True Organized Crime

As a cop, Ron Previte was corrupt. As a mobster, he was brutal. And in his final role, as a confidential informant to the FBI, Previte was deadly. The Last Gangster is his story—the story of the last days of the Philadelphia Mob, and of the clash of generations that brought it down once and for all. Convinced that the honor of the "business" was gone, he became the FBI's secret weapon in an intense and highly personalized war on the Philadelphia mob, operating with the same guile, wit, and stone-cold bravado that had made him a force in the underworld.

In 1997 a six-year-old boy questioned by authorities relayed disturbing stories of abuse. The more he talked, the more people were implicated in his shocking revelations. And he was only the first child to come forward. Within a year, fifteen more children with similar tales were transferred out of the Bassa region of Italy to protected locations. Their parents were accused of belonging to a satanic sect that performed sex rituals under the aegis of beloved local priest Don Giorgio Govoni. With each child’s confession, the network of monsters grew.

Joey "Crazy Joe" Gallo and his President Street mob waged a deadly Mafia civil war with the Colombo crime family, and in particular, Carmine "the Snake" Persico. And on that fateful night of April 7, 1972, in a Little Italy restaurant, Gallo was assassinated...by Carmine "Sonny" DiBiasi. This is the true story of who really whacked "Crazy Joe" Gallo on that fateful night of April 7, 1972.

Umberto "Albert" Anastasia was born in Italy at the turn of the century. Five decades later, he would be gunned down in a barber shop in New York City. What happened in the years in between is one of the most brutal and fascinating stories in the history of American organized crime. This in-depth account of the man who became one of the most powerful and homicidal crime bosses of the 20th century from Mafia insider Frank Dimatteo is the first full-length book to chronicle Anastasia's bloody rise from immigrant to founder of the notorious killer's club Murder, Inc.

In 2003, local Genovese family captain "Big Al" Bruno got shot five times with a .45 caliber handgun as he walked out of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel social club in Springfield, Massachusetts. Since Vito Genovese took his empire north from New York City, a string of mobsters dating back a hundred years have operated in the Greater Springfield area. With this migration came murders, mayhem, treachery, criminal trials, and constant corruption.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

At first glance Gabriel Cardona is the poster-boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. His younger friend, Bart, as well as others from Gabriel's childhood join him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of the cartel's leadership.

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.

Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell is surfer and former war reporter Chas Smith's wild and unflinching look at the high-stakes world of surfing on Oahu's North Shore - a riveting, often humorous, account of beauty, greed, danger, and crime. For two months every winter, when Pacific storms make landfall, swarms of mainlanders, Brazilians, Australians, and Europeans flock to Oahu's paradisiacal North Shore for surfing's Triple Crown competition. Smith reveals how this influx transforms a sleepy strip of coast into a lawless, violent, drug-addled, and adrenaline-soaked mecca.

In the 1970s and thru the mid-1980s, the Chicago Outfit was the dominant organized crime family in Las Vegas, with business interests in several casinos. During those years the Outfit and its colleagues in Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland were using Sin City as a cash cow. Commonly referred to as the “skim,” unreported revenue from Outfit-controlled casinos was making its way out of Vegas by the bag full and ending up in the coffers of the crime bosses in those four locations.

The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don", John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways, an image perpetuated in popular Mafia mythology. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell.

In 1979, the gruesome slaying of a thirteen-year-old boy riveted the suburbs of Suffolk County, New York. As the county hustled to bring the case to a dubious resolution, a wayward local teenager emerged with a convenient story to tell. For his cooperation, Jimmy Burke was rewarded with a job as a cop. Thus began Burke’s unlikely ascent to the top of one of the country’s largest law enforcement jurisdictions. He and a crew of likeminded allies utilized vengeance, gangster tactics, and political leverage to become the most powerful and feared figures in their suburban empire.

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.

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.

Pablo Escobar was a mama’s boy who cherished his family and sang in the shower, yet he bombed a passenger plane and formed a death squad that used genital electrocution. Most Escobar biographies only provide a few pieces of the puzzle, but this action-packed 1000-page book reveals everything about the king of cocaine.

La crónica de un secuestro real magistralmente retratado por Gabriel García Márquez. "Era, en efecto, el automóvil de Maruja. Había transcurrido por lo menos media hora desde el secuestro, y sólo quedaban los rastros: el cristal del lado del chofer destruido por un balazo, la mancha de sangre y el granizo del vidrio en el asiento, y la sombra húmeda en el asfalto, de donde acababan de llevarse al chofer todavía con vida. El resto estaba limpio y en orden."

Mafia Spies is the definitive account of America’s most remarkable espionage plots ever - with CIA agents, mob hitmen, “kompromat” sex, presidential indiscretion, and James Bond-like killing devices together in a top-secret mystery full of surprise twists and deadly intrigue. In the early 1960s, two top gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, were hired by the CIA to kill Cuba’s Communist leader, Fidel Castro, only to wind up murdered themselves amidst Congressional hearings and a national debate about the JFK assassination.

When detective Maggie Oliver first discovered that children as young as 10 were being groomed, abused and trafficked for sex by gangs of men in the Rochdale area, she felt like a lonely voice calling for people to act. Banging on closed doors, it seemed that nobody was able or willing to help her save these vulnerable girls, but she couldn't just sit back while countless lives were being destroyed forever in plain sight. Instead, she launched a one-woman campaign to bring down these sickening gangs.

Meet Michael D. Blutrich, founder of Scores, the hottest strip club in New York history. A resourceful lawyer at one of the city's most respected firms, Blutrich fell into the skin trade almost by accident, but it was his legal savvy that made Scores the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dances and enabled him to neatly sidestep a law requiring dancers to wear pasties by instead covering their nipples with latex paint. Soon Scores was a home away from home for everyone from sports superstars and Oscar-winning actors to pop singers and political notables alike.

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on the streets of Brooklyn to the long-term jail sentences that didn't stop him from controlling his criminal empire, with the help of his brother - the equally kill-crazy Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico.