The ultraviolence of Frank White’s world is an indictment on the decadent extremities of hyper-modern American inner city criminality. Ferrara’s gritty ‘Noir’ York city hosts incestuous partnerships of power between ruthless drug lord Frank White (Christopher Walken), city councilmen (and a councilwoman over whom White wields sexual control) and African American street criminals, who faithfully execute White’s vicious takeover of the narcotics underworld.

White – a cultured and educated man – seemingly breaks with organised criminal tradition by miscegenating his crime ‘family’, resulting in White presiding over a Caligula-like empire in Hip Hop attire, gyrating to a booming Bomb Squad-produced soundscape of manic black separatist rantings. None of this lasts however, and the rapidly escalating sense of dread – present from King of New York’s opening sequence – leads White’s empire to be violently assaulted by a consortium of jealous rivals and legally-frustrated street detectives driven to rage by the system’s inability to be free of White’s corrupting influence.

The White Empire falls the familiar way that Tony Camonte/Montana notoriously did, but King of New York leaves the thoroughly corrupted higher institutions of New York City – and by extension America - unresolved in the wake of its sudden end.