¹ The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 19, “Second Coming.”

² Matt Taibbi, “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia,” Rolling Stone, 21 June 2102, at www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620.

³ See Roberto Saviano, “Where The Mob Keeps its Money,” New York Times, 25 Aug. 2012, at www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/where-the-mob-keeps-its-money.html?pagewanted=all.

⁴ The term “money laundering” first gets used in legal proceedings in 1982; it is codified in 1986. That these recordings and recodings, even, happen in the 1980s is hardly coincidental: the termination of the Bretton Woods Accords created more stateless or ‘hot” money which would necessarily find its way into multiple, including illicit, channels of circulation. See Kris Hinterseer, Criminal Finance (Great Britain: Kluwer Law International, 1989), for a history of the term.

⁵ Boesky was repeatedly portrayed as the Russian Czar Ivan “The Terrible.” See Time magazine, 1 Dec. 1990, cover.

⁶ William K. Raushbaum, “Police Say a Queens Drug Ring Watched Too Much Television,” New York Times, 15 Jan. 2005, at www.nytimes.com/2005/01/15/nyregion/15drug.html?_r=0.

⁷ I will use three terms throughout whose meanings must be clarified. “Illegal” indicates the breaking of a specific law, counterfeiting, for example. “Illegitimate” is not necessary illegal (but might be); rather it is not socially endorsed, in the case of many offshore sites usage is legal but not socially legitimate, thus there is some secrecy around them. “Illicit,” finally, has a cultural rather than instituional or legal resonance.

⁸ Economists estimate that the illegitimate economy comprises around 10% of global GDP.

⁹ Maurer, Bill, “Complex Subjects: Offshore Finance, Complexity Theory, and the Dispersion of the Modern,” Socialist Review, 25, 3–4 (1995), 114–45Google Scholar.

¹⁰ That show's own moral economy prohibits the direct representation of the sale of drugs, preferring instead for the viewer to infer these transactions and watch characters consume the substances.

¹¹ While these shows do not conform precisely to “mob” stories, Dana Polan has suggested they may be postmodern reissues of them. Dana Polan, The Sopranos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See also now Linda Williams, The Wire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

¹² Joshua Clover, “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics,” Representations, 126, 1 (Spring 2014), special issue, Financialization and the Culture Industry, 9–30, suggests that metaphor is the “most financial of literary devices”; allegory's structural similarity make it a close second. Allegory requires a difference that ultimately finds a semantic equivalent to produce meaning across a referential divide; arbitrage requires a difference that ultimately finds a monetary equivalent.

¹³ A quick and easy definition: “Arbitrage in this sense refers to the efficient marketeers' assumption that should prices get out of line with their warranted value, rational investors will move in quickly and buy underpriced assets or sell overpriced ones. Thus mispricing can only be transient, never sustained. This makes sense if you're dealing with two very similar assets; where gold is selling for $350 an ounce in New York and $355 in London, then speculators would immediately move in and buy New York.” Doug Henwood, Wall Street (New York: Verso, 1996), 177.

¹⁴ Michael Szalazy offers a different way to think about representation as profit outside the commodity structure in “HBO's Flexible Gold,” Representations, 126, 1, special issue, Financialization and the Culture Industry (Spring 2014), 112–34). He focusses on brand equity and its relation to derivatives.

¹⁵ Randy Martin, Empire of Indifference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) p. 4.

¹⁶ The first season of the show was coincident with the onset of the crisis; many popular critics have noted this in their reviews.

¹⁷ See my “Capitalist Realism and Serial Form: The Fifth Season of The Wire,” in Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2014), 115–39.

¹⁸ Donald MacKenzie has produced some wonderfully rich accounts of the institutional culture of securities production and trading; see, for example, MacKenzie, Donald, “The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology, 116, 6 (May 2011), 1778–1841CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1780.

¹⁹ McCarthy, Anna, “Reality Television and the Neoliberal Theatre of Suffering,” Social Text, 93, 25, 4 (Winter 2007), 17–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Jason Mittell, work in progress, Complex TV, full manuscript available at http://mcpress.media-commons.org/complextelevision, accessed January 2015.

²¹ See the whole issue of Criticism (Spring 2010) devoted to The Wire, ed. Paul Farber and Robert LeVertis Bell. See also Polan, The Soporanos; and Williams, The Wire. Please supply volume number for Criticism.

²² Nochimson, Martha P., “Waddaya Lookin’ At? Re-reading the Gangster Genre through ‘The Sopranos,’” Film Quarterly, 56, 2 (2002–3), 2–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has a wonderful reading of The Sopranos and Tony's relation to his own body.

²³ See Fredric Jameson's theory of ideological “strategies of containment” in the introduction to his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

²⁴ Charles Spezzano, Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67.

²⁵ Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), introduction.

²⁶ The Sopranos, Season 6, Episode 17, “Walk Like a Man.”

²⁷ See Geoffrey O'Brien, “A Northern New Jersey State of Mind,” New York Review of Books, 16 Aug. 2007, at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/aug/16/a-northern-new-jersey-of-the-mind.

²⁸ R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and The Politics of Debt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), xii.

²⁹ See the blog entry by Curtis Marez, “From Mr. Chips to Scarface, or Racial Capitalism in Breaking Bad,” at https://critinq.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/breaking-bad, accessed Dec. 2014.

³⁰ Very little has been written on this show. But for one see Jason Mittell at mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/breaking-toward-end. Mittel's work is almost exclusively about character development and plotting.

³¹ Naylor.

³² United States Criminal Code.

³³ See Saviano, “Where the Mob Keeps its Money.”

³⁴ See, for example, the United Kingdom's recent decision to attempt to account for this money. Angela Monaghan, “Drugs and Prostitution to Be Included in UK National Accounts,” The Guardian, 29 May 2014, at www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/29/drugs-prostitution-uk-national-accounts.

³⁵ See Michael Hudson's “JPMorgan Chase's Record Highlights Doubts about Big Banks' Devotion to Fighting Dirty Money Flows,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, at www.icij.org/offshore/jpmorgan-chases-record-highlights-doubts-about-big-banks-devotion-fighting-dirty-money, accessed Jan. 2015. This is a different Michael Hudson than the economist I already cited. See this Michael Hudson's excellent The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011), about the subprime mortgage market and subsequent crisis.

³⁶ Michael Hudson explains that “crime is the key sector of which no estimates are made. It is perhaps the most liquid.” See Naylor.

³⁷ The original Observer article is not available online, but there are multiple references to it, e.g. in The Guardian at www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims.

³⁸ Thanks to David Bholat for this reminder.