Download or read book Hollywood Godfather written by Gianni Russo and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood Godfather is Gianni Russo's over-the-top memoir of a real-life mobster-turned-actor who helped make The Godfather a reality, and his story of life on the edge between danger and glamour. Gianni Russo was a handsome 25-year-old mobster with no acting experience when he walked onto the set of The Godfather and entered Hollywood history. He played Carlo Rizzi, the husband of Connie Corleone, who set her brother Sonny—played by James Caan—up for a hit. Russo didn't have to act—he knew the mob inside and out: from his childhood in Little Italy, where Mafia legend Frank Costello took him under his wing, to acting as a messenger for New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello during the Kennedy assassination, to having to go on the lam after shooting and killing a member of the Colombian drug cartel in his Vegas club. Along the way, Russo befriended Frank Sinatra, who became his son's godfather, and Marlon Brando, who mentored his career as an actor after trying to get Francis Ford Coppola to fire him from The Godfather. Russo had passionate affairs with Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minelli, and scores of other celebrities. He went on to become a producer and starred in The Godfather: Parts I and II, Seabiscuit, Any Given Sunday and Rush Hour 2, among many other films. Hollywood Godfather is a no-holds-barred account of a life filled with violence, glamour, sex—and fun.
Download or read book Blood Ties written by Claudio Antonelli and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A massive bestseller in its native Italy, and a book that can justly be compared with Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, Blood Ties is a terrifying account of the 'ndrangheta's criminal activities over the last four decades. Originally from Calabria, this sinister organization has - like the Mafia in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples - a vicious hold over northern Italy and much of the rest of the country, too, a stranglehold that is growing every day. Told to the authors by an insider, Pippo di Bella, a 'pentito', a former member of the gang now turned state's evidence, it reveals many hitherto unknown operations, as well as throwing new light on well-known cases from the past. It shows an organization which retains and strengthens its position through corruption, drug smuggling, gun running, violence, extortion and kidnapping. Visceral, compelling and terrifyingly readable, it paints a brutally vivid picture of the most dangerous and powerful of the Italian mafias, one which demands to be read.
Download or read book Mafia Daddy written by Renee Rose and published by . This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHE'S ALWAYS BEEN MINEDon G gave me an order--find his daughter.Straighten her out. Bring her home.Sure--taking the mafia princess in hand will be my pleasure.But she's not going home--she's staying with me.Because despite the marriage contract to another family, Jenna Pachino has always been mine.
Download or read book The Mafia s President written by Don Fulsom and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever full account of Nixon's extensive ties to the American Mafia, from a veteran White House reporter. Unbeknownst to most people even now, the election of 1968 placed the patron saint of the Mafia in the White House. In other words, Richard Nixon would go on to not only lead a criminal presidency; he would be totally indebted to our nation’s top mobsters. By 1969, thanks in large part to his long-time campaign manager and political advisor Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who specialized in representing mobsters, Nixon had participated in secret criminal dealings for more than 20 years with sketchy figures such as Mickey Cohen, Mob financial guru Meyer Lansky, Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa, and New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. And with Chotiner as one of his key behind-the-scenes advisors in the White House, Nixon's ties to the Mafia didn't end there. The Mafia’s President reveals a mind-blowing litany of favors Nixon exchanged with these sinister characters over decades, ranging from springing Jimmy Hoffa from prison to banning the federal government from using the terms “Mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra.” Drawing on newly released government tapes, documents, and other fresh information, The Mafia’s President by Don Fulsom offers a carefully reported, deeply researched account of Richard Nixon’s secret connections to America’s top crime lords.
Download or read book In Hoffa s Shadow written by Jack Goldsmith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Irishman is great art . . . but it is not, as we know, great history . . . Frank Sheeran . . . surely didn’t kill Hoffa . . . But who pulled the trigger? . . . For some of the real story, and for a great American tale in itself, you want to go to Jack Goldsmith’s book, In Hoffa’s Shadow.” —Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal "In Hoffa’s Shadow is compulsively readable, deeply affecting, and truly groundbreaking in its re-examination of the Hoffa case . . . a monumental achievement." —James Rosen, The Wall Street Journal As a young man, Jack Goldsmith revered his stepfather, longtime Jimmy Hoffa associate Chuckie O’Brien. But as he grew older and pursued a career in law and government, he came to doubt and distance himself from the man long suspected by the FBI of perpetrating Hoffa’s disappearance on behalf of the mob. It was only years later, when Goldsmith was serving as assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and questioning its misuse of surveillance and other powers, that he began to reconsider his stepfather, and to understand Hoffa’s true legacy. In Hoffa’s Shadow tells the moving story of how Goldsmith reunited with the stepfather he’d disowned and then set out to unravel one of the twentieth century’s most persistent mysteries and Chuckie’s role in it. Along the way, Goldsmith explores Hoffa’s rise and fall and why the golden age of blue-collar America came to an end, while also casting new light on the century-old surveillance state, the architects of Hoffa’s disappearance, and the heartrending complexities of love and loyalty.
