Download or read book Prohibition Gangsters written by Marc Mappen and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master story teller Marc Mappen applies a generational perspective to the gangsters of the Prohibition era—men born in the quarter century span from 1880 to 1905—who came to power with the Eighteenth Amendment. On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in the United States, “outlawing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” A group of young criminals from immigrant backgrounds in cities around the nation stepped forward to disobey the law of the land in order to provide alcohol to thirsty Americans. Today the names of these young men—Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Nucky Johnson—are more familiar than ever, thanks in part to such cable programs as Boardwalk Empire. Here, Mappen strips way the many myths and legends from television and movies to describe the lives these gangsters lived and the battles they fought. Placing their criminal activities within the context of the issues facing the nation, from the Great Depression, government crackdowns, and politics to sexual morality, immigration, and ethnicity, he also recounts what befell this villainous group as the decades unwound. Making use of FBI and other government files, trial transcripts, and the latest scholarship, the book provides a lively narrative of shootouts, car chases, courtroom clashes, wire tapping, and rub-outs in the roaring 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and beyond. Mappen asserts that Prohibition changed organized crime in America. Although their activities were mercenary and violent, and they often sought to kill one another, the Prohibition generation built partnerships, assigned territories, and negotiated treaties, however short lived. They were able to transform the loosely associated gangs of the pre-Prohibition era into sophisticated, complex syndicates. In doing so, they inspired an enduring icon—the gangster—in American popular culture and demonstrated the nation’s ideals of innovation and initiative. View a three minute video of Marc Mappen speaking about Prohibition Gangsters.

Download or read book Mobbed Up written by James Neff and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spellbinding saga of Teamster boss Jackie Presser’s rise and fall In his rise from car thief to president of America’s largest labor union, Jackie Presser used every ounce of his street smarts and rough-edged charisma to get ahead. He also had a lot of help along the way—not just from his father, Bill Presser, a Teamster power broker and thrice-convicted labor racketeer, but also from the Mob and the FBI. At the same time that he was taking orders from the Cleveland Mafia and New York crime boss Fat Tony Salerno, Presser was serving as the FBI’s top informant on organized crime. Meticulously researched and dramatically told, Mobbed Up is the story of Presser’s precarious balancing act with the Teamsters, the Mafia, and the Justice Department. Drawing on thousands of pages of classified files, James Neff follows the trail of greed, corruption, and hubris all the way to the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, where Bill and Jackie Presser were treated as valued friends. Winner of an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award for best reporting on organized crime, it is a tale too astonishing to be made up—and too troubling to be ignored.

Download or read book Superthief written by Rick Porrello and published by Next Hat Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superthief is a captivating first-hand look at the life of Phil Christopher, a career criminal, Mafia associate, and one of the most successful bank burglars in the United States. In a raw and candid accounting, Rick Porrello takes his readers inside Phil's brutal street world and prison life and exposes the details behind the planning and execution of the daring and record-setting 1972 United California Bank burglary in Orange County, California.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America written by Albert Fried and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Fried recalls the rise and fail of an underworld culture that bred some of America's most infamous racketeers, bootleggers, gamblers, and professional killers, spawned by a culture of vice and criminality on New York's Lower East Side and similar environments in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Detroit, Newark, and Philadelphia. The author adds an important dimension to this story as he discusses the Italian gangs that teamed up with their Jewish counterparts to form multicultural syndicates. The careers of such high-profile figures as Meyer Lansky, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, and "Dutch" Schultz demonstrate how these gangsters passed from early manhood to old age, marketed illicit goods and services after the repeal of Prohibition, improved their system of mutual cooperation and self-governance, and grew to resemble modern business entrepreneurs. A new afterword brings to a close the careers of the Jewish gangsters and discusses how their image is addressed in selected books since the 1980s. Fried also examines the impact of films such as The Godfather series, Once Upon a Time in America, and Bugsy.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia written by Rick Porrello and published by Rick Porrello. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mafia boss turned federal witness Angelo Lonardo, the Sugar War, and the story of the rise and fall of the Cleveland Mafia.--Publisher.

Download or read book Bombs Bullets and Bribes written by Rick Porrello and published by . This book was released on 2020-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of Shondor Birns, an aging Jewish mobster struggling to maintain control and his reputation in a black-dominated gambling empire. His relentless challenges include a rogue protégé and a high-stakes, high-finance mystery stretching from the US to Israel, and Canada to Cuba.

Download or read book Eliot Ness written by Douglas Perry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led the Untouchables, took on Al Capone, and saved a city’s soul As leader of an unprecedented crime-busting squad, twenty-eight-year-old Eliot Ness won fame for taking on notorious mobster Al Capone. But the Untouchables’ daring raids were only the beginning of Ness’s unlikely story. This new biography grapples with the charismatic lawman’s complicated, largely forgotten legacy. Perry chronicles Ness’s days in Chicago as well as his spectacular second act in Cleveland, where he achieved his greatest success: purging the profoundly corrupt city and forging new practices that changed police work across the country. He also faced one of his greatest challenges: a mysterious serial killer known as the Torso Murderer. Capturing the first complete portrait of the real Eliot Ness, Perry brings to life an unorthodox man who believed in the integrity of law and the power of American justice.

