Showing titles in Organised Crime

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

Author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country's most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.

Women of Southie tells the story of six women who grew up in and, in most cases, still live in their beloved town of South Boston, a place most notably recognized as the home of organized crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger. But while Bulger might have been ruling the town with an iron fist, as depicted by Johnny Depp in Black Mass, what the town ought to have been recognized for are the brave women who ruled their own lives and their families with equally strong but far more beneficial hands. The stories of these women, ages 40 to 67, are filled with honest details.

La scomparsa di Emanuela Orlandi e il massacro delle guardie svizzere sono due tra i casi più bui e intricati della recente storia Vaticana. Da una parte una ragazzina di appena 15 anni che sparisce senza motivi e, soprattutto, senza lasciare la minima traccia, nel pieno di un'estate romana come tante altre; dall'altra un doppio omicidio e un suicidio (per lo meno questa è la versione ufficiale dei fatti) che rappresentano il più grave fatto di sangue avvenuto in Vaticano nel secolo scorso.

In the late 1970s, criminal mastermind John Milligan and his associates conspired to import heroin into Far North Queensland via a remote mountaintop airdrop. In a story that is stranger than fiction, it took them three trips through dense jungle to locate the heroin, but they only recovered one of the two packages. When narcotics Agent John Shobbrook took on the investigation of this audacious crime, codenamed 'Operation Jungle', his career was on the rise within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Professor Dick Hobbs is a leading commentator on the culture of crime and criminality. East End born and bred, he is a fascinating dichotomy of the criminal and the intellectual world, allowing him a unique insight into a subject that holds fascination for so many. When he was growing up, the East End was rocking with dock strikes, thievery and the kind of family values practiced by the Krays the Tibbs and a few dozen other outlaw clans. Violence was everywhere. Crime was an unavoidable fact of life.

The Crossing is a groundbreaking, unprecedented look inside the UK's newest and most chilling underworld. Wensley Clarkson's insider account reveals the emergence of numerous organised crime networks more powerful and violent than anything ever seen before in this country. These often foreign gangs run elaborate international systems dealing in drugs, people smuggling, prostitution and money laundering, and they have gained a huge foothold in the UK underworld thanks to The Crossing.

When detective Maggie Oliver first discovered that children as young as 10 were being groomed, abused and trafficked for sex by gangs of men in the Rochdale area, she felt like a lonely voice calling for people to act. Banging on closed doors, it seemed that nobody was able or willing to help her save these vulnerable girls, but she couldn't just sit back while countless lives were being destroyed forever in plain sight. Instead, she launched a one-woman campaign to bring down these sickening gangs.

Inhumanely cruel and irresistibly cool, the Mafia has always captured the darker side of the imagination. But just what is the Mafia, how does it operate, and what can be done to combat it? In this dramatic and informative audiobook, James Finckenauer rejects the Mafia mystique and explores the sinister reality lurking beneath the romanticised surface. He argues that the Mafia destabilises society on a global scale through its control of criminal markets, violence and corruption.

Mafia Spies is the definitive account of America’s most remarkable espionage plots ever - with CIA agents, mob hitmen, “kompromat” sex, presidential indiscretion, and James Bond-like killing devices together in a top-secret mystery full of surprise twists and deadly intrigue. In the early 1960s, two top gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, were hired by the CIA to kill Cuba’s Communist leader, Fidel Castro, only to wind up murdered themselves amidst Congressional hearings and a national debate about the JFK assassination.

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso-Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law.

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. 

October 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Volstead Act, which put the enforcement teeth into Prohibition. But the law didn't stop George Remus from cornering the boozy, illegal liquor marketplace and amassing a fortune that eclipsed $200 million (the equivalent of $4.75 billion today). As eminent documentarian Ken Burns proclaimed, "Remus was to bootlegging what Rockefeller was to oil." Author Bob Batchelor has unearthed a treasure trove of untapped historical archives to cover the life, times, and crimes of the man who ran the largest bootlegging operation in America.

The grandson and great-grandson of Chicago police officers, Chicago Police Detective James Sherlock was CPD through and through. His career had seen its share of twists and turns, from his time working undercover to thwart robberies on Chicago's L trains to his years as a homicide detective. He thought he had seen it all. But on this day, he was at the records center to see the case file for the murder of John Hughes, who was 17 years old when he was gunned down on Chicago's Southwest Side in 1976. The case's threads led everywhere.

Beginning in the 1920s, an all-star team of goons, gunmen, and garrotters transformed America's criminal landscape. Its membership was diverse; the mob recruited men from all ethnicities and religious backgrounds. Most were natives of the Big Apple, handpicked from the city's toughest neighborhoods: Brownsville, Ocean Hill, Flushing. So prolific were their exploits that the media soon dubbed this bevy of hired hands Murder, Incorporated. 

Here is the critically acclaimed inside story, now in an expanded edition, about the rise and fall of Philadelphia's notorious Scarfo organization. Blunt and unsparing, it is a firsthand account of murder, money, and corruption told by wiseguy-turned-witness Nick Caramandi, whose testimony put Nicky Scarfo and many of his associates behind bars for the rest of their lives. In this updated edition of Blood and Honor, author George Anastasia picks up the story where he left off, filling us in on the fates of all the characters - major and minor - in recent years.

In 1951 American terrorism was homegrown. There were no battles fought on American soil, yet there were 12 bombings targeting black Americans, Catholics, and Jews in "Jim Crow" Florida. One of those bombs was, symbolically, heard around the world. Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette, were murdered on Christmas night 1951 by racist terrorists. Ironically, Harry knew he was a target of the KKK but swore he would keep going, working on rights for African Americans.

From a onetime white-supremacist leader now working to disengage people from extremist movements, Breaking Hate is a "riveting" (James Clapper), "groundbreaking" (Malcolm Nance), "horrifying [but] hopeful" (S.E. Cupp) exploration of how to heal a nation reeling from hate and violence. Today's...

In this powerful and “engrossing” memoir, identity theft expert Axton Betz-Hamilton tells the shocking story of how her family was destroyed by the actions of an anonymous criminal (The New York Times). When Axton Betz-Hamilton was 11 years old, her parents both had their identities stolen...

London's most notorious gangsters, in their own words . . . The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. The Kray twins were Britain's most notorious gangsters. Ruling London's underworld for more than a decade, as gang lords they were among the most powerful and feared men in the city. Photographed by...