True Organized Crime

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.

Secretive - even reclusive - Russell Bufalino quietly built his organized crime empire in the decades between Prohibition and the Carter presidency. His reach extended far beyond the coal country of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and quaint Amish farms near Lancaster. Bufalino had a hand in global, national, and local politics of the largest American cities, many of its major industries, and controlled the powerful Teamsters Union. His influence also reached the highest levels of Pennsylvania government and halls of Congress, and his legacy left a culture of corruption that continues to this day.

Roberto Saviano nous emmène dans les coulisses du crime organisé partout dans le monde et explore la vie de ceux qui sont morts au nom de la liberté d'expression. Articulé en trois parties (l'histoire des héros qui se sont opposés à la mafia, la vie des grands boss, et les organisations criminelles internationales) "Main basse sur le monde" est un documentaire audio qui explore les frontières de ces organisations souterraines et le monde paralèlle sur lequel règne le crime organisé.

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.

The gritty prison memoir of Michaella McCollum, one half of the infamous 'Peru Two', imprisoned in a Peruvian jail for attempting to smuggle 11kg of cocaine from Peru to Madrid in August 2013. She was just a regular girl, spending the summer working at a bar in Ibiza, until she was approached by a man who asked her if she'd like to make some quick, easy money...and it would change her life forever. This is the truth of her time in prison, told through her own diaries and letters to her mother, family and friends.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano takes you inside John Gotti's inner circle to reveal the dark hearts and violent deeds of the most remorseless and cold-blooded characters in organized crime. Men so vicious even the other mafia families were terrified of them. Meet Gotti's Boys....

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself.

All the varieties of power—star, political, sexual, criminal and emotional—are on show in this definitive, untold story of Frank Sinatra and the Mafia. Drawