Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Organised Crime

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.

This is the life and times of an underworld legend. Packed with shocking details and firsthand insights, Carlo Gambino: Boss of Bosses is the definitive account of this real-life Godfather, written by someone who grew up in that world and met Gambino personally.

Pittsburgh's small but lucrative Cosa Nostra mafia family was on the rise in 1985 with a newly crowned Don . . . The men who came to dominate the rackets in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and West Virginia opened the family to massive profits from drug trafficking and a street tax on other criminal activities. At the same time, the Youngstown, Ohio, faction of the family launched a brutal mob war against the weakening Cleveland mafia and the Altoona, Pennsylvania, crew violently clamped down on their city.

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 daring bank robberies to cold-blooded betrayals, Gangs of St. Louis chronicles a fierce yet juicy slice of the Gateway City's history that rivaled anything seen in New York or Chicago.

With a round, open face and a penchant for tall tales, Matteo de Lorenzo resembled everyone's kindly uncle. But Uncle Marty, as he was known throughout the Genovese crime family, was one of the New York mob's top earners throughout the 1960s and '70s, the mastermind of a billion-dollar trade in stolen and counterfeit securities.

Bizarro is a must-listen tale of the unprecedented prosecution of Burton Ritchie and Ben Galecki, the Florida-based founders of a sprawling "spice" (synthetic cannabinoid) operation. With this book, journalist and former New York City narcotics prosecutor Jordan S. Rubin exposes a Reagan-era law called the Analogue Act, which targets dealers selling drugs that are "substantially similar" to controlled substances—an unwieldy law that produces erratic results in court.

In 1988, Judge Joe O'Kicki was regarded by his peers as one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States. He was newly remarried, sworn in as the president judge of a Pennsylvania county and on the fast track to a federal bench . . . Silently, however, a state police vice unit was in the midst of covert operation into O'Kicki's personal affairs. The judge would be accused of soliciting bribes, frequenting brothels, and running the county as if he were a "battleship commander." Later he'd concoct a plan to flee the country and exact revenge on his enemies.

The story of Luigi Ronsisvalle is an intimate look at the life of a professional killer. It is, in some ways, the story of all workingmen and women with ambition who never achieve their ultimate goal. But what makes Luigi unique is that, for him to achieve his goal, people had to die. His ambition, from when he was twelve years old, was to be a made man in the Mafia. He once told a presidential commission, "American child falls in love with baseball, I fall in love with Mafia."

Muckraking journalist Walter Liggett dubbed Pittsburgh the "Metropolis of Corruption" in 1930 when he reported the city had more vice per square foot than New York, Detroit, Cleveland, or Boston. Decades earlier, the Magee-Flinn political machine ruled public officials, and crooked police helped racketeers protect brothels and gambling dens. Mayor (later Governor) David Lawrence was indicted several times for graft but acquitted each time. Even Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney Sr. colluded with gangsters. Join Richard Gazarik as he reveals the wicked history of the Steel City.

George Anastasia exposes what it really means to be married to the mob—and fathered by it. As revealed in their personal accounts, life for the wife and sons of Thomas "Tommy Del" DelGiorno became a descent into hell. In the end, guilty of a raft of crimes that included multiple murders, Tommy Del served less than a year in prison in exchange for turning government witness during a dozen trials against fellow mobsters. Based on years of reporting, thousands of pages of court testimony, and extensive interviews, Mobfather takes the listener deep into the heart of corruption.

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.

Chicago Heights was long the seat of one of the major street crews of the Chicago Outfit, but its importance has often been overlooked and misunderstood. The crew's origins predate Prohibition, when Chicago Heights was a developing manufacturing center with a large Italian immigrant population. Its earliest bosses struggled for control until a violent gang war left the crew solidified under the auspices of Al Capone. For the first time, the history of the Chicago Heights street crew is traced from its inception through its last known boss.

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.

Nicknamed "The Squirrel" for his elusiveness, Thrasher was a daredevil pilot who made millions flying marijuana and cocaine from South America into the US in the '70s and '80s. With his beautiful Portuguese-born wife, Olga, he lived in a mountain estate near Virginia's New River Valley. He owned oceanfront homes and yachts in Florida, spent weekends in the Caribbean, and laundered money in Las Vegas, where he partied with Frank Sinatra's entourage.

Prohibition. Mobsters, murder, and mayhem. FBI agents. Cops, robbers, and worse. Sound like the background for a Hollywood epic? It's Ernest Marquez's latest very true story of the renowned gambling ships that anchored in Santa Monica Bay in the 1920s and 1930s. It's the story of Tony Cornero, the cockiest gangster who ever bootlegged a bottle of scotch, the man who helped found Las Vegas, and the smooth operator of the most glamorous gambling ship in the Pacific, the Rex.

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.

In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-20th-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.

In this Very Short Introduction, Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou uncover the reality of organized crime in our world today. Shining a light on the people involved in organized crime, Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou question whether the term "organized" is used to evoke the image, the operations, and power of a legitimate organization, such as a corporation. Discussing whether there are particular crimes that the label "organized crime" applies to, or if any crime can be organized, they also consider what happens when organized crime extends beyond borders.

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.