While I don’t love the moniker, the Matt Reeves version of Gotham City, “The Batman Epic Crime Universe,” is pretty apt. While The Batman has a superhero and a terrifying serial killer at its center, the main thrust of the plot centered around organized crime and police and government corruption. Fun! We always knew Gotham’s rot ran deep, but The Batman really highlighted that. Fittingly, it’s this aspect the TV series The Penguin focuses on, despite having a recognizable comic villain as the lead. Much of The Penguin deals with the hierarchy and squabbling between two particular crime families mentioned in The Batman.
Here’s what you need to remember about the Falcone and Maroni criminal organizations and families before you dive into The Penguin.
Boss Carmine Falcone Is Dead
Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in the movie, Mark Strong on the show) was the longtime head of Falcone crime family. In The Batman, he more or less acts as the fulcrum from which all of the other plots in the movie circle. Falcone is Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell)‘s boss, and owner of the Iceberg Lounge which the Penguin runs. He tells Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) of his connection to Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne. Thomas fixed up Falcone’s mob-related wounds and later when a reporter threatened to expose Martha Wayne’s history of mental illness, Thomas asked Falcone to “put the fear of God” into the reporter. Falcone also had an affair with Maria Kyle, a dancer at the Iceberg, and is the illegitimate father of Selina (Zoe Kravitz).
The big penny-drop moment of the movie is when Batman figures out that Falcone is the rat feeding info to the police in exchange for the cops and politicians leaving him alone. Falcone murdered the reporter, and Selina’s mother, and later Selina’s friend Annika when she learned the truth about him. Part of his ratting consisted of selling out Salvatore Maroni, his criminal rival and operator of the city’s “drops” drug trade, and taking over the business. He puts Oz in charge of running it.
Through the Riddler (Paul Dano)’s clues, Batman uncovers all of this corruption and the uncorrupt members of the GCPD come to arrest Falcone. While doing so, the Riddler assassinates Falcone with a rifle in a nearby building.
The Penguin Sees a Vacuum in the Criminal Underworld
At the end of The Batman, we see the Penguin—who was vehemently against Falcone’s working with the cops—looking out over Gotham, contemplating his rise to the top. The series shows us it’s not that simple. The remaining capos in the Falcone organization aren’t going to just fall in line behind a thug like Cobb. He also has to contend with Carmine’s two legitimate children, Alberto (Michael Zegen) and Sofia (Cristin Milioti). Both have eyes on controlling the organization, and Sofia is freshly out of Arkham for apparently killing several women in the guise of the Hangman.
Salvatore Maroni Also Has a Score to Settle with the Falcone Crime Family
The aforementioned rival boss Salvatore Maroni will also appear in The Penguin, played by motherf***ing Clancy Brown. Maroni was the ruling family in the drops industry before Falcone’s involvement. Now that Carmine is no more and the big secret it exposed, Maroni sees this as an opportunity to take back what’s his. One setback, he’s still in prison. Lucky for him, his wife Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is more than capable, and ruthless, to go toe-to-toe with the Penguin and the Falcone kids.
The Falcones, the Maronis, and Their Crime Families in the Batman Comics
The criminal underworld of Gotham City as depicted in The Batman and The Penguin are not wholly new characters to the Batman mythos. In fact, many members of both the Falcone and Maroni families have appeared in comics over the past several decades in prominent ways.
Carmine Falcone
Carmine Falcone first appeared in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal four-issue mini series Batman: Year One from 1987. He later appeared as a main antagonist in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s iconic 1996-1997 series, Batman: The Long Halloween, which serves as a major inspiration for much of The Batman and The Penguin. The backstory about Thomas Wayne tending to Carmine’s wounds with a young Bruce watching comes right out of that book. Carmine dies in The Long Halloween at Two-Face’s hand.
Sofia and Alberto Falcone
The two Falcone children also both first appear in The Long Halloween and continue on in Loeb and Sale’s other big arc, Dark Victory. (They have another brother in the comics who doesn’t apparently exist in the show.) Sofia aids her father in The Long Halloween in unearthing the true identity of the serial murderer, the Holiday Killer, who kills citizens seemingly at random during specific holidays. Holiday turns out to be Alberto Falcone himself.
Later in the 2000 event Dark Victory, Sofia Falcone returns to Gotham in the guise of the Hangman, a serial murderer taking out members of the GCPD.
Salvatore Maroni
Salvatore Maroni is a very old character indeed. He first appeared in Batman issue #66 from 1942. He’s a gott-dang Bill Finger and Bob Kane creation! As one of the city’s major crime bosses, he appears on and off over the years. His major claim to fame is that he’s the one who tosses acid in Harvey Dent’s face which leads to him becoming Two-Face. This happens in The Long Halloween as well.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
