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Curated playlist

Fictional gangsters

  • Joker (character)The Joker was nearly killed off in his second comic appearance. An editor saved him with a hastily drawn panel.
  • Christopher MoltisantiChristopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperioli on the HBO series The Sopranos, speaks the closing line of the prequel film The Many Saints of Newark. From somewhere beyond death, his voice says that Tony Soprano is "the guy he went to…
  • Mike EhrmantrautMike Ehrmantraut began life as a placeholder. The writers of Breaking Bad needed someone to fill a gap in the second-season finale, titled ABQ, because Bob Odenkirk, the actor who plays Saul Goodman, had a commitment to appear in How I Met…
  • Jesse PinkmanJesse Pinkman is the only character besides Walter White to appear in every episode of Breaking Bad. Aaron Paul plays him. When the story opens, Jesse is a crystal meth cook and dealer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his former high school…
  • Two-FaceTwo-Face, the coin-tossing enemy of Batman, makes his first appearance in Detective Comics #66, published in August 1942. Late in that issue, Batman chases him down and corners him. The hero offers a simple deal: give up and start over.…
  • Tommy ShelbyTommy Shelby, the central figure of the British crime drama Peaky Blinders, exists on screen partly because of a text message of four words. The message read "Remember, I'm an actor." Its sender was Cillian Murphy, and its recipient was a…
  • Tony SopranoTony Soprano, the New Jersey mob boss at the center of the HBO series The Sopranos, was nearly named Tommy. In the pilot, the name honored Tom Powers, the gangster James Cagney played in The Public Enemy. Clearance to call the character…
  • F.A.N.G. (Street Fighter)F.A.N.G promised to beat his opponent in exactly two minutes. The Street Fighter V villain still ranked near the bottom.
  • Sodom (Final Fight)Capcom's Sodom tried to write the kanji for death on his chest and got it wrong.
  • NeganNegan is a fictional survivor in The Walking Dead, a man who carries a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire and calls it Lucille. He first appears as the leader of the Saviors, a group that forces neighboring communities to hand over…
  • Solomon Grundy (character)Solomon Grundy is a DC Comics supervillain, and now and then an antihero, who took his name from a 19th-century nursery rhyme. He first lurched onto the page in All-American Comics #61, dated October 1944. Writer Alfred Bester created him…
  • Tombstone (character)Tombstone is a Marvel Comics crime boss whose face was built to resemble the grave marker he is named after. Writer Gerry Conway chose the name first. He then gave the character albinism and squared-off features so the finished drawing…
  • Jigsaw (Marvel Comics)Jigsaw made his first full appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #162, published in November 1976. Writer Len Wein and artist Ross Andru created the character for Marvel Comics. The name fits the man. His face was shattered into pieces, and…
  • Omar LittleOmar Little, the stick-up man at the center of HBO's The Wire, announced himself with a whistled tune. When he stalked a target, he whistled "A-Hunting We Will Go", a melody also known as "The Farmer in the Dell". Anyone on a Baltimore…

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