TV tip
“Tatort” in Vienna: fight against criminal clans
Moritz Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) and Bibi Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) investigate in the clan milieu. photo
© Felix Vratny/ORF/ARD Degeto/dpa/dpa
A murder in the clan milieu: this time, a young police informant is at the center of the new Viennese case. Is it legitimate to risk your life in the fight against organized crime?
“For once, it got the right guy,” says investigator Bibi Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) about the dead man who started the new Viennese crime scene “Tatort”. The brother of a Georgian mafia godfather is lying next to his luxury car in front of a club in a colorless industrial park.
The classic crime thriller question of who shot him is pushed into the background for long stretches this time. Instead, screenwriter Sarah Wassermair and director Dominik Hartl will be presenting a police thriller with the episode “Azra” on Whit Monday at 8:15 p.m.
Azra is the name of the young informant who was smuggled into the Georgian clan some time ago. As a police informant from a difficult background, the Viennese actress Mariam Hage shows an impressive range of acting – from Viennese humor to rock-hard coolness to pure despair.
A high-risk plan
Previously, Azra’s job was to gather information for police economic investigators tracking the clan. Now Fellner and her longtime colleague Moritz Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) also put her on the murder case – a high-risk plan, as it soon turns out. Because if Azra is caught, “we’re not looking for a missing person, we’re looking for a shallow grave in the woods,” as police colonel Ernst Rauter (Hubert Kramar) puts it.
With Azra, who is willing to take risks, the investigators not only fall into dangerous situations, they also find themselves in a moral dilemma: what does the safety of an informant weigh against the chance of dealing a blow to organized crime?
The story has a real source of inspiration: in 2010, in the pan-European police operation “Java”, dozens of suspects linked to Georgian organized crime were arrested. The main focus of the investigations were property crimes on a large scale. At the time, the Austrian police assumed that 30 percent of all burglaries in Vienna since 2009 were attributable to the organization.
Gloomy Light
In “Azra” the story is spun further: The investigators suspect the clan boss Beka Datviani (Lasha Bakradze) and his people to be dealing with money laundering and other economic crimes and to establish contacts in high economic and political circles for this purpose. Cameraman Ioan Gavriel usually immerses Vienna in a gloomy light, appropriate to the atmosphere, even when the sun is shining outside.
In the light of the recent past in Austria, the contacts invented by the screenwriter between the mafia and politics do not appear to be completely absurd, but simply imaginative exaggeration. Namely, if you consider the questionable entanglements between business and politics, which the country’s real corruption investigators have been investigating in the course of the Ibiza affair for four years. But that’s a whole different crime story.