Download or read book Chin written by Larry McShane and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This true crime biography chronicles the life of the so-called “Oddfather” who ran a powerful NYC crime family while playing crazy to avoid prosecution. Vincent “Chin” Gigante was a professional boxer before discovering his true calling as a ruthless contract killer. When Vito Genovese went to prison, he picked Gigante to run the Genovese crime family in his absence. While raking in more than one hundred million for the family, he routinely ordered the murders of mobsters who violated the Mafia code—including John Gotti. At the height of Gigante's reign, the Genovese Family was the most powerful in the United States. And yet he was, to all outside appearances, certifiably crazy. He wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in a ratty bathrobe and slippers. He urinated in public, played pinochle in storefronts, and hid a second family from his wife. On twenty-two occasions, Gigante admitted himself to a mental hospital—evading criminal prosecution while maintaining his nefarious operations. It took nearly thirty years of endless psychiatric evaluations by a parade of puzzled doctors for federal authorities to finally bring him down.

Download or read book Shocking Stories of the Cleveland Mob written by Ted Schwarz and published by True Crime. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of the mob's involvement in Cleveland, Ohio.

Download or read book American Mafia written by Thomas Reppetto and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reppetto's book earns its place among the best . . . he brings fresh context to a familiar story worth retelling." —The New York Times Book Review Organized crime—the Italian American kind—has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia's rise—from the 1880s to the post-WWII era—that is as exciting and readable as it is authoritative. Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally grown Mafia. It wasn't until the 1920s, thanks to Prohibition, that the Mafia assumed what we now consider its defining characteristics, especially its octopuslike tendency to infiltrate industry and government. At mid-century the Kefauver Commission declared the Mafia synonymous with Union Siciliana; in the 1960s the FBI finally admitted the Mafia's existence under the name La Cosa Nostra. American Mafia is a fascinating look at America's most compelling criminal subculture from an author who is intimately acquainted with both sides of the street.

Download or read book Born to Kill written by T. J. English and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting” true story of the Vietnamese gang that terrorized Manhattan’s Chinatown, from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Westies (Newsday). They are children of the Vietnam War. Born and raised in the wasteland left by American bombs and napalm, these young men know a particular brand of cruelty—which they are about to export to the United States. When the Vietnamese gangs come to Chinatown, they adopt a name remembered from GI’s helmets: “Born to Kill.” And kill they do, in a frenzy of violence that shocks even the old-school Chinese gangsters who once ran Canal Street. Killing brings them turf, money, and power, but also draws the government’s eye. Even as Born to Kill reaches its height, it is marked for destruction. This story is told from the perspective of Tinh Ngo, a young gang member who eventually grows disenchanted with murder and death. When he decides to inform on his brothers to the police, he enters a shadow world far more dangerous than any gangland.

Download or read book Portrait of John Scalish written by Frank Monastra and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The portrait of John Scalish will show a never-before view of his personal life inside and outside his criminal empire. Which led to the premise of why "John Scalish, became the mafia boss no one knew." In the begging, John was viewed to be a man of peace, who was apprehensive about becoming the crime boss of the third-largest Mafia controlled city in America. You will learn never released information about John's two brothers Tom and Sam. Their life and how they worked with John. You will now discover undocumented information about a conflicted man. John often struggled between his professional and private life with his wife and children, in contrast to his accomplished life of a well-respect crime boss. I will disclose never reported information about his health concerns, which John kept a secret to most if not all the friends and, of course, his enemies along with the everyday citizens in Cleveland, Ohio. Later, these ailments will bring about John's death at the young age of 67.

