Showing results for "A - M" in Organised Crime

One of the biggest scores in Mafia history, the Lufthansa Airlines heist of 1978 has become the stuff of Mafia legend - and a decades-long investigation that continues to this day. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony DeStefano sheds new light on this legendary unsolved case using recent evidence from the 2015 trial of 80-year-old Mafia don Vincent Asaro, who for the first time speaks out on his role in the fateful Lufthansa heist.

The Detroit True Crime Chronicles sets forth the rich history of criminal activity in the Motor City. Using information from declassified federal documents and many firsthand accounts, the book focuses on the city's local Mafia, key mobsters, drug kingpins, serial killers, and unsolved crimes.

Using newly released FBI files, eyewitness accounts, and family mementos, Top Hoodlum takes you inside the Mafia that Frank Costello helped build from the ground up, from small-time bootlegging and gambling to a nationwide racketeering empire. Sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing, and always riveting, these are the stories that have inspired American crime classics like The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos. This is the man who made the Mafia such a powerful force in our nation's history. This is Top Hoodlum.

From the Bowery Boys and the Five Points Gang through the rise of the Jewish "Kosher Nostra" and the ascendance of the Italian Mafia, mobsters have played a major role in the city's history, lurking just around the corner or inside that nondescript building. Bill "the Butcher" Poole, Paul Kelly, Monk Eastman, "Lucky" Luciano, Carlo Gambino, Meyer Lansky, Mickey Spillane, John Gotti - each held sway over New York neighborhoods that nurtured them and gave them power.

Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life.

For more than 20 years, Joseph "Big Joey" Massino ran what was called the largest criminal network in the US, employing over 250 made men and untold numbers of associates. The Bonanno family was responsible for over 30 murders, even killing a dozen of its own members. He would be brought down by Salvatore "Good Looking Sal" Vitale, the underboss who was not only Massino's closest and most trusted friend but also his brother-in-law. King of the Godfathers is the story of the brutal mob war that made Massino head of the Bonanno family and the most powerful gangster in America.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano presents the rise and fall of Vito Genovese in this first comprehensive biography of the legendary mafioso - from his childhood in Naples, Italy, and the beginnings of his bullet-ridden criminal career on lower Manhattan's mean streets, through his self-exile in the mid-1930s back to his homeland where he ran a black market operation under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, and his return to New York where Genovese made a fortune as the head of an illegal narcotics empire.

In the late 1970s, a string of seemingly unconnected murders had Harlem police and federal authorities at their wits' end until they realized several commonalities. The victims were all either Mafia members or potential witnesses of Mafia activity and they'd all been shot from .22 pistols traced back to a single private sale in Florida. From these details, the FBI and police were able to build a profile of a rogue sect of Mafia hitmen known as the East Harlem Purple Gang.

Gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging have been going on in Steubenville for well over a century. In its heyday, the city's Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The White slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurrence. This revealing history chronicles the rise of Steubenville's prodigious underworld from the 1890s to the modern day.

Social scientist and crime writer James A. Buccellato explores Detroit's struggle with gang violence, public corruption, and the politics of vice during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century.