He’s been indicted on RICO charges, but how does the former President stack up against actual dons?

Murray Kempton, the greatest newspaper columnist New York has ever known, was both a moralist and an ironist, particularly as he chronicled the lives, the crimes, and the decline of the Cosa Nostra in the pages of Newsday and the Post. Dressed in a black suit and listening to Verdi on his headphones, Kempton would bicycle to arraignments at Foley Square and interviews at the Ravenite Social Club, on Mulberry Street. He had no illusions about the mafiosi. But, in describing their ordinariness, their codes of behavior and self-delusions, their modest houses in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, he seemed to say that the Five Families were merely a more lurid reflection of the rest of us.

“You know, most of these guys, when you meet them, are just as bad as respectable people,” he once told me. As John Gotti, the “Dapper Don” of the Gambinos, headed off to federal prison—doomed, in part, by his prideful indiscretions and by the bugs planted amid the espresso cups at the Ravenite—Kempton saw him as the end of something. “Do you remember that moment in Henry Adams’s ‘Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres’ when Adams speaks of the Virgin and Child looking down on a dead faith? Well, John Gotti believed in all of it. He believed in a dead faith.”

I once asked Kempton if he ever really liked any of the mobsters of his acquaintance. He told me that he had “tremendous admiration for Carmine Persico,” the longtime boss of the Colombo crime family. He was a killer, of course, but the wiretaps brought out an appealing side to his character. Kempton recalled an episode in which Persico, Carmine Galante, and others were playing cards, and Galante, a widely loathed capo of the Bonanno crime family, kept insulting a player of Irish extraction. “Galante just kept it up with all manner of obscene anti-Irish comments,” Kempton said. “Finally, Persico said, ‘Get out of the game!’ and Galante did, slinking off for home. The next day, Galante came back to the card game, begging, ‘Please! I’m sorry! I’ll never do it again!’ It was wonderful. Persico said about Galante, ‘He’s not such a bad guy. He was just brung up wrong.’ ”

Yet even Kempton, who died in 1997, might have struggled to find a shred of virtue in another fallen Don—Donald J. Trump—who is finally confronting a judicial system that he cannot bully into submission. This week, the forty-fifth President, who built his early fortune on casinos and construction, and Rudolph Giuliani, the former “hero mayor” of New York, whose early legal reputation came from locking up mobsters and bankers on racketeering statutes, will turn themselves in with a gaggle of co-conspirators on forty-one felony charges in Fulton County, Georgia. Fani Willis, the county’s district attorney, is employing a state version of rico, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, to make her case. Easy ironies are blooming like dandelions.

All good things must come to an end, but an audible groan was heard across Indian Country when “Reservation Dogs” creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi announced that Season 3, which starts Aug. 2 on Hulu, would be the last.

The show has been showered with awards — the 2022 American Film Institute Awards, a Peabody, a Gotham Award and two Independent Spirit Awards, despite the veritable snub from the Emmy Awards this year.

The last season had already been written and shot when the Screen Writers Guild went on strike in the spring, so the third and final season has faced no delays from the combined writers and actors strikes.

Harjo, Seminole and Muscogee Creek of Oklahoma, took to Instagram with a statement about the show’s final season, promising more things to come.

“When we came up with the idea for ‘Reservation Dogs,’ I didn’t think the show would ever get made, but thankfully it did,” Harjo said on Instagram. “The first and most basic idea for us as Native people, was to show the world that Native humor and Natives are funny. Almost all television and film depictions about Native people are mostly inaccurate. And most of them have been untruthful.

“It has been a gift to us to show the world a different perspective of Indigenous people and our culture,” he continued. “Most important of all, it has been a dream to collaborate and make a show that is entirely written by, directed by, and stars Native people. These are our stories, and they represent our people. We know it’s an enormous responsibility and we never took that lightly.”