Download or read book Brancato Mafia Street Boss written by Frank Monastra and published by . This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the better part of half a century, Frank Brancato was one of the most feared men in Ohio. The Sicilian immigrant claimed to be a humble tire salesman... ...but in reality he was the right-hand man of Cleveland Mafia Boss John Scalish. Brancato-Mafia Street Boss traces Frank's story from his days as a penniless Italian immigrant to his years as a wealthy and prosperous Cleveland businessman. His children and grandchildren knew him as a kind, soft-spoken, generous man. But others saw a different side of him. Entrepreneurs who were reluctant to share their bootlegging or gambling profits with the Cleveland "Family" were eliminated without delay. People who were suspected of talking too much found themselves taking a "one-way ride." For many years, FBI agents were under orders from their famous leader, J. Edgar Hoover himself, to observe Brancato's activities and try to collect information that would lead to his criminal conviction. Immigration officers tried long and hard to deport Brancato, including an unsuccessful attempt to "kidnap" him from a Cleveland Federal Building and whisk him away on a one-way trip back to his homeland in Italy. Police tried to pin various Mob "hits" on Brancato, but eyewitnesses frequently either died suddenly, or they mysteriously developed doubts about what they'd seen. People who made trouble for the Mafia frequently had their lives cut short by explosions or gunfire. Brancato was usually questioned in these incidents, but was released for lack of evidence. He was nearly "bulletproof..". ...except for the wound from a gunbattle that nearly took his life and led to his only prison term. Using newspaper reports, FBI and police files, and even stories told by family members, Frank Monastra chronicles the story of his grandfather, Frank Brancato, from his days as a Prohibition-era bootlegger and whiskey runner to his role in the rise of the gambling and nightclub industry. Brancato-Mafia Street Boss gives an insider look at the rise of the Sicilian Mafia in Ohio in its heyday, from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Download or read book The Sly Fanner Murders written by Allan R. May and published by Conallan Press LLC. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cleveland Police Department Never Gave Up! From the moment of the double-murder the police never gave up in the hunt for the six suspects involved in the payroll robbery-gone bad. Cleveland detectives and prosecutors pursued and/or arrested the killers in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco and finally Sicily, taking some fifteen years to make sure justice was served. The crime was carried out by members of Cleveland's infamous Mayfield Road Mob. The plot to rob the local businessmen was hatched after one gang member, convicted of auto theft, was desperate for cash to file an appeal. Short on manpower, the gang's leader was forced to involve himself and an immature teenager in the daring hold-up. The young man's inexperience led to the double slaying and the manhunt was on. In the end, three of the participants would pay with their lives in the electric chair, one would be sent to prison for life, another received 30 years at hard labor; the last one, the younger brother of Cleveland's first Mafia boss, would go free. This story also gives a chilling look at one of the most violent periods in the history of Cleveland. When a new prosecutor takes office on January 1, 1921, he is confronted with handling three sensational murder trials in addition to the killings, which just took place the day before. This lawless period resulted in the Cleveland Crime Survey of 1921, the country's first in-depth study of the justice system of a major United States city

Download or read book The Mob and the City written by C. Alexander Hortis and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forget what you think you know about the Mafia. After reading this book, even life-long mob aficionados will have a new perspective on organized crime. Informative, authoritative, and eye-opening, this is the first full-length book devoted exclusively to uncovering the hidden history of how the Mafia came to dominate organized crime in New York City during the 1930s through 1950s. Based on exhaustive research of archives and secret files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, author and attorney C. Alexander Hortis draws on the deepest collection of primary sources, many newly discovered, of any history of the modern mob. Shattering myths, Hortis reveals how Cosa Nostra actually obtained power at the inception. The author goes beyond conventional who-shot-who mob stories, providing answers to fresh questions such as: * Why did the Sicilian gangs come out on top of the criminal underworld? * Can economics explain how the Mafia families operated? * What was the Mafia's real role in the drug trade? * Why was Cosa Nostra involved in gay bars in New York since the 1930s? Drawing on an unprecedented array of primary sources, The Mob and the City is the most thorough and authentic history of the Mafia's rise to power in the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Download or read book Gotti written by Jerry Capeci and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was the most famous and infamous mobster since Al Capone. A stylish, expensively groomed Godfather who beat rap after rap to become a legendary figure to the public, and a nightmare to the forces of law and order. John Gotti was the original New York Untouchable -- a Godfather who laughed at the law. He rose from the streets of Queens to head America's most powerful crime family -- and his path there was littered with bodies. This title offers account of the brutal story of John Gotti.

Download or read book The Deadly Don written by Anthony M. DeStefano and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulizter Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano’s latest in-depth history of organized crime exposes the truth behind the mafia crew that took down John Gotti. THE BOSS OF BOSSES Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano exposes 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. As a member of Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria’s gang in New York City, Genovese ran rackets before joining forces with Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel as bootleggers during Prohibition. He helped orchestrate Masseria’s slaughter on behalf of Brooklyn crime lord Salvatore Maranzano, consolidating his position and power before ensuring Maranzano, too, was knocked off. For the next three decades, Vito Genovese—shrewd, merciless, and utterly savage—killed countless gangsters in his bid to become the capo di tutti i capi—boss of bosses—in the American Mafia. Don Vito would betray some of the mafia’s most notorious bosses, including Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello, to eventually seize control of the Luciano crime family, one that still bears the Genovese name today. Praise for Anthony M. DeStefano’s Gotti’s Boys “DeStefano explores John Gotti’s rise to the head of the Gambino family . . . Aficionados are sure to relish the finer, exhaustively researched details.” —Publishers Weekly “A thrilling ride . . . DeStefano has written another excellent biography of a memorable group of gangsters and an excellent addition to the history of the Teflon Don.” —Booklist