From 'Public Enemy' to 'The Irishman,' 'The Sopranos' to 'This City Is Ours,' it seems we can't get enough of tales about gangsters on the big and small screen.
Ireland has also had quite a few TV shows and movies about crime gangs in its time from 'The General' to 'Calm With Horses,' 'Love/Hate' to 'KIN'.
Sometimes, though, the grim storles of what real life crime gangs get up to is just as fascinating.
That is especially true of two recent docuseries about rival sides in a feud that spectacularly erupted on the streets of Dublin - RTE1's 'Gerry Hutch: AKA The Monk' and BBC1's 'Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland's Mafia'.
The feud between the Kinahan and Hutch gangs is probably best known for the shocking gun attack on a boxing weigh-in in Dublin's Regency Hotel in February 2016.
However the fallout claimed the lives of 18 people.
There were lots of other casualties along the way too whose suffering has never really been dwelled upon - addicts hooked on the drugs that members of both factions peddled and profited from, traumatised civilians who witnessed acts of violence and cops who succumbed to depression.
While there is a grim fascination with the Irish underworld that has proven hard for the tabloids and dramatists to resist, both docuseries are nevertheless careful not to glamorise the criminal figures they are examining.
GERRY HUTCH: AKA THE MONK (RYE1)
'Gerry Hutch: AKA The Monk' is a two part documentary about one of Ireland's most notorious criminals who came very close to winning a seat in the Irish Parliament in the General Election last year.
Directed by John Downes and written by former BBC Ireland Correspondent Leo Enright, it charts his rise from the leader of a north inner city Dublin street gang known as The Bugsies to the mastermind of the Brinks Allied and Marino Mart robberies.
It portrays him as a shrewd operator who is proud of his roots in the Summerhill estate and who was careful not to let go of those even after he moved into the more affluent Clontarf area of the city.
The impression is of a crime figure who understood early on the importance of shaping his own narrative.
He has done this with only two televised interviews - one with RTE's Prime Time programme after the Criminal Assets Bureau moved in on his financial gains and the other for a Sunday World podcast.
Despite the interest of the Gardai in his activities, Hutch has sought to portray himself as a man of the people who got lucky on property deals and who in recent years has been willing to take on "official Ireland".
It is a narrative that almost won him a Dail seat in former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's former stronghold of Dublin Central which is also the constituency of the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald.
However, as the RTE docuseries shows, the other narrative around him is of a gangland figure who was prepared to harm others if they got in the way of his robberies and as someone who had a central role in the feud with the Kinahan gang that claimed the lives of a brother and nephews.
Like 'Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland's Mafia,' Downes and Enright's documentary hangs on the audacious Regency Hotel gun attack that Daniel Kinahan was attending following the mowing down of Hutch's nephew Gary in Spain.
The two part docuseries does a particularly thorough job documenting how the prosecutor's case against Hutch for the murder of Kinahan associate David Byrne in the attack fell apart, thanks to a poor witness - former Sinn Fein councillor Jonathan Dowdall who turned state's evidence against him.
Interviews with Sunday World reporter Nicola Tallant, the lawyer and boxing official Mel Christie and court sketch artist Mike O'Donnell portray Hutch as calm and collected throughout proceedings.
But the docuseries also questions why the state went for broke in trying to secure a conviction for murder instead of also charging him over the ferrying of the weapons back to dissident republicans north of the border.
The impression given is of an intelligent old school crime gang leader who has been fortunate to avoid death and lengthy spells in jail.
KINAHAN: THE TRUE STORY OF IRELAND'S MAFIA (BBC1)
Tim Robinson, Darragh McIntyre and Stephen Dempster's 'Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland's Mafia' focuses on the rise of the other faction in the feud from Dublin street drug dealers to leading lights in a European super cartel whose links were forged in Amsterdam during the ecstasy boom.
At the head of the family, Christopher Kinahan, like Hutch, is portrayed as an intelligent, disciplined and ruthless gang leader who learned from his early mistakes and built a drugs empire.
Originally a thief, a forger and a conman, he constructed a drug dealing operation in the Irish capital with his sons Daniel and Christopher Jr by spotting an opportunity to the grow the business in Ireland and the UK during the 1990s.
As the profits rolled in, he and his family have lived a high life in Amsterdam, Marbella and Dubai.
Back in Dublin, Gerry Hutch's nephew Gary became a close associate of Daniel's, hanging out with him in Spain until he was accused of being an informant for the local police after Operation Shovel resulted in a series of raids on the Kinahan gang's assets in the Costa del Sol.
Smarting from the Kinahans' failure to return money he had laundered through Daniel Kinahan, Gary Hutch ordered his former friend's shooting in 2014 in Marbella but the job was botched, with the hitman wounding a boxer Jamie Moore instead.
His uncle Gerry Hutch was subsequently called upon to help avoid further bloodshed and broker a deal between him and Daniel Kinahan which allegedly comprised of compensation for the latter and a so-called "punishment shooting" carried out on Gary's brother Patrick.
However the deal was broken when Gary Hutch returned to Estepona from exile in Amsterdam and was gunned down in September 2015 during an early morning jog.
Gerry Hutch also survived an attempt on his life on New Year's Eve three months later in a bar in Lanzarote, hiding behind a pillar.
Over the next five years, various members of the Hutch family or people with links to the Kinahan gang were shot or stabbed to death. Others were arrested.
But while Robinson, McIntyre and Dempster's four part docuseries dives into the details of the feud, where it really scores is the way it maps out how the Kinahan gang emerged as a major force in the international drugs trade and how Daniel Kinahan's attempts to earn respectability by becoming a powerful figure in professional boxing backfired spectacularly.
While relying on solid interviews with Tallant and fellow crime reporter Paul Williams, the viewer gains even greater insight through interviews with figures like former US DEA agent Jack Kelly, ex Assistant Garda Commissioner Michael O'Sullivan and members of the UK National Crime Agency who sheds light on how the gang's UK operations run from Tamworth by Thomas 'Bomber' Kavanagh were exposed.
For those puzzled as to why the Kinahans attracted the attention of the US authorities look to Daniel's profile in boxing as the owner of a stable of fighters that included the world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, while his gang were also linked to drug deals with Hezbollah that resulted in the extraordinary December 2015 murder in the Dutch city of Almere of the Iranian dissident Mohammad Reza Kolahi Sama who was living under the assumed identity of Ali Motamed.
These extraordinary stories about the Kinahans' rise in international drugs trade circles - allegations which a caption at the start of each episode informs us that the Kinahans deny and which their lawyers insist have never been proven in court - are what really distinguishes the BBC1 documentary.
While the Hutch gang in both documentaries is portrayed as a big fish in a small pond, the Kinahan Organised Crime Group is an even bigger fish in that pond.
In fact, it's a $1 billion shark swimming in more expansive watersii.
Amid predictions that both gangs days may be coming to an end, one thing is certain.
There will still be huge public interest in the Kinahan and Hutch stories - whether or not either actually feels the full force of the law.
('Gerry Hutch: AKA The Monk' was broadcast on RTE1 between February 10-17, 2025 while 'Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland's Mafia' was broadcast on BBC1 between March 31-April8, 2025. Both are available on the RTE Player and BBC iPlayer respectively.)
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