The New York City historian and author of The Bowery takes readers on a tour of New York's infamous underworld in this revealing guide.During the early twentieth century, Sicilian and Southern Italian immigrants poured into New York City looking for a better life. But while they escaped the kind of poverty and persecution they experienced in the old country, they soon discovered that certain criminal enterprises followed them to America. Over the years, th...

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. The brainchild of aging mob bosses, including Meyer L...

“A lucid investigation of the devotion between the brothers and their loyalty to Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch.” —Library JournalEight years apart in age, John F. and Robert F. Kennedy were wildly different in temperament and sensibility. Jack was the leader—charismatic, ironic, capable of extraordinary growth and reach, yet also reckless. Bobby was the fearless, hardworking Boy Scout—unafraid of dirty work and ruthless about protecting his brother ...

The runaway bestselling exposé about Canada's most infamous mafia family is finally available in English, updated to include shocking events and revelations that followed its newsmaking publication in Québec.Queens, New York, 1981. When Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato and two others are found dead in a vacant lot, police fail to solve their murders. For their killer and his Montréal family, their deaths mark the beginning of an epic rise to criminal power that will last over thirty...

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

The New York Times bestseller chronicling the history of NYC’s infamous five mafia families is now the basis for the upcoming The HISTORY® Channel documentary series American Godfathers: The Five Families.Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggre...

The Wall Street Journal called him “a living legend.” The London Times dubbed him “the most famous art detective in the world.”In Priceless, Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable career for the first time, offering a real-life international thriller to rival The Thomas Crown Affair.Rising from humble roots as the son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a twenty-year career tha...

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...

On February 26, 1986, Mafia underboss Gennaro Angiulo was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. In The Underboss, bestselling authors Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill tell the story of the fall of the house of Angiulo. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, aided in part by the Irish Mob's Whitey Bulger, entered the Boston Mafia's headquarters in Boston's North End early one morning in 1981 and began to compile the evidence that would lead to the entire upper tie...

For the first twenty-five years of his criminal career, Charles "Lucky" Luciano was a vicious mobster who rose to become the multimillionaire king of the New York underworld. For the next twenty-five years of his life, Luciano was a legend---but a fake master criminal without real power, his evil reputation manipulated and maintained by the government agents who had put him behind bars.Drawing on secret government documents from archives in the United States and Europe, this myth-bu...

A classic masterwork newly updatedThe electrifying true story of the rise and fall of New York's notorious Bonanno crime familyOn New York's Park Avenue on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. More than a year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, setting off a bloody mob feud that came to be known as the "Banana War."In this monum...

The true story of one museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld: "Boser cracks the cold case of the art world's greatest unsolved mystery." — Vanity FairShortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and ...