful of what horrors a bad sale would bring down on their day.

Finally, Ivens had had enough. She quit in the fall of 2008 with no job to go to and moved to Kentucky. She was “34 and unhappy, anxious, living on my nerves,” she later wrote, claiming that she turned down $1 million from Desmond to stick around.

Ivens declined to comment for this story.

One morning in 2009, with sales nosediving, staff arrived to find the office plastered with dozens of sheets of paper, each with a large red “500” printed on it. The idea, it seems, was to will the staff into making a magazine that would sell 500,000 copies a week. This “Secret”-like manifesting did not work.

There followed a period of editorial identity crisis, with Desmond frantically cycling through editors, obviously casting about for someone who knew how to stem the bleeding. The plans swung wildly between upscale and downmarket. Often, they attempted to do both at the same time.

At one point, the exhausted staff out on the editorial room floor had booked a cover shoot with contestants from “The Biggest Loser.” Meanwhile, behind office doors, consultants were plotting to make OK!, as one of them queasily put it, “the frothy cappuccino at the end of a meal.” The two sides were so hopelessly disconnected that the next cover ended up featuring stars of the weight-loss game show wearing, for no obvious reason, ball gowns.

Meanwhile, Desmond’s interest seemed to drift. One staffer remembers a time when an editor-in-chief was left in a panic when Dirty Des couldn’t be located on his yacht to sign off on a cover. 

“I think Roger Daltery approved the 478th ‘Jennifer Aniston’s Baby Joy!’ cover,” joked one former staffer. “That poor woman. Her uterus should have had its own agent.”

Indeed, a virtually foolproof way of selling copies was to soothe whatever ulcerous wound in the American psyche is caused by the “Friends” actress’s lack of a child. By the end of the Desmond era, the magazine had bestowed a biblical 19 children on her. (She has no children.)

After the magazine lost a reported $25 million in 2010, Desmond put it on the market, courting then-People publisher Time Inc. as a buyer. When that deal went nowhere, he sold it to AMI (home of Star and the National Enquirer), which slashed costs, pooled resources with its other titles and scrapped exclusives.

In 2021, AMI sold OK!’s website to digital startup Empire Media and says it will continue to publish occasional special issues under the OK! brand.

Desmond stunned the UK once again in 2010 by buying money-losing British TV network Channel Five. He sold it four years later for a profit of around a half-billion British pounds. In 2020 he was reportedly worth around $2.5 billion — about a billion more than when he launched OK! in the US. He’s still friends with Roger Daltrey.

Where things landed was sidelining exclusives in favor of, apparently, trying to divine what readers would like to see on the cover and then reverse-engineering a story to match. The cover stories began to read like fevered fan fiction. “Best Friends!” raved one cover, showing a picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s daughter Photoshopped next to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ kid. “Shiloh and Suri’s Play Date: The Little Girls Have an Afternoon Tea Party With Cupcakes, Giggles and Dresses Picked Out By Suri.” To the best knowledge of a number of then-editors, no such tea party took place.

Dirty Des declined to be interviewed, but a rep said: “He thoroughly enjoyed launching OK! in America and working with the great team that was there to help build it to the 7th largest newsstand magazine in America. Mr. Desmond was very proud of the exclusives that came to OK! because of its high reputation in the US and world market.”

Sarah Ivens, meanwhile, now has a Ph.D. and is the bestselling author of 11 books including “Get Real: Embrace Your Strengths, Accept Your Limits, and Create an Authentically Happier, Healthier You.”

This article was originally posted here