L. J. Shen builds the underworld of Bad Bishop from three real organized crime traditions: the Italian Camorra, the Irish Mob, and the Russian Bratva, represented by the Ferrante, Callaghan, and Rasputin families, respectively. The Camorra’s roots lie in Naples’s 19th-century prison system, where released gang members built an illicit network of smuggling, extortion, and political influence (Siggia, Stefano. “Dissecting the Mafia: Campania’s Camorra.” ACAMS Today, 19 May 2023). Unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra operates not under a centralized authority but as roughly 180 independent clans that forge alliances or wage wars over Naples and the surrounding Campania region (Siggia). Shen ties the fictional Ferrantes to this lineage through Don Vello’s Neapolitan dialect, the family’s summers on Ischia in the Bay of Naples, and references to Secondigliano (a real Naples district that the Anti-Mafia Commission identifies as home to the Secondigliano Alliance, one of the Camorra’s most powerful active clans [Siggia]). When Tiernan Callaghan observes that “the Ferrantes rule[] 90 percent of New York” (2), Shen overstates the Camorra’s real American footprint since New York’s organized crime hierarchy historically belonged to the Sicilian-rooted Five Families that Salvatore Maranzano organized in 1931. By assigning the Ferrantes Camorra heritage but Five Families-level dominance, Shen blends two distinct Italian criminal traditions.

The Irish Mob in New York reached modern infamy through the Westies of Hell’s Kitchen. Journalist T. J. English’s history The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob documents how Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone rose through loan-sharking, extortion, and labor racketeering in the mid-1970s, eventually carrying out contract hits for the Gambino crime family and dismembering victims as their signature method. The Westies’ alliance with the Gambinos was sealed when Gambino soldier Roy DeMeo murdered rival Irish boss Mickey Spillane in 1977 as a favor to Coonan (“In 1980s New York, the Mob Had Its Hands in Everything.” The Mob Museum, 6 June 2024). Shen relocates her fictional Irish operation from Hell’s Kitchen to Hunts Point in the South Bronx, but Tiernan’s gambling halls, brothels, and bar headquarters at Fermanagh’s mirror the real Westies’ model of running rackets from neighborhood pubs. Tiernan’s alliance with the Italian Ferrantes echoes the historic Westies-Gambino arrangement.

The Russian Bratva’s American expansion followed two waves of Soviet emigration, with the Odessa Mafia establishing itself in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, between 1975 and 1981, followed by a more hardened “first string” of criminals after the 1991 Soviet collapse (“Russian Organized Crime.” Federation of American Scientists; Schreck, Carl. “Russian Gangs of New York.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 12 Nov. 2014). Nearly 40,000 Soviet Jewish émigrés arrived in Brighton Beach between 1975 and 1980, creating an insular Russian-speaking enclave nicknamed “Little Odessa” that provided cover for criminal elements (“Brighton Beach.” Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative). Real Brighton Beach Bratva operations have historically included gasoline tax fraud, extortion, gambling dens, and racketeering, with the first crime boss Evsei Agron controlling the area until his death in 1985 and Vyacheslav Ivankov dominating it until his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1995 (Schreck).

By assigning each family a distinct ethnic and geographic lineage, Shen positions the novel’s territorial disputes within a recognizable underworld map of New York. The marriage between Lila and Tiernan, Igor Rasputin’s death, and the looming war with the surviving Rasputins all draw their stakes from real patterns of alliance, betrayal, and turf control that shaped these communities for decades before the novel’s fictional events unfold.