Download or read book Smalltime A Story of My Family and the Mob written by Russell Shorto and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.
Download or read book Nothing But Money written by Greg B. Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forced out of the work-hard, play-hard world of Wall Street following the Crash of ’87, financial analyst Cary Cimino was determined to maintain his lifestyle of luxury and ease. Under the guidance of dubious businessman Jeffrey Pokross, Cimino embarked on an illegitimate underground career as a “financial adviser” to naïve investors. Cimino’s small-time operation soon spiraled into a large-scale crime ring when he and Pokross were reunited and met with Mafia wiseguy Robert Lino. Together, and with the support of organized crime families, the three men devised a high-risk, high-return scheme to extort millions of dollars from a bevy of unsuspecting stockbrokers and investors—all in the name of the Mob. This is the uncut, untold story of one of the most elaborate conspiracies to rock Wall Street’s rigid foundation—a story centered around the Mafia, murder, and a load of money.
Download or read book House of Trump House of Putin written by Craig Unger and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House. It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence. To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower. Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.
Download or read book Shadows Over the White House written by Thomas A. Reppetto and published by Enigma Books. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the American Mafia and corrupt politicians assert so much power over the nation's affairs that the Mob's influence actually reached into the White House? Harry Truman had been one of three key lieutenants of Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast. Truman controlled the county government, while another lieutenant, Mafia Boss Johnny Lazia, carried out murders and other crimes as required to keep the machine in power. Truman himself was never accused of corruption. Once elected to the Senate in 1934, he became known in Washington as Pendergast's errand boy. When Pendergast himself eventually ended up in federal prison for evading taxes on bribe money, Truman remained loyal to him. With the fall of Pendergast, Truman appeared likely to be defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1940. However, Bob Hannegan, who ran St. Louis in conjunction with Mayor Bernie Dykman, came to Truman's aid and provided the senator's margin of victory. Harry Truman eventually became president upon FDR's death, opening a period of tolerance for the Mob throughout the country. The need for margins in tight elections in certain key moments, such as John F. Kennedy's in 1960, increased Mafia influence. More connections are clearly documented during the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, when the Mob played a role in securing key voting blocs. Thomas A. Reppetto was commander of detectives in Chicago and dean of John Jay College CUNY. He is the author of American Police, American Mafia, and countless op-ed pieces in major daily newspapers.
Download or read book The Mob and Me written by John Partington and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revealing first-person narrative, by one of the founders of the Witness Protection Program and a personal protector to more than five hundred informants, offers an eye-opening, dead-on authentic perspective on the safeguard institution. How did law enforcement’s frustration with the criminal underworld and a serpentine series of hit-or-miss rules and mistakes give rise to one of the most significant and endlessly fascinating government-run programs of the 20th century? In 1967, U.S. Marshal John Partington was given the task of overseeing the protection of the wife and young daughter of renowned mobster Joe “The Animal” Barboza, now an informant with a bounty on his head. It wasn’t Partington’s first time guarding underworld witnesses. But this time was different. It was at the behest of Senator Bobby Kennedy that Partington became the architect of a new high- threat program to get the bad guys to testify against the worse guys. Lifelong protection in exchange for the conviction of the upper echelon of organized crime would require a permanent identity change for every member of the witness’s family, a battery of psychological tests for re-assimilation, and a total, devastating obliteration of all ties with the past. With no blueprint for success, it created a logistical nightmare for Partington. He would have to make up the rules as he went along, and he did so without the luxury of knowing whom he could really trust at any given time. And so, the Witness Protection Program was born. The account John Partington tells of the next thirty years of his life is a never-before-seen portrait of members of the underworld and law enforcement—from Joe Valachi, the first mobster to violate the “omerta,” the sacrosanct code of silence, to high-profile informant and NYPD narcotics detective Bob Leuci, immortalized in Prince of the City. He reveals the details of the protection provided such significant figures as Watergate players to Howard Hunt and John and Maureen Dean. Ultimately, Partington delivers the unvarnished truth of the Program, from the heavily-shielded delivery of witnesses to trial, to countless death threats, to managing an ever- rotating crew of U.S. Marshals, to the step-by-step procedure of reinventing his sometimes dangerous, sometimes terrified charges and their families as uncomplicated suburbanites. These would be the guarded new neighbors just across the street bearing secret histories—uncomfortable actors in a play that would run for the rest of their lives. Lifting a cloak of confidentiality and controversy, The Mob and Me immerses readers in the rarified, misunderstood world of Witness Protection—at once human, dangerous, intimate, surprising, and stone-cold violent.
