8 Movie Villains Who Were Way Worse In Real Life

6. Steve Flemmi - Black Mass

There's always a danger with movies about the mafia that film-makers will end up seemingly glorifying criminal activity and turning monsters into sympathetic figures and even heroes. To a lesser extent, those films could change the characters of real people in order to dial up the dramatic tension, whether to make everything tick along a little nicer or to make them seem like more complex creatures.

And occasionally, film-makers can choose to make their characters seem more human so that the real people behind them don't come off as wholly unbelievable cartoon characters. That was the case for Black Mass, and in particular the portrayal of enforcer Steve Flemmi, who was White Bulger's partner in the Winter Hill Gang as well as a top level FBI informant.

The film's portrayal of Flemmi paints him as a conflicted figure, which makes sense given the fact that he was an informant, but the reality was that he was a seriously bad dude and something of an FBI liability. Sure, he supplied lots of info on mafai activity, but his own crime became a nightmare for the service. And pretty much everyone with knowledge of him seems to suggest that a cartoonish evil portrayal would have been more true to life.