Mafia

'100 Most Infamous Criminals' is an astounding compendium of crimes and their perpetrators. The book includes some of history’s most notorious criminals and tells in vivid detail the story of the lives they led, the crimes they committed and the destruction and sorrow they left in their wake. '100 Most Infamous Criminals' is a gripping and compelling portrait of the darker side of life, and reveals the strange and grisly stories behind the world’s most shocking...

Sure, the Mafia takes its vow of Omerta - the code of silence - seriously, but that doesn't mean this book can't spill the beans. From what it means to become a made man, to why an unfortunate fellow could find himself saddled with cement shoes, '101 Things You Didn't Know about the Mafia' dishes the dirt! From the modern Mafia's precursors to crime fighting in the twenty-first century and beyond, you'll find plenty of entertaining tidbits in this book, including:...

A Cop��_��s Tale focuses on New York City��_��s most violent and corrupt years, the 1960s to early 1980s. Jim O��_��Neil, a former NYPD cop, delivers a rare look at the brand of law enforcement that ended Frank Lucas��_�� grip on the Harlem drug trade, his cracking open of the Black Liberation Army case, and his experience as the first copy on the scene at the ��_��_��_Dog Day Afternoon��_ѝ bank robbery. A Cop��_��s Tale delivers a rare look into the bare-bones brand of law enforcement that...

Prepare to go back in time to some of New York City's most violent and corrupt years, the 1960s through the early 1980s. O'Neil, a highly decorated detective, is your guide for this descent into the Big Apple's most hellish days. His career spanned the NYPD's transformation from a corrupt, inefficient force floundering in a city full of murder and mayhem to one of the cleanest, most efficient police departments in existence. He describes the thrill of putting Harlem drug lord...

Based on a true story about a genius inventor and his son: One would change the telecommunication world, the other turned to the underworld. Walter L. Shaw had an astonishing 39 patents to his credit including the first burglar alarm that automatically calls the police; and the hands free speaker phone. Amazingly, Shaw never got credit for these inventions nor was he compensated for them until four years after his death. The son of this genius, Walter T. Shaw Jr., a celebrated jewel thief...

Subtitled "The Criminal Activities of the Depression Era Bank Robbers, Mafia, FBI, Politicians, & Cops". Here for the first time is the complete story of the careers and lives of the four successive Public Enemies Number One who were the most dangerous machinegun toting Midwestern bank robbers of the early Depression years - John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Alvin Karpis with the Barker brothers. Besides being complete this presentation is wholly different...

This is a book that explains the world of ‘hot money’ in the international banking arena. It promises to be one of the most important books on international organized crime, money laundering, and the complicity between legitimate and illegitimate businesses in both the United States and the former Soviet Union, among other places, during the last decade of the 20th century. In a series of intrigues that involved crooked Geneva banker Bruce Rappaport and high-level members of the...

This is the story of the Cosa Nostra: From its origins in Sicily in 1863, through the great wave of Italian immigration to America, to prohibition and the formation of the first mafia families and to the harsh realities of fascism and the postwar years in Italy where the Cosa Nostra thrived. The image of the mafioso as a “man of honor” - good to the weak, above the laws of the state but subject to a precise code - was firmly rooted in the collective imagination until the 1980's...

Subtitled "The Bloody Rise and Fall of the Mob's Most Feared Assassin". "Joseph Barboza is the most dangerous individual known." FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 1965 Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could...

Subtitled "From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas - Only in America". In Being Oscar, one of America’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo and “Lefty” Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King,...

Subtitled 'Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down'.  The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn’t tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country’s deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation’s most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted and killed...

Focuses on Italian-Americans who made major contributions to the development of Las Vegas from its earliest days to the present. Investors, builders, developers, musicians, contractors, lounge performers, writers and editors are all here. Balboni interviewed more than 200 people to capture the facts, the flavor, the struggles and the achievements they proudly remember. Includes 20 pgs. of footnotes, references and a bibliography, making it a vital tool for researchers. 168 Pgs.1996 ...

When it comes to gangsters of Chicago, we don't think of names like John "Mushmouth" Johnson, Jeff Fort or Larry Hoover. They were black gangsters, every bit as intriguing and influential as white gangsters. This is the story of many of those underworld characters from the late 19th century policy kings and extending to the present day street thugs, including the Vice Lords and Blackstone Rangers. 320 pgs, hardcover, 2007

In the 1980s, a small group of Israeli nationals set up one of the most lucrative crime syndicates in New York City's history. With rackets ranging from drug dealing to contract killing, the gang's crime spree was so violent that it wasn't long before crime reporters for New York's tabloids dubbed the crew the Israeli Mafia. Headed by a cold-blooded killer named Johnny Attias, the Israeli mafia butted heads with the Italian mafia, killed Russian gangsters and pulled off the...

