This paper investigates the discursive construction of organised crime from a critical perspective, highlighting the semiotic resources employed in the media representation of one of the most powerful Italian crime syndicates today, the Neapolitan Camorra. The analysis draws on acorpus of international video documentaries describing the Camorra’s criminal activities released after 2007, when a series of crucial events started to give this crime syndicate an unprecedented international visibility. The main research hypothesis of this study is that the process of construction of the Camorra as a criminal entity with a global reach is performed via multiple modes of meaning- making in the audiovisual genre of expository documentaries. More specifically, discourse and visual semiotics in the video reportages under scrutiny are believed to play a constitutive role in that they shape the way this ‘lesser-known’ Italian mafia is perceived, understood and categorised beyond Italy’s borders. The investigation focuses on the constructive strategies enacted to establish a certain identity for this crime group, and on the sociosemantic categories used to represent the social actors inhabiting the Camorra universe by looking at how criminals and their victims/public antagonists are linguistically and visually presented to a mass public.