Organized Crime History

Author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country's most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.

At 33, Virginia Vallejo was part of the media elite. A renowned anchorwoman and socialite, and a model who appeared on magazine covers worldwide, Vallejo was the darling of Colombia's most powerful politicians and billionaires. Meeting Pablo Escobar in 1983, then becoming his mistress for many years, she witnessed the rise of a drug empire that was characterized by Escobar's far-reaching political corruption, his extraordinary wealth, and a network of violent crime that lasted until his death in 1993.

Historians have previously glazed over the Mafia's formative years. In this first volume, Ferrante explores its Sicilian roots, before following a cast of larger-than-life characters who arrived as fugitives on American shores. Through these and other lives - including legendary mobsters Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel - Ferrante tells the extraordinary story of the Mafia's rise in America, as they provided alcohol during Prohibition, created the gambling mecca Las Vegas and practically took over the island of Cuba.

Las Vegas was the Mob's greatest venture and most spectacular success, and through 40 years of frenzy, murder, deceit, scams, and skimming, the FBI listened on phone taps and did virtually nothing to stop the fun. This is the truth about the Mob's control of the casinos in Vegas like you've never heard it before, from start to finish.

Midcentury Los Angeles: A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America", a land of sunshine and orange groves, Midwestern values, and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief - each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.

During Prohibition, while Al Capone was rising to worldwide prominence as Public Enemy Number One, the townspeople of rural Templeton, Iowa - population just 418 - were busy with a bootlegging empire of their own. Led by Joe Irlbeck, the whip-smart and gregarious son of a Bavarian immigrant, the outfit of farmers, small merchants, and even the church Monsignor worked together to create a whiskey so excellent, it was ordered by name: Templeton Rye.

We live in their buildings, work in their companies, shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants and elect politicians they fund. Founded more than 150 years ago by shepherding families in the toe of Italy, the 'Ndrangheta is today the world's most powerful mafia, with a crushing presence in Southern Italy, a market-moving size in global finance and a reach that extends to 50 countries around the world. And yet, remarkably, few of us have ever heard of it.

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough strips away a thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to tell the full story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and an assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers.

The Mafia in the United States might be a shadow of its former self, but in the New York/New Jersey metro area, there are still wise guys and wannabes working scams, extorting businesses, running gambling, selling drugs, and branching out into white collar crimes. And they are continuing a tradition that's over 100 years old. Some of the most powerful mobsters on a national level were from New Jersey, and they spread their tentacles down to Florida, across the Atlantic, and out to California.

Conducted under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, intended to stem the flow of firearms to Mexico, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) ran a series of “gun walking” sting operations, including Operations Wide Receiver and Operation Fast & Furious. The government allowed licensed gun dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers so that they could continue to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels.

Dive into the clandestine world of one of New York's most enigmatic and feared crime syndicates with this comprehensive exploration of the Bonanno Mafia Crime Family. This meticulously researched book unveils the dark and complex web of activities, power struggles, and influential figures that shaped the Bonanno family's legacy. From its roots in the 1890s under the guidance of founder Salvatore Maranzano, this narrative traces the Bonanno family's rise to power in the American underworld.

More than any other sport, boxing has a history of being easy to rig. There are only two athletes and one or both may be induced to accept a bribe; if not the fighters, then the judges or referee might be swayed. In such inviting circumstances, the mob moved into boxing in the 1930s and profited by corrupting a sport ripe for exploitation. In Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science, Jeffrey Sussman tells the story of the coercive and criminal underside of boxing, covering nearly the entire 20th century.

The Snakehead is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America's 12 million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe's sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream.

They called it Satan's Circus, a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the 20th century, murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel.

Here's what we now know: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Mafia contract killers hired by Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello. Kennedy was killed in that city because it was the only place in the country where a crime of that magnitude could be committed without fear of punishment. Long-time local district attorney Henry Wade, an LBJ crony who would have sole jurisdiction over the prosecution of those responsible, had been corrupted by the local Civello crime family. Lyndon B. Johnson, while a U.S. senator during the 1950s, had accepted bribes from the same mobsters so that they could avoid deportation.

Operation Car Wash is the inside story of two Brazilian Federal Police officers who found themselves at the centre of the biggest corruption scandal in history; uncovering a web of political and corporate racketeering which would lead them all the way to the arrest and imprisonment of the nation’s President. Through engrossing first-hand testimony, Pontes and Anselmo recount the uphill battle faced by the Federal Police in apprehending Brazil’s white-collar criminals.

In a small village in New York, mob bosses from all over the country - Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Paul Castellano - were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Apalachin summit....

Javier Valdez ofrece un libro impactante que va del reportaje a la crónica para rescatar del silencio, de la nota roja y del olvido, a numerosas mujeres que viven entre las balas momentos cruciales de su vida. Amantes de capos, amigas de ellos o familiares, son mujeres con una verdad ardiente y dolorosa, que buscan el glamour y la hermosura, el poder económico y la huida de su realidad; mujeres que viven en el límite de la ley, la violencia y de la muerte.

From running guns to white-collar crimes in cyberspace and illegal seafood, the Triads, the mafia of China, are potent figures in the world of organized crime. Going by enigmatic names like the 14K Triad and the United Bamboo Gang, these criminal groups are enormous, with some organizations boasting memberships ranging in the tens of thousands. A powerful factor in China and throughout Asia, Triads are entrenched in society and the masters of multiple enterprises ranging from extortion, narcotics, prostitution, and white collar crime.