David Harbour to play trash-hauling, hockey-scamming mobster in The Trashers

David Harbour has yet to find a genre project after his breakout on Stranger Things that really works, with his Hellboy movie being totally forgettable and his role in Black Widow being… also a little forgettable, but in a more pleasant way (that movie’s problems do not lay at his feet, we’ll say that). So how about a more straightforward drama about a guy who is bad but also kind of nice, a.k.a. a very Harbour-friendly gig?

That’s precisely what he’s doing, with Deadline saying that Harbour is going to star in Cha Cha Real Smooth director Cooper Raiff’s movie The Trashers, based on the true story of mob associate Jimmy Galante. In the early 2000s, Galante—who was a wealthy trash-collecting mogul at the time in New York and Connecticut—bought a local minor-league hockey team (the eponymous Trashers) and turned the organization into a success… until everyone found out that his trash companies were running scams, his hockey team was an elaborate scam, and that he worked with the notorious Genovese crime family to protect his various illicit operations.

But Raiff says that the real Jimmy Galante is “truly tough” and also “impossibly warm,” making Harbour the “perfect” choice to play him. He also says in his statement that Harbour is “the best person,” adding, “I hope he reads this and knows I want to be friends with him forever.” Aww!

Raiff is directing from a script written by Billions’ Adam R. Perlman, and the real Galante is on board as an executive producer. He plead guilty to various fraud charges in 2008 and had to surrender his trash-collection companies to the government. The hockey team had already been disbanded. (It’s too late now, but all of this is surely a spoiler for the movie.)