True Organized Crime

Al DeMeo will never forget the day in 1992 when a coworker taunted him with a copy of the hot new book Murder Machine, chronicling the horrific criminal life of DeMeo's father, Roy, the head of the most deadly gang in organized crime. The moment sent DeMeo into a psychological tailspin: How could he have spent his life looking up to, and loving, a vicious killer?

Historians have previously glazed over the Mafia's formative years. In this first volume, Ferrante explores its Sicilian roots, before following a cast of larger-than-life characters who arrived as fugitives on American shores. Through these and other lives - including legendary mobsters Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel - Ferrante tells the extraordinary story of the Mafia's rise in America, as they provided alcohol during Prohibition, created the gambling mecca Las Vegas and practically took over the island of Cuba.

Slava Pastuk made a decision that changed his life when he became involved in a global drug-smuggling conspiracy to import cocaine into Australia. Bad Trips is a story of crime, sex, drugs, and rap music, with a backdrop of one of the world’s hippest and most influential websites, VICE.

Fans of Peter James and his best-selling Roy Grace series of crime novels know that his audiobooks draw on in-depth research into the lives of Brighton and Hove police and are set in a world every bit as gritty as the real thing. His friend, Graham Bartlett, was a long-serving detective in the city once described as Britain's crime capital. Together, in Death Comes Knocking, they have given a gripping account of the city's most challenging cases.

Social scientist and crime writer James A. Buccellato explores Detroit's struggle with gang violence, public corruption, and the politics of vice during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century.

In a secret meeting in 1981, a master thief named Louis Royce gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime. As a kid, Royce had visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made a habit of sneaking in at night to find a good place to sleep. He knew the Museum's security was lax, and he gave this information to a boss of the Boston criminal underworld. It took years before the Museum was hit. But when it finally happened, it quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history.

Martin Suarez, a legend within the FBI who specialized in Colombian drug cartels, holds the record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. As his alter ego Manny, Martin followed the unspoken rules of the cartels: He knew the right lingo to use, the right whiskey to drink, the right watch to wear, the wrong questions to ask. He smuggled over $1 billion worth of cocaine into the United States for the Medellín Cartel and, as his cover deepened, he graduated to become a high-level money launderer for the North Coast Cartel.

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.

On December 9, 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her Durham, NC home. Her scalp was laced with deep incisions, and her blood was strewn from outside to inside the house. The sinister truth of that night turned her murder into North Carolina's most enigmatic criminal case, capturing media attention across the globe.

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.

This is the unbelievable, unforgettable, unparalleled story of an ordinary guy whose attempts to become famous doing the thing he wanted most—become a world class race car driver—devolved into a you-can’t-make-this-up tale of one of the biggest crime rings and drug scandals of the 1980s. Now, with the help of New York Times bestselling author A.J. Baime, Randy tells the whole truth for the first time ever, a gripping narrative unlike any other, a sports story for the ages, and shocking a true crime epic.

A church's lies, harassment, abuse, and deceit. A must-listen true story of a girl who took a courageous stand against an empire. This is a true story of a second-generation Scientologist, born into the lifestyle and strict structure of this church, and the extreme harassment and abuse that followed the escape from this so-called religion. Many in this day and age have heard of the Church of Scientology, but are unaware of the true scope of its reach, and the depth of its grip in our society’s structure.

Called "a triumphant piece of reporting", Snowblind recounts the exploits of former cocaine smuggler Zachary Swan, chronicling his elaborate scams and outstanding success in the early 1970s.

In the fall of 1969, a public execution in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn earned Joey a mention in the New York Daily News and a twenty-grand payout from the mob. On the surface, his next job seemed just as routine: The bosses suspected their trusted numbers controller, Joe Squillante, was skimming the nightly bets to settle personal debts. Joey gave Squillante two weeks to live.

You see, the actual fact of the matter is that at one time I did work in Amity where this series of adventures played out. Yes, I carried a badge; it was number 108. I also carry a Glock and well…sometimes truth really is much stranger than that which the mind can create!

William Elliott Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World's Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open.

I've written what I call an autobiographical, historical book. As you listen, you'll follow my rise from just a 1970s kid selling drugs out of my mom's house into a life of crime lasting more than 22 years and the road that took me from 3 finger ozs and 1/2 grams of Blow to moving tons of weed and thousands of pounds of Cocaine. And from the fast life of Cigarette boats, racing cars, and Learjets—to just hanging on for dear life. You'll listen about the history of how the drug wars started and how, along with some of the biggest smugglers in the world, I was more than willing to help.

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.

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.

In this fascinating and comprehensive examination of the underside of globalization, Moises Naim illuminates the struggle between traffickers and the hamstrung bureaucracies trying to control them. From illegal migrants to drugs to weapons to laundered money to counterfeit goods, the black market produces enormous profits that are reinvested to create new businesses, enable terrorists, and even to take over governments. Naim reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard - and so necessary - to contain them.