True Organized Crime

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.

Burn Boston Burn is an astounding true crime narration. A conspiracy of nine men, including three Boston cops and a Boston firefighter, burned Boston and surrounding communities in the early 1980s due to tax-cutting measures that caused layoffs of hundreds of police and firefighters. Over two years, these fire buffs-turned-arsonists torched 264 buildings, causing millions of dollars in damages and hundreds of injuries. The city was ablaze with nightly fires, sirens wailing through the streets, and people too afraid to sleep.

Was a hacker diverting phone calls meant for Las Vegas escort services? The FBI wanted to know, and so did associates of a New York Mafia family. In one of the most unusual undercover operations ever, the FBI had an agent acting as a manager in a real Las Vegas escort service. Federal agents expected to find prostitution and drugs in the Las Vegas escort industry. What their investigation uncovered was even more serious.

One of the biggest scores in Mafia history, the Lufthansa Airlines heist of 1978 has become the stuff of Mafia legend - and a decades-long investigation that continues to this day. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony DeStefano sheds new light on this legendary unsolved case using recent evidence from the 2015 trial of 80-year-old Mafia don Vincent Asaro, who for the first time speaks out on his role in the fateful Lufthansa heist.

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.

In "Nemesis" si intrecciano quattro storie. La storia di Antonio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, giovane brasiliano onesto, gran lavoratore e padre premuroso, che, per pagare le cure della sua bambina affetta da una rara malattia, non riesce a trovare altra via se non quella del mondo della droga, dove diventa Nem, boss dei boss di Rocinha, e infine l'uomo più ricercato di tutto il Brasile.

Dangerous Odds - a true crime thriller memoir - is the explosive, never-been-told, behind-the-scenes look into the world of illegal sports betting, revealed by an insider. Marisa Lankester, a young beauty with a privileged New York upbringing, stumbles into the back door of the largest illegal sports betting organization in the US, run by Ron (The Cigar) Sacco. Marisa, a thrill-seeker, maneuvers herself into this mob-run men-only bookmaking operation and becomes a trusted insider.

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and Steinberg had spent over 50 hours discussing his life experiences. The Number is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg's journeys to the places and people of Wentzel's past.

Although much has been written about Al Capone, there has not been-until now-a complete history of organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition. This exhaustively researched book covers the entire period from 1920 to 1933. Author John J. Binder, a recognized authority on the history of organized crime in Chicago, discusses all the important bootlegging gangs in the city and the suburbs and also examines the other major rackets, such as prostitution, gambling, labor and business racketeering, and narcotics.

The city of Salinas, California, is the birthplace of John Steinbeck and the setting for his epic masterpiece East of Eden, but it is also the home of Nuestra Familia, one of the most violent gangs in the United States. Born in the prisons of California in the late 1960s, Nuestra Familia expanded to control drug trafficking and extortion operations throughout the northern half of the state and left a trail of bodies in its wake.

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.

Numa realidade paralela ao cotidiano sangrento da guerra às drogas nas periferias, emergem aqui diversas tramas, nas quais circulam os mais variados tipos: dos jovens de classe alta que ganham dinheiro com o delivery de maconha orgânica nos bairros mais nobres de São Paulo aos ricos empresários que controlam o transporte aéreo de cocaína, ligando produtores e clientes no Brasil.

Brought up in the East End of London, son of a policeman, John was already dabbling in crime by his early teens, ending up in a young offenders institute and then a borstal. He'd left home at 15, and the only occupation he knew was theft. He landed a job doing security at concerts for stars such as Simply Red, Queen, and Bruce Springsteen, and was lured deeper into the world of drugs and crime. By his 20s, he was well-acquainted with the capitals criminal underworld.

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

A Gangsters Guide to Al Capone takes you deep into the world of America's most infamous mob boss. From his rise in the brutal streets of Chicago to his iron grip on the Prohibition-era underworld, this book explores Capone's empire built on bootlegging, corruption, and deadly violence. Discover the man behind the legend, his ruthless tactics, and the law enforcement efforts that finally brought him down. A fast-paced, gripping look at the king of organised crime.

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps 500 body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit men to gun down 41 police officers and prison guards in two days. In Southern Mexico a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans.

This compelling nonfiction work takes the reader into a convoluted eight month infiltration of a group of squalid criminals trafficking in wildlife by two undercover game wardens. Latham doesn't hold back on the language in this book nor does he downplay the vile acts that occurred against both the human and wildlife victims in this twisted tale. If you think poachers are just a bunch of good old boys out for a bit of meat, this true story is bound to reshape your opinion.

Recently fans have been absorbed in Curse of the Chippendales. All of these stories rise to fame, to end so tragically. Many questions whether Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or was he silenced for knowing about too many powerful men's secret affairs with under-aged girls. Same types of questions are now arising in Banerjee's suicide. Did he have too much information on married men's fetishes with his male dancers?

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 A Bright and Guilty Place, an exhilarating tale of murder in L.A., Richard Rayner finds the source of the city's darkness in real-life events that unfolded in the 1920s, when the booming early years of L.A. started to shade into the Depression, and the city of sunshine revealed the hidden darkness and corruption at its heart.