True Organized Crime

On May 5, 1981, three rebellious members of New York's Bonanno crime family were gunned down in a Brooklyn social club. One of the gunmen was Vito Rizzuto, a man who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family, now revised and updated, reveals the hidden history of the rise of the Rizzuto clan, the alliances it forged around the world, and the bloody events that led to charges against Vito Rizzuto in the United States and Italy for racketeering and corruption.

Le destin du plus puissant des gangs criminels canadiens actuels s’est joué dans le dernier quart du 20e siècle, de 1980 à 2000. En vingt ans à peine, une bande de jeunes délinquants jadis désargentés, brutaux et asociaux, liés par leur amour de la Harley-Davidson et par leur quête de sensations fortes, ont fini par conquérir les sommets du crime organisé québécois, voire canadien. Il s’agit d’un fait unique dans l’histoire des pègres occidentales.

The Tangled Web tells the dramatic story of detective Richard Cain's criminal career as revealed by his half-brother, Michael. Cain led a double-life—one as a well-known cop who led raids that landed on the front pages, and the other as a "made man" in one of Chicago's most notorious mob families.

Detective Michael Palermo built his career on his unique ability to inhabit two worlds at once: the world of law enforcement and the underworld of New York’s crime family organizations. Palermo participated in over 2,000 arrests while maintaining close relationships with the kingpins of organized crime - ties that allowed him to stay one step ahead of the rest of the New York City Police Department. This true crime drama takes you inside the police force at its most corrupt.

For the first time in Canadian history, a high-ranking Mafioso agreed to break the code of omertà by talking to journalists. From October 2014 to October 2019, Félix Séguin and Eric Thibault held multiple secret meetings with Andrew Scoppa, getting an exclusive inside look at the inner workings of the North American Mafia. This book is the culmination of their perilous investigation. It sheds light on the life—and death—of one of the most influential organized crime figures in recent years.

Longtime ATF agent Ken Croke had earned the right to coast to the end of a storied career, having routinely gone undercover to apprehend white supremacists, gun runners, and gang members. But after a chance encounter with an associate of the Pagan Motorcycle Gang created an opening, he transformed himself into “Slam,” a monstrous, axe-handle wielding enforcer whose duty was to protect the leadership “mother club” at all costs.

« À 14 h précises, on cogne à la porte. C’est lui, la source que tout journaliste rêverait d’avoir. L’homme de courte stature est armé et dépose son pistolet sur une table. “Are you impressed ? ” me lance-t-il avec un grand sourire. “Yes. Very much.” J’ai devant moi Andrew Scoppa, l’un des confidents du défunt parrain Vito Rizzuto, trafiquant international d’héroïne, et meurtrier sans pitié. » Pour la première fois au pays, un mafieux de haut rang a brisé l’omerta en se confiant à des journalistes.

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind.

After 40 years in the Hells Angels, George Christie was ready to retire. As president of the high-profile Ventura charter of the club, he had been the yin to Sonny Barger's yang. Barger was the reckless figurehead and de facto world leader of the Hells Angels. Christie was the negotiator, the spokesman, the thinker, the guy who smoothed things out.

In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-20th-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.

Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon.

In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associatesas the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Mafia. Author James Higdon takes listeners back to the 1970s and ‘80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

Many people are familiar with the story of Al Capone, the legendary Chicago gangster best known for orchestrating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But few are aware that Capone’s remarkable story began in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn, New York. Tutored by the likes of infamous mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, young Capone’s disquieting demeanor, combined with the “technical advice” he learned from these shady teachers, contributed to the molding of a brutal criminal....

The astonishing story of Benny Binion - a rip-roaring saga of murder, money, and the making of Las Vegas. Benny Binion was many things: a cowboy, a pioneering casino owner, a gangster, a killer, and founder of the hugely successful World Series of Poker. Blood Aces tells the story of Binion's crucial role in shaping modern Las Vegas. From a Texas backwater, Binion rose to prominence on a combination of vision, determination, and brutal expediency.

In 2008 veteran journalist Evan Wright, acclaimed for his New York Times best-selling book Generation Kill and co-writer of the Emmy-winning HBO series it spawned, began a series of conversations with super-criminal Jon Roberts, star of the fabulously successful documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Those conversations would last three years, during which time Wright came to realize that Roberts was much more than the de-facto “transportation chief” of the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, much more than a facilitator of a national drug epidemic.

From poverty to lucky in love, Belle found her happy ending with a man named Mads…or so everyone thought. But when the wealthy Mads died a mysterious death, Belle collected the life insurance policy and remarried…only for her new husband to drop dead. With things going from strange to sinister, more men mysteriously die or go missing around Belle.

Mafia Prince is the first-person account of one of the most violent eras in Mafia history - "Little" Nicky Scarfo’s reign as boss of the Philly family in the 1980s - written by Scarfo’s underboss and nephew, "Crazy" Phil Leonetti. The youngest-ever underboss at the age of 31, Leonetti was at the crux of the violent downfall of the traditional American Mafia in the 1980s when he infiltrated Atlantic City after gambling was legalized, and later turned state’s evidence against his own.

As the biggest criminal trial since the Boston Strangler draws nearer, the public’s fascination with the life and crimes of mob boss Whitey Bulger continues to heat up. Many stories have been told about the murders Whitey and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi committed, and the tacit permission they received from the FBI.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself.