True Organized Crime

In 2005, a team of criminals tunneled beneath the streets of Fortaleza, Brazil, and pulled off one of the largest bank heists in history. Disguised as landscapers, they built an 80-meter tunnel, cut into the Banco Central’s vault, and vanished with 3.5 tons of cash—nearly $70 million. This gripping true-crime account reveals the daring plan, the nationwide manhunt, and the betrayals that turned fortune into bloodshed. A story of ambition, greed, and the fragility of institutions, it remains Brazil’s most infamous “heist of the century.”

Over the course of the 19th century, the people of Sicily found themselves at the center of a struggle for freedom, one that ended up being long and often very bloody. It was during these crucial years of struggle that the Sicilian mafia, La Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"), started to take shape. Cosa Nostra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Sicilian Mafia examines how the world’s most famous mob formed, its inner workings, and the events that made it feared around the world.

Auf den Straßen deutscher Großstädte tobt ein Machtkampf: Kriminelle arabisch-stämmige Clans haben in Berlin, Bremen, Dortmund oder Essen über Jahre Großstadtkieze erobert – und kaum jemand hat sie aufgehalten. Nun hat der Staat den Kampf mit den Familienbanden aufgenommen. Bereits seit 2003 verfolgen die SPIEGEL-TV-Reporter Thomas Heise und Claas Meyer-Heuer die kriminellen Machenschaften dieser Clans.

How much do you know about the organized crime involvement of Irish descendants in the United States? How much do you know of the impact of British rule in Ireland? Religious conflicts? The backing of parliamentary and paramilitary groups by criminal gangs? Gun-running and drug-smuggling? A History of Irish Organized Crime is the perfect book to help you develop your knowledge and learn about social history, including the current impact of Brexit on the Irish border “backstop”.

Society has created many great men; yet before they were great, they were persecuted. During their plights, they stood up for what they believed in; even when others were afraid to stand. They were galvanized by truths, which created followers. It was then that trends emerged. The trends contradicted the norm and uprooted communities, which created fear. Society rejects what it does not understand. The unknown makes them tremble. The thought makes them cower.

Enfance ou folie? Cette collection d'histoires commence avec un jeune garçon dont l'intelligence, la capacité et la détermination sont plus en accord avec un adulte plutôt qu'avec un enfant de six ans curieux, qui nous est présenté dans la première histoire.La normalité ne fera jamais partie de la vie de Marcel Pontbriand. Orphelin à l'âge tendre de 14 ans et avec seulement quelques centimes à son nom, vous découvrirez comment il s'est rendu sur les routes de glace du Nord du Canada et a fait face à la peur.

Drawing together a remarkably wide-range of original sources, including interviews with relatives of the 1920s gangsters, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story adds a new dimension to the true history of Birmingham's underworld and fact behind its fiction.

For a quarter century, Luis Antonio Navia worked as a high-level cocaine transporter for all of the major Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, including Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, and flooded the United States and Europe with cocaine before his dramatic arrest in Venezuela in 2000 during the 12-nation Operation Journey. The story of Navia’s rise, fall, takedown, imprisonment, and redemption is expertly researched and told by acclaimed biographer Jesse Fink.

Rear Admiral Terry McKnight, USN (Ret.) served as Commander, Counter-Piracy Task Force - Gulf of Aden. After his tour in the waters off the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, he retired from the Navy and began seriously researching the subject. Pirate Alley explores every aspect of Somali piracy, from how the pirates operate to how the actions of a relative handful of youthful criminals and their bosses have impacted the world economy. The book examines various answers to the question: "How do you solve a problem like Somalia?"

Timmy Overton of Austin and Jerry Ray James of Odessa were football stars who traded athletics for lives of crime. The original rebels without causes, nihilists with Cadillacs and Elvis hair, the Overton gang and their associates formed a ragtag white trash mafia that bedazzled Austin law enforcement for most of the 1960s. Tied into a loose network of crooked lawyers, pimps, and used car dealers who became known as the "traveling criminals," they burglarized banks and ran smuggling and prostitution rings all over Texas.

Pittsburgh's small but lucrative Cosa Nostra mafia family was on the rise in 1985 with a newly crowned Don . . . The men who came to dominate the rackets in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and West Virginia opened the family to massive profits from drug trafficking and a street tax on other criminal activities. At the same time, the Youngstown, Ohio, faction of the family launched a brutal mob war against the weakening Cleveland mafia and the Altoona, Pennsylvania, crew violently clamped down on their city.

The heist was flawless. The silence that followed wasn’t. In the explosive second volume of The Great Bookie Robbery Trilogy, A.J. Salara returns to 1970s Melbourne to chronicle the unraveling of a crew once believed to be untouchable. The money is gone, the job is done—but the danger has just begun. The perfect crime gave way to a perfect storm of secrecy, suspicion, and betrayal. Blood & Betrayal isn’t a story about how the heist was pulled off. It’s about what came after—when the celebration faded and fear took root.

Delving deeply into corroborated family documentation, Charles Bufalino separates fact from fiction and corrects the presumed history of his ruthlessly enterprising ancestors to paint an intimate portrait of one of the most storied crime families of the twentieth century.

The Gambino family is a prime example of organized crime families and how their in-house fighting and varying styles of leadership have defined the age of the mob. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the family went through a series of names and leaders, but they always remained at the top of the New York mob regime and retained their Sicilian ties.

Minutes into this rollicking good story, the central figure, Lee Chagra, comes alive: "[Lee] washed his morning cocaine down with strong coffee and remembered the time he had met Sinatra, how genuine he appeared." Everything you'll need to know and remember about Chagra - the son of Syrian immigrants to Mexico and an attorney who spun the world of dope-running, border-crossing, high-living outlaws along the El Paso-Juarez border around his finger like the gaudy rings he favored - can be neatly summarized in that one sentence.

In the early 2000s, Dave Gunn and his brother Colin built the Bestwood Cartel, a multi-million-pound empire based on drugs, extortion and violent crime during a time when Nottingham was labelled Britain's gun crime capital. Much has been written about the Gunn Brothers in the media and books such as Hoods, but no gang leader has ever detailed the real-life warfare in Nottingham in the early 2000s. In Bestwood Boss, Dave Gunn sets the record straight with the first ever insider’s account of what led to the blood-soaked ganglands.

A vivid, wild ride through a century of Mafia lore, this book tells stories of organized crime rings that have settled in Florida and made the state their base of operations for bootlegging, gambling, extortion, money laundering, and drug running.

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.

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.

De criminele nieuwlichter Jos Leijdekkers, alias Bolle Jos , staat volop in de belangstelling. Ondanks zijn jonge leeftijd wordt de meest gezochte crimineel van Nederland de 'Godfather van het Zuiden' genoemd. Hoogmoed is hem niet vreemd: beïnvloed door zijn contacten in Zuid-Amerika laat hij zich graag aanspreken met zijn bijnamen El Presidente of El Ganador, 'de winnaar'. Al meer dan drie jaar is hij voortvluchtig. Zijn naam prijkt op de Most Wanted-lijst van Europol. Wie is deze Bolle Jos , die in weerwil van zijn koosnaampje een internationale topcrimineel is?