True Organized Crime

The Calabrian Mafia in Australia is alive and well. This is the first time its real story in this country has ever been told. The Calabrian mafia is Australia's oldest, largest and most ruthless crime syndicate, trafficking drugs worth billions of dollars and laundering the proceeds through sophisticated international networks. Enforcing discipline with age-old tools of violence and intimidation, the Calabrians have been responsible for nearly 40 murders in Australia since the mid-1970s and many more before that.

Chicago Heights was long the seat of one of the major street crews of the Chicago Outfit, but its importance has often been overlooked and misunderstood. The crew's origins predate Prohibition, when Chicago Heights was a developing manufacturing center with a large Italian immigrant population. Its earliest bosses struggled for control until a violent gang war left the crew solidified under the auspices of Al Capone. For the first time, the history of the Chicago Heights street crew is traced from its inception through its last known boss.

The gritty prison memoir of Michaella McCollum, one half of the infamous 'Peru Two', imprisoned in a Peruvian jail for attempting to smuggle 11kg of cocaine from Peru to Madrid in August 2013. She was just a regular girl, spending the summer working at a bar in Ibiza, until she was approached by a man who asked her if she'd like to make some quick, easy money...and it would change her life forever. This is the truth of her time in prison, told through her own diaries and letters to her mother, family and friends.

Three very different men battle to control their destinies as they hurtle through the hall of mirrors of the global shadow economy. Each man, born in radically different circumstances in the 1960s, is in his own way grappling with the powerful and unstoppable forces that shape the world around us; forces which topple governments, send refugees fleeing across borders, and put guns in the hands of mercenaries and militias. Each has devoted his whole life to an institution - and each will eventually be destroyed or betrayed by the thing they believe in the most.

The last great mafia story When The Bullet Hits The Bone is an enthralling full-access account of the life of a notorious mafioso intimately involved in the Lufthansa Heist, rampant government corruption, and the death of a pope.

Karen Gravano is the daughter of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, once one of the mafia's most feared hit men. With 19 confessed murders, the former Gambino Crime Family underboss - and John Gotti’s right-hand man - is the highest ranking gangster ever to turn State’s evidence and testify against members of his high-profile crime family. But to Karen, Sammy Gravano was a sometimes elusive but always loving father figure. He was ever-present at the head of the dinner table.

Seldom has the netherworld of the Mafia been revealed with such fascinating detail and sheer suspense. Featuring eccentric, larger-than-life New York characters and an undercover cop on the brink of being discovered - and murdered - at every step, Takedown is a riveting real-life procedural and one of the most important investigative books of its time.

The grandson and great-grandson of Chicago police officers, Chicago Police Detective James Sherlock was CPD through and through. His career had seen its share of twists and turns, from his time working undercover to thwart robberies on Chicago's L trains to his years as a homicide detective. He thought he had seen it all. But on this day, he was at the records center to see the case file for the murder of John Hughes, who was 17 years old when he was gunned down on Chicago's Southwest Side in 1976. The case's threads led everywhere.

In Bloodlines, Emmy and National Magazine award-winning journalist Melissa del Bosque follows Lawson and Perez's harrowing attempt to dismantle a cartel leader's American racing dynasty built on extortion and blood money. With extensive access to investigative evidence and in-depth interviews with key players, del Bosque turns more than three years of research and her decades of reporting on Mexico and the border into a gripping narrative about greed and corruption.

Drug Lord, a firsthand account of drug dealing, murder, and corruption, tells of drug kingpin Pablo Acosta, who smuggled up to 20 tons of cocaine each year into the United States before treachery brought about his downfall and grisly death.

On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt."

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend. Taylor had always struggled to make friends - she felt 'different'. Taylor never knew her father, and her mother wasn't around much. She just didn't understand people and was alone and scared most of the time. That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her - a protector. But when he moved away a few months later, she was easy prey.

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.

With a round, open face and a penchant for tall tales, Matteo de Lorenzo resembled everyone's kindly uncle. But Uncle Marty, as he was known throughout the Genovese crime family, was one of the New York mob's top earners throughout the 1960s and '70s, the mastermind of a billion-dollar trade in stolen and counterfeit securities.

In a bid to take down MS-13's criminal network in the Mission District of San Francisco, Michael Santini, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, recruits a pair of hardened gang members and convinces them to risk their lives as criminal informants. Set in a city with one of the strictest sanctuary policies protecting illegal immigrants in America, Operation Devil Horns illustrates how politically correct ideology impacts life-or-death crime fighting on the streets.

With his brother dead, Eddie Richardson feels free to detail the story of a vicious family feud that provoked extravagant acrimony. No Handcuffs unravels the mysteries of decades of crime and political incident. The story of a turbulent era, it rivals the most imaginative fiction in its portrayal of gangland life with all its chanciness and rawness and careless disregard for any obstacle on the way to its target: the big money.

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.

Drawing on essential new material derived from decades-long investigations, Detective Mike Rothmiller and Douglas Thompson shatter the secrets and lies with a revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller focusing on JFK and Robert F. Kennedy, both before and after they bought the White House.

Burn Boston Burn is an astounding true crime narration. A conspiracy of nine men, including three Boston cops and a Boston firefighter, burned Boston and surrounding communities in the early 1980s due to tax-cutting measures that caused layoffs of hundreds of police and firefighters. Over two years, these fire buffs-turned-arsonists torched 264 buildings, causing millions of dollars in damages and hundreds of injuries. The city was ablaze with nightly fires, sirens wailing through the streets, and people too afraid to sleep.

The Bronx-born son of a Jewish bootlegger, "Joey the Hit Man" was introduced to crime when he was just eleven years old. For the next thirty years he was a numbers king, scalper, loan shark, enforcer, and drug smuggler. He hijacked trucks, fenced stolen goods, and trafficked in pornography. But Joey really made his name as a Mafia assassin, racking up thirty-eight cold-blooded hits-thirty-five for cash, three for revenge.