If someone can make money from recounting a killing in graphic detail on YouTube, are they profiting from their crimes a second time? That ensures gripping content for the audience – a front row seat to history, even – but it may also raise some ethical questions for the $500bn (£365bn) video sharing platform. Mobsters have for years used that interest for their own gain, but those stories have mostly been told with some distance from the subject, in semi-fictionalised dramatisations or in documentaries. Even as the power of the American mafia has declined in recent decades, the public’s fascination with it has not.
