Retired Chicago Homicide Detective James Jimmy Jack grew up in the Chicago neighborhoods with many of Chicagos future crime figures, and later he investigated or arrested many during his years on the force. I have known Jimmy Jack for over fifteen years, and his personal memoir The Last Dance offers many personal behind the scenes stories regarding the personalities and events behind the great Family Secrets mob trial. It is a must read for anyone interested in organized crime, especially ...

Every baseball player from little league to the big leagues knows it is illegal to steal signs, yet every major league team assigns someone to do just that.Baseball thrives on trickery and deception. But as our oldest major team sport, its larcenous legacy goes much deeper than the field of play.In LARCENY AND OLD LEATHER: THE MISCHIEVOUS LEGACY OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, Eldon Ham—sports lawyer, professor, and author—traces the game's lesser-known, roguish past. His wry cha...

Every baseball player from little league to the big leagues knows it is illegal to steal signs, yet every major league team assigns someone to do just that.Baseball thrives on trickery and deception. But as our oldest major team sport, its larcenous legacy goes much deeper than the field of play.In LARCENY AND OLD LEATHER: THE MISCHIEVOUS LEGACY OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, Eldon Ham—sports lawyer, professor, and author—traces the game's lesser-known, roguish past. His wry cha...

Why are Americans obsessed with the home run in sports, business, and even life? What made the steroid era inevitable? Revisiting the great home run seasons of Babe Ruth through those of Barry Bonds, All the Babe's Men answers these and other provocative questions.Baseball, and particularly the long ball itself, evolved via accident, necessity, and occasional subterfuge. During the dead-ball era, pitching ruled the game, and home run totals hovered in the single digits. Then ...

A Crazed KillerHe dissolved the bodies of some of his victims in acid and poured them down the sewer. He hung grisly souvenirs on nails in his junkyard.La Costra NostraCharles Carneglia was a stone-cold killer who fell in with the bloodthirsty John Gotti crew. As the infamous crime family rose to power with their murderous trail of sex, jealousy, greed, and revenge, Carneglia rose with them.Mafia, Madness And Murder

"Having covered the Yankees for thirty years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive and captivating biography." — Kirkus Reviews2010 Winner of the Baseball Hall of Fame J. G. Taylor Spink AwardIf you love the New York Yankees, arguably the most storied franchise in all of sports—or even if you're just a fan of baseball history, or big business bios—this biography of the larger-than-life team...

If baseball is America's national religion, then the Hall of Fame is its High Church. Being named among its 286 inductees makes you the closest thing our country has to an undisputed hero - even a secular saint. But the men in the Hall of Fame are no angels. Among their number are gamblers, drunks, race-baiters, at least one murderer, and perhaps the greatest collection of bona fide characters ever to be dignified by an honor of any kind.This is the book the Hall of Fame deserves. ...

“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The NumberIn Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles a...

The chilling true story of how the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago helped bring down the last great American crime syndicate: the one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit.In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, Jr. reveals for the first time the outfit’s “made” ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion. As members of the outfit, they plotted the slaying ...

Posing as jewel thief "Donnie Brasco," FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone carried out the most audacious sting operation ever, working undercover for six years to infiltrate the flamboyant community of mafia soldiers, "connected guys," captains and godfathers.Now his unforgettable eyewitness account brings to pulsating life the entire world of wiseguys—their code of honor and their treachery, their wives, girlfriends and whores, their lavish spending and dirty dealings.

When FBI Special Agent Joe Pistone began what was supposed to be a six-month operation infiltrating New York's Bonanno crime family in 1975, he had no idea what was about to happen.Posing as jewel thief “Donnie Brasco,” Pistone would spend the next six years undercover witnessing and sometimes participating in the Mafia's gruesome activities while gathering enough evidence to send over 200 gangsters to jail. Pistone told his story in the 1988 book Donnie Brasco-a N...

Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike "King Mike" McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Featherstone, troubled Vietnam vet turned Westies gang leader; and James "Whitey" Bulger, the ruthless a...