Download or read book Mafia Spies written by Thomas Maier and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Bestselling Author and Television Producer of MASTERS OF SEX, a True Story of Espionage and Mobsters, Based on the Never-Before-Released JFK Files, and Optioned by Warner Bros. 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. Mafia Spies revolves around the outlaw friendship of these two mob buddies and their fascinating world of CIA spies, fellow Mafioso in Chicago, Cuban exile commandos in Miami, beautiful Hollywood women, famous entertainers like Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack in Las Vegas, Castro’s own spies in Havana and his double agents hidden in Florida, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI snooping, and the Kennedy administration’s “Get Castro” obsession in Washington. Thomas Maier is among the first to take full advantage of the National Archives’ 2017–18 release of the long-suppressed JFK files, many of which deal with the CIA’s top secret anti-Castro operation in Florida and Cuba. With several new investigative findings, Mafia Spies is a spy exposé, murder mystery, and shocking true story that recounts America’s first foray into the assassination business, a tale with profound impact for today’s Trump era. Who killed Johnny and Sam—and why wasn’t Castro assassinated despite the CIA’s many clandestine efforts?
Download or read book Trump written by Wayne Barrett and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of Trump's rise to the top--and the truth behind the deals he described in The Art of the Deal--is told for the first time by Village Voice reporter Barrett, who has been following the Trump story for nearly a decade. Photographs.
Download or read book Mobfather written by George Anastasia and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Me the Mob and the Music written by Tommy James and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, after five hardcover printings, Tommy James’s wild and entertaining true story of his career—part rock & roll fairytale, part valentine to a bygone era, and part mob epic—that “reads like a music-industry version of Goodfellas” (The Denver Post). Everyone knows the hits: “Hanky Panky,” “Mony Mony,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Crimson and Clover,” “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” All of these songs, which epitomize great pop music of the late 1960s, are now widely used in television and film and have been covered by a diverse group of artists from Billy Idol to Tiffany to R.E.M. Just as compelling as the music itself is the life Tommy James lived while making it. James tells the incredible story, revealing his complex and sometimes terrifying relationship with Roulette Records and Morris Levy, the legendary Godfather of the music business. Me, the Mob, and the Music is a fascinating portrait of this swaggering, wildly creative era of rock ’n’ roll, when the hits kept coming and payola and the strong-arm tactics of the Mob were the norm, and what it was like, for better or worse, to be in the middle of it.
Download or read book Trump The Art of the Deal written by Donald J. Trump and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: President Donald J. Trump lays out his professional and personal worldview in this classic work—a firsthand account of the rise of America’s foremost deal-maker. “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”—Donald J. Trump Here is Trump in action—how he runs his organization and how he runs his life—as he meets the people he needs to meet, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies, and challenges conventional thinking. But even a maverick plays by rules, and Trump has formulated time-tested guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest accomplishments; he shatters myths; he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker’s art. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it. Trump: The Art of the Deal is an unguarded look at the mind of a brilliant entrepreneur—the ultimate read for anyone interested in the man behind the spotlight. Praise for Trump: The Art of the Deal “Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again.”—The New York Times “Donald Trump is a deal maker. He is a deal maker the way lions are carnivores and water is wet.”—Chicago Tribune “Fascinating . . . wholly absorbing . . . conveys Trump’s larger-than-life demeanor so vibrantly that the reader’s attention is instantly and fully claimed.”—Boston Herald “A chatty, generous, chutzpa-filled autobiography.”—New York Post
Download or read book Prison Rules written by John Alite and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first page to the last of this raw look into prison life is painted in dark and stark colors not meant for the faint of heart. It is a step by step tour from the time an individual is arrested till the time he is hopefully released. Each chapter is offered through the eyes of ex-mobster / bodyguard, John Alite, of the ruthless Gambino Crime family. He spent sixteen years of his life in prisons across the globe. He also was the bodyguard for John Gotti Jr.The project is meant for young men and women to educate them on the horrors of prison life. It details all the rules and survival tips if you are ever sent away. In addition, to John's experiences there are interviews with psychologists, correction officers and ex-mobsters with their advice on prison life.
Download or read book When the Mob Ran Vegas written by Steve Fischer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
