True Organized Crime

In February 1991, the media mogul and former MP Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News. Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand and children asked for his autograph. But just 10 months later, Maxwell disappeared from the same yacht off the Canary Islands, only to be found dead in the water soon afterward.

As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into a double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, all with some apparent connection to drug-trafficking, as well as dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, and American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade.

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.

Recently fans have been absorbed in Curse of the Chippendales. All of these stories rise to fame, to end so tragically. Many questions whether Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or was he silenced for knowing about too many powerful men's secret affairs with under-aged girls. Same types of questions are now arising in Banerjee's suicide. Did he have too much information on married men's fetishes with his male dancers?

The ‘Ndrangheta (pronounced an-drang-et-ah) is a close neighbor of the Cosa Nostra and currently considered the most powerful (and difficult to spell) criminal organization in Italy. The ‘Ndrangheta is centered around Calabria, the most southwestern region of Italy, almost touching the Sicilian city of Messina. Though it began as far back as the late 19th century, it was not until the 1950s that the ‘Ndrangheta started to spread its tentacles throughout Italy and then across the entire globe, forming an empire that now ranges from Australia and Turkey, to Chile to Canada.

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.

During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them. Author Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes listeners on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man’s heroic rescue mission.

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.

Cocaine Cowboys tells the story of Ireland's love affair with cocaine since it first washed ashore on Cork's rugged coast to the billion-euro trade it has become. From Ireland's first cocaine lord and his attempts to establish a direct route from Miami to Dublin, to the modern-day violence that led to the brutal dismemberment of teenager Keane Mulready Woods, the book will follow the stories and the increasing chaos that has engulfed those desperate for a slice of this modern day gold rush.

In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was 21, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit.

Biloxi, Mississippi: After the fatal shooting of one of the city’s most prominent couples - Vincent Sherry was a circuit court judge; his wife, Margaret, was running for mayor - their grief-stricken daughter came home to uncover the truth behind the crime that shocked a community and to follow leads that police seemed unable or unwilling to pursue. What Lynne Sposito soon discovered were bizarre connections to the Dixie Mafia, a predatory band of criminals who ran The Strip, Biloxi’s beachfront hub of sex, drugs, and sleaze.

Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor.

Irish mafia from the streets of Dublin to the highest echelons of global organised crime and right into the heart of professional boxing. When a weigh-in turns into a gangland bloodbath, the tables begin to turn on the powerful Kinahan Organised Crime Group. But is it too late to tame the beast or can the law finally catch up with the mob? With a unique insight into the rise of mob and its reach into boxing through a tapestry of confidential informants and some too-close-for-comfort experiences, Tallant brings to life one of the most extraordinary stories in modern organised crime.

A must-listen for anyone fascinated with Mafia history - and a rare inside account of the rise of the "Springfield Crew" in Massachusetts, its ties with the Genovese Crime Family of New York, and its evolution into the present-day Mob.This crime story is 100% true. From the personal diary of a man sitting in his jail cell awaiting trial. The story follows Giuseppe “Joseph” Parisi, who guns down the “King of Bootleggers,” Carlo Siniscalchi, a ruthless crime boss, as his limousine idled against the curb.

One of the biggest scores in Mafia history, the Lufthansa Airlines heist of 1978 has become the stuff of Mafia legend - and a decades-long investigation that continues to this day. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony DeStefano sheds new light on this legendary unsolved case using recent evidence from the 2015 trial of 80-year-old Mafia don Vincent Asaro, who for the first time speaks out on his role in the fateful Lufthansa heist.

Ultras are football fans like no others. A hugely visible and controversial part of the global game, their credo and aesthetic replicated in almost every league everywhere on earth, a global movement of extreme fandom and politics is also one of the largest youth movements in the world. Yet they remain unknown: an anti-establishment force that is transforming both football and politics. In this book, James Montague goes underground to uncover the true face of this dissident force for the first time.

Widely known in the criminal underworld as the 'Black Widow', Linda Calvey spent the first half of her life running with the UK's top gangsters, robbing banks and rubbing shoulders with the Kray twins. That is, until, in 1990, her lover Robbie Cook was murdered at point-blank, and she found herself falsely convicted. Linda was sent away for decades, and would go on to become Britain's longest-serving female prisoner. This is her story of life inside, and how she learnt to survive the many years she spent behind bars.

In 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the US Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it. Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

What do Wyatt Earp, Belle Gunness, Big Foot the Renegade, Billy the Kid, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and The Black Hand have in common? They were all subjects of true crime newspaper reporting in the 1800s. Now their stories and that of many others are brought together in their original form in this compilation by New York Times best-selling author Mike Rothmiller. These classic works of journalism resurrect astonishing stories that will take the listener back to when these horrific tales mesmerized a nation.

The wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami's cocaine cowboys heyday - and an inspiration for the blockbuster film Scarface.