Here’s the Insane True Story Behind Mark Wahlberg’s New Crime Movie ‘By Any Means’

One of the most morally tangled partnerships in American law enforcement history is finally making its way to the big screen.

Paramount Pictures’ upcoming crime thriller ‘By Any Means‘ arrives at a time when audiences have shown an enormous appetite for stories set at the intersection of racial injustice and institutional corruption, and this film appears to have both in abundance. Directed by Elegance Bratton and starring Mark Wahlberg alongside Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the film has been generating serious awards season chatter well ahead of its theatrical release.

The film follows a young Black FBI agent dispatched into 1960s Mississippi to investigate a wave of brutal killings targeting civil rights leaders. He is forced to work alongside notorious mafia hitman Greg Scarpa, and the two men find themselves pulled into a deadly hunt where justice and vengeance begin to blur. The premise sounds cinematic to the point of fiction, but the remarkable truth is that this story actually happened.

So yes, ‘By Any Means’ is very much rooted in real events. Gregory Scarpa was a real mob hitman who worked for the FBI in the 1960s, and in 1966, when the film takes place, he aided the FBI in the murder investigation of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights activist killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

Dahmer was not a peripheral figure. He was a farmer, grocery store owner, and two-time president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP, who alongside Medgar Evers had founded a youth NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg. For years he was the chief advocate for voting rights in a county where Black voter registration was shamefully suppressed.

The Real Gregory Scarpa and His Violent Role

Scarpa carried the nickname “The Grim Reaper” because of how many people he killed for the Colombo crime family. He had managed to dodge a bank robbery charge by becoming an FBI informant. His methods in Mississippi were far from conventional. In January 1966, Scarpa and an FBI agent entered a store in Laurel, Mississippi, where they found the owner Lawrence Byrd, a suspect in Dahmer’s killing.

After luring Byrd outside under the pretense of loading a television set, they shoved him into a car and hauled him to a remote area, where the mobster pistol-whipped him. After that beating, Byrd gave the FBI a 22-page confession which identified key Klansmen involved in the attack. It was brutal, extralegal, and it worked.

The script was written by Sascha Penn, who previously worked on ‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’, and the film aims to balance crime thriller elements with historical events, especially focusing on the violence surrounding civil rights activism in the 1960s. Penn’s background in prestige street-level drama makes him a logical choice for material that refuses easy moral categories.

What the Film Changes and What It Keeps

While the historical spine is real, the film does introduce fictional elements. Although the crime-focused, Wahlberg-led action movie will have a number of fictitious elements, it promises a story that remains true to the time period while also highlighting the real-life murder of an important civil rights leader. Abdul-Mateen II plays a character named Wayne Strider, an FBI agent who appears to be a composite creation rather than a direct historical figure, allowing the screenplay room to explore institutional racism from an insider perspective.

The cast also includes Giancarlo Esposito as civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, whose voter registration work made him a target of the KKK. Dahmer died in 1966 after Klansmen firebombed his home, and director Bratton told Entertainment Weekly that Dahmer’s daughter, Bettie Dahmer, was present when the production filmed that sequence. That kind of family involvement speaks to the weight the filmmakers placed on honoring the real human cost behind the story.

Bratton’s Vision and the Bigger Stakes

Bratton described the film as being about “justice moving through corrupted systems,” while also calling it “muscular, entertaining, and haunted.” That framing captures exactly why the true story is so compelling and so troubling. The only way the FBI could crack a racially motivated murder in the Deep South was by deploying a violent mobster, because the official system was too compromised to act on its own.

The film is based on the 2018 Black List script CI-34, from Sascha Penn and Theodore Witcher, and is scheduled to be released in the United States by Paramount Pictures on September 4, 2026. With its combination of prestige filmmaking and potent subject matter, ‘By Any Means’ looks poised to be one of the most talked-about releases of the year.

Let us know in the comments whether you think Hollywood can do justice to a story this complicated and morally charged.