Organized Crime History

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 their birthplace in Phenix City, Alabama to the corruption of today, the Dixie Mafia’s tentacles stretch from coast to coast throughout the south. While most of the world denies their existence, this network of freelance criminals have flown under the radar for the most part since the 1950s. Their structure is completely different than that of La Cosa Nostra so people discount them as rogue bands of individual criminals. In reality it’s one massive web of corruption, lies, and murder.

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.

More than any other sport, boxing has a history of being easy to rig. There are only two athletes and one or both may be induced to accept a bribe; if not the fighters, then the judges or referee might be swayed. In such inviting circumstances, the mob moved into boxing in the 1930s and profited by corrupting a sport ripe for exploitation. In Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science, Jeffrey Sussman tells the story of the coercive and criminal underside of boxing, covering nearly the entire 20th century.

From the bizarre world of female Japanese motorcycle gangs to the historic rise and fall of London's 40 Elephants, the history of female organized crime is both fascinating and strange. These are the stories, both true and legendary, of the female crime bosses that broke the mold of feminine gentility. This is the secret world of female gangsters. Most of society thinks of women as the gentler sex, the sex with more compassion and empathy, not prone to violence. The truth is history, and current events, are littered with stories of violent women who do whatever it takes to get what they want; women who either revel in, or accept as needed, whatever acts of torture, murder, and depravity that are required to achieve their goals.

New York City, 1972: Bobby Comfort and Sammy "the Arab" Nalo were highly skilled jewel thieves who specialized in robbing luxury Manhattan hotels. (They once robbed Sophia Loren's suite, relieving the Italian actress of over $1 million in gems.) With the blessing of the Lucchese crime family, their next plot targeted the posh Pierre Hotel - host to kings and queens, presidents and aldermen, and the wealthiest of the wealthy.

From the beginnings of big-city police work to the rise of the Mafia, Rogues' Gallery is a colorful and captivating history of crime and punishment in the bustling streets of Old New York. Rogues' Gallery is a sweeping, epic tale of two revolutions, one feeding off the other, that played out on...

The Cartel That Went to War is a forensic look at one of the most violent and militarised organised crime groups of the modern era: Los Zetas. Emerging from within Mexico’s own military ranks, Los Zetas redefined what a cartel could be – not just traffickers of drugs, but an armed, diversified, and fearsome paramilitary enterprise whose reach extended into politics, economics, and the daily lives of communities.

In this stranger than fiction story of the massive crime network that rigged the McDonald’s monopoly game for decades, unlock new, exclusive interviews and stories that couldn't make it into the HBO docuseries, McMillion$. Perfect for readers of Argo, The Wizard of Lies, and Enron: The...

In a small village in New York, mob bosses from all over the country - Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Cuba boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Paul Castellano - were nabbed by Sergeant Edgar D. Croswell as they gathered to sort out a bloody war of succession. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had adamantly denied the existence of the Mafia, but Robert Kennedy immediately recognized the shattering importance of the Apalachin summit....

¿Qué tiene que ver el asesinato de tres mujeres y seis niños, a mitad del desierto, con la disputa por la riqueza minera de un país? En apariencia nada, si eso no hubiese ocurrido en México… La riqueza minera mexicana se encuentra intrínsecamente ligada a la violencia. En las últimas décadas, cientos de mineras han aplicado un modelo de despojo de tierras y desplazamiento de poblaciones donde existen altos intereses extractivos, muchas veces apoyadas por el crimen organizado.

A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, American Kleptocracy offers the first explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known.

Author Ron Chepesiuk chronicles the little known history of organized crime in Harlem.

African American organized crime has had as significant an impact on its constituent community as Italian, Jewish, and Irish organized crime has had on theirs. Gangsters are every bit as colorful, intriguing, and powerful as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and have a fascinating history in gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing. In the late 1800s, Harlem became a highly fashionable neighborhood.

Imagine a valley so pristine it is the envy of all places near it. Complete with soft rolling hills, clear-water brooks, thermal springs, lakes for water sports, and crystal mines for discovering quartz, plus the only diamond mine in America. It was so attractive. The first on the scene were native Indians followed by explorers, and by 1832, Hot Springs became the first US National Park. Of course, something this special was instantly noticed. And then along came the settlers, proprietors, and anyone interested in turning a dollar.

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.

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.

Anticipating a new dawn of freedom after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians could hardly have foreseen the reality of their future a decade later: a country impoverished and controlled at every level by organized crime. This riveting book views the 1990s reform period through the experiences of individual citizens, revealing the changes that have swept Russia and their effect on Russia's age-old ways of thinking.

El retrato demoledor de una dinastía cuya fortuna se construyó gracias a Valium y cuya reputación fue destruida por OxyContin.

Dive into the clandestine world of one of New York's most enigmatic and feared crime syndicates with this comprehensive exploration of the Bonanno Mafia Crime Family. This meticulously researched book unveils the dark and complex web of activities, power struggles, and influential figures that shaped the Bonanno family's legacy. From its roots in the 1890s under the guidance of founder Salvatore Maranzano, this narrative traces the Bonanno family's rise to power in the American underworld.

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.