McMafia, the BBC's mega-budget new year thriller, is a jet-setting romp brimming with bloodshed, steamy assignations and gripping twists. But it also has more serious ambitions – with writer-directors Hossein Amini and James Watkins describing the eight-part series as "a state-of-the-nation treatise on globalisation".
Starring James Norton as the scion of a Russian crime dynasty drawn inexorably into the family business, the series is "loosely" adapted from a 2008 book of the same name by Misha Glenny, a former BBC Central Europe correspondent.
However, Glenny's non-fiction work is more jumping off point than direct inspiration - with many of the show's major characters entirely fictitious and others an amalgam of real-life gangsters. Here's a rundown of the real criminals and events on which the series is (often very hazily) based:
Alex Godman doesn't exist
There is no direct parallel in...