Throughout the late 1980s and 90s, a gang of young Asian refugees cut a bloody swath through New York's Chinatown. They were the lost children of the Vietnam War, severed from their families by violence and cast adrift in a strange land. Banding together under the leadership of a young psychopath, David Thai, they took their name from a slogan they had seen on helicopters and the helmets of U.S. soldiers: "Born to Kill." For a decade their empire was unassailable, built on fear and...

In the 1980s, the broad legal mandate of the RICO act succeeded in crushing much of the backbone of the traditional American Mafia. Across the ocean however, in the ancestral Sicilian homeland of La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia was anything but finished. Possessed of a power thought to rival that of the Italian state itself, for the past decades, the Sicilian Mafia has waged a war on the forces of law and order that has not only left thousands dead, but has created a ripple effect of crime and...

Gurty and heart-wrenching, "Breaking My Silence" narrates the bold truth about author Jane McCormick and her abusive childhood, rape, prostitution, and inside stories as a Las Vegas high-class call girl during the 1960's. In this memoir, not only does she reveal her 1960's sexcapades with Frank, Dean, Peter, Vic, Sam, Arnold, Jerry, Bill, and other celebrities, she also details her molestation by an abusive stepfather and the too-young marriage that led to her addiction to the big money of...

Subtitled "The War Against The American Mafia". The riveting, often bloody account of how the fifty-year attack by the federal government virtually extinguished the nation's most powerful crime syndicate. In the critically acclaimed American Mafia, Thomas Reppetto narrated the ferocious ascendancy of organized crime in America. In this fascinating sequel, he follows the mob from its peak into a shadowy period of decline as the government, no longer able to deny its existence, made subduing the...

Like the gunslinger, the gangster is a classic American characterand the gangster movie, like the Western, is one of the American cinema's enduring film genres. From Scarface to White Heat, from The Godfather to The Usual Suspects, gangland on the screen remains as popular as ever. Film scholar John McCarty traces the history of mob flicks and reveals why the films are so beloved by Americans. Packed with fascinating behind-the-scenes anecdotes, info about real-life hoods and their cinematic...

Bootleggers, gambling ringleaders, arsonists, narcotics dealers, and gang members - a variety of characters flourished in the era known as Prohibition, and Tampa, Florida was where they battled for supremacy of the criminal underworld. With meticulous detail, Deitche documents the rise of the infamous Trafficante family, ruthless competitors in a "violent, shifting place, where loyalties and power quickly changed". Ybor City, the region of Tampa know as Little Havana, was a...

Lane chronicles the secret inner sanctums at the center of the action in gentlemen's clubs across  America. 'Confessions of a Stripper' puts you in the middle of the VIP room where freaks, fetishists, scammers, and even normal guys match wits with the dancers. Here, outlandish fantasies are bought and sold, and almost nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. 237 Pages Paperbound 2004

If you have an interest or need for information about the cops, crooks and criminologists who shaped crime and law enforcement throughout history, this is the book for you. From bank robbers and godfathers to ballistics experts and courtroom crusaders, the authors present the bold and cunning, the righteous and resourceful, all in one volume. Biographies (and some photos) of 600 people covering a period from 2100 B.C. to the present Hammurabi, who came up with the 'eye for an eye'...

Crime Files' gives you the inside track on the latest developments in murder with its retelling of some chilling crimes accompanied by full color illustrations. Features Anders Breivik (the Norwegian spree killer), Robert Pickton, Phillip Garrido, Serhiy Tkach, John Thomas, Jerry Brudos, Josef Fritzl, Katherine Knight, Ed Kemper and many others. Author John Marlowe specializes in detailed case-by-case examinations from the world of extreme human behaviour. Indexed128 Pages Paperbound 2012

From burglary to armed robbery and murder, infamous bad guy Frank Cullotta not only did it all, he admits to it in graphic detail in this book. This no-holds-barred biography chronicles the life of a career criminal who started out as a thug on the streets of Chicago and became a trusted lieutenant in Tony Spilotro's gang of organized lawbreakers in Las Vegas. Cullotta's was a world of high profile heists, street muscle, and information about many of the FBI's most wanted, info...

Subtitled "The FBI's Secret Thirty Year Relationship with a Mafia Killer". In 'Deal with the Devil', Lance draws on three decades of once secret FBI files and exclusive new interviews to tell the definitive story of Gregory Scarpa Sr., aka "The Grim Reaper" a Mafia capo, who "stopped counting" after 50 murders, while secretly betraying the Colombo crime family as a Top Echelon Criminal Informant for the Bureau. Lance draws on thousands of pages of...

