True Organized Crime

As he stumbled through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans of punk rock music, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious white power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When his mentor was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison, 16-year-old Picciolini took over the man's role as the leader of an infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group.

From its beginnings in the 1890s, Miami Beach has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach was the training ground for half a million army recruits, even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar boom, the city's luck gave out. But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans arrived by the boatload.

From the Bowery Boys and the Five Points Gang through the rise of the Jewish "Kosher Nostra" and the ascendance of the Italian Mafia, mobsters have played a major role in the city's history, lurking just around the corner or inside that nondescript building. Bill "the Butcher" Poole, Paul Kelly, Monk Eastman, "Lucky" Luciano, Carlo Gambino, Meyer Lansky, Mickey Spillane, John Gotti - each held sway over New York neighborhoods that nurtured them and gave them power.

He seems like a typical 16-year-old boy except that Mikey is walking the knife edge of crime. He’s tough and good with his fists, but when journalist Shane Dunphy is offered the chance to write his story, he discovers a lost, vulnerable child, in danger and desperate for help. Shane descends into the perilous underworld of organised crime and discovers that the glamour of gangland life is riven with brutality and murder. Far from providing a means of survival for boys from broken families, the price they pay is often with their life.

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.

Considered by Ty Cobb as the "finest natural hitter in the history of the game," "Shoeless Joe" Jackson is ranked with the greatest players to ever step onto a baseball diamond. With a career .356 batting average - which is still ranked third all-time - the man from Pickens County, South Carolina, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest players in the sport's history. That is until the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which shook baseball to its core.

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.

Countless criminals have made their mark on Chicago and the surrounding communities. Chicago Sun-Times journalist Jon Seidel takes listeners back in time to the days when H. H. Holmes lurked in his "Murder Castle" and guys named Al Capone and John Dillinger ruled the underworld. Drawing upon years of reporting, and with special access to the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times archives, Jon Seidel explains how men like Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, and Richard Speck tried to get away with history’s most disturbing crimes.

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 the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town’s growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn’t enough. The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America. But they would wait until after the presidential election, so that their actions wouldn’t hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning.

Pittsburgh’s mafia may not have been as infamous as New York’s Five Families or Chicago’s Outfit, but for nearly a century, the LaRocca Mafia Crime Family ruled Pittsburgh’s underworld with an iron fist. This is the untold story of power, betrayal, and survival, from the blood-soaked streets of Wylie Avenue to the backroom deals that shaped the Steel City’s economy. This book uncovers the full story of Pittsburgh’s organized crime history, from the first dons to the final days of the once-mighty LaRocca family.

Enter the riveting and volatile world of the Burger Bar Boys, Birmingham's infamous gang, in this relentless chronicle of power, violence, and redemption. Gangland Birmingham: The Rise and Fall of the Burger Bar Boys unravels the intricate narrative of one of the UK's most notorious gangs from their humble beginnings to their inevitable downfall.

When Bugsy Siegel was executed, ruthless Mickey Cohen, a former pro boxer and cunning provocateur, took over criminal activity in L.A., a move sanctioned by Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. Attaining immense power and dominance, from the late 1940s until 1976 the semi-literate Angeleno became an above-the-fold newspaper name, accumulating a remarkable count of more than 1,000 front pages in Los Angeles papers alone, and hundreds of articles in national and international periodicals.

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

Stephen L. Carter delves into his past and retrieves the inspiring story of his grandmother’s life. She was Black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s - and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected 20 lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

On a cold afternoon in February 1991, a frightening new drug hit the streets of New York City, a synthetic narcotic marketed in packets labeled “Tango & Cash.” As police scrambled to warn heroin users of the danger, the overdose victims began piling up in hospital emergency rooms and county morgues across three states.

As part of Scotland Yard's undercover team, it was Peter Bleksley's job to infiltrate some of the capital's most dangerous gangs and bring them down. For ten years, he went deeper into the criminal underworld than any cop had before him. Meeting with dealers, gangland leaders and members of the IRA and the Mafia, he lived the life of the Great Pretender, constantly changing his identity to ensure his cover was never blown. Whilst undeniably thrilling work at times, it came at a heavy price.

Early in the Prohibition era, Moe Sedway became part of the New York organized crime gang led by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. A loyal and highly effective operative for Siegel, Sedway eventually gained monopoly control of the race wire service in Las Vegas and also became an effective casino manager of the Las Vegas Club, El Cortez, and the Rex Club. Moe Sedway is now at last brought out into the light in this riveting tale of the sensational life and times of one of Vegas's most mysterious and little-known figures.

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.