Subtitled "A Historical and Theoretical Study". What is organized crime? This question has generated many responses over the decades from scholars, governments, the media, pop culture and organized criminals themselves. Layered one on top of the other, these answers cumulatively created a "Mafia Mystique" that dominated discourse until after the end of the Cold War, when transnational organized crime emerged as a pronounced, if nebulous, threat to global security and...

When one of the wise guys who ran the Horizon Club handed musician Frankie Severino a package containing a great deal of money to deliver to the boss, Big Julie Passano, he knew his life just took a left turn. In a matter of minutes, Frankie graduated from local cover band leader in Pittsburgh to 'drummer for the mob.' He was the leader of the Nite Lites, four Italian-Americans who became the go-to group for organized crime. The bond he forged with them could not be broken and was...

This reference and resource is packed with 80 pages of footnotes, chronology and notes including hundreds of resources. This bio shows more of Nitti than the TV series 'The Untouchables' ever did. Nitti began as a part-time barber and jewelry fence. Humble tells how Nitti rose to the top and gained power in great detail, along with what was happening in Chicago in the 1920s and beyond. A gold mine of information on the history of illegal gambling operations (900 of them were in Chicago by...

Gangster City is arguably the most comprehensive book written to date on New York City's underworld from 1900-1920. Chronicles virtually every widely known (and lesser known) Mafioso, bootlegger, racketeer and thug who terrorized the city in the early 20th century. The murders of 600-plus gangsters are profiled in detail. Beginning with the reign of Monk Eastman, this veritable encyclopedia of the New York underworld explores the origins of Mafia initiation rites and uncovers the most...

Gangsters of the past never looked far enough into the future to do much planning. They stole sufficient money to get by for a short while and then robbed again. Sometimes they wanted to settle down, but most knew their crimes were going to lead to jail or death and their women knew it too. Life on the run was no picnic, but gangsters' molls chose it over a settled life in suburbia. This book is a history of gangsters' molls and mob queens, and it explains who these women were, where they came...

Chepesiuk chronicles the little-known history of organized crime in Harlem. African-American organized crime has had as significant an impact on its constituent community as Italian, Jewish and Irish organized crime has had on theirs. In the late 1800s, Harlem was a highly fashionable neighborhood. A real-estate collapse shortly after the turn of the century emptied its neighborhoods of white residents, and by the 1930s, two-thirds of New York City's African-Americans were living in...

A virtual rogues' gallery of criminals. This book covers organized crime, including those who had a hand in legal and illegal gambling. Four to five pages on: Al Capone, Frankie Carbo, Mickey Cohen, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Owney Madden, Arnold Rothstein, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel and Joe Valachi. Also includes villains of the Old West: Billy the Kid, Black Bart, Butch Cassidy, Bob Dalton, Bill Doolin, John Wesley Hardin, Tom...

Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso was the boss of New York’s Lucchese Mafia family. He worked himself to the top as a cold-blooded killer, responsible for more than 50 murders. He was also, for a while, the next-door neighbor of the author. Carlo’s sister babysat for Casso; his mother was best friends with Casso’s wife. That long and trusting relationship garnered Carlo, journalist and best-selling author (The Ice Man, 2006), unprecedented access to one of the most ruthless...

Subtitled "Myths and Realities of Organized Crime". Considered a classic, this book (now in its eighth printing) veers away from the once-accepted but erroneous theory that organized crime was the specific province of Italians, and looks further to the role of businessman, politicians and professional groups. Six sections include The History of Organized Crime, Social and Psychological Characteristics of Organized Crime, Organized Crime as an Economic and Political System and Policy...

Subtitled " How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost it to the Revolution". To underworld kingpins Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Cuba was the greatest hope for the future of American organized crime in the post-Prohibition years. In the 1950s, the Mob - with the corrupt, repressive government of brutal Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in its pocket - owned Havana's biggest luxury hotels and casinos, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the...

Subtitled 'Negotiating Life and Death For the Las Vegas Police Department'. “As he was rising, I saw Brian raise the loaded Glock .40 pistol towards the approaching SWAT officers. I wanted to scream for him to stop; I knew he was about to fulfill his ultimate goal.” What do you say to prevent someone from committing ‘suicide-by-cop’? Or has a gun pointed at a hostage? Or an armed man who has barricaded himself in a hotel room? Or a despondent woman who is threatening to kill herself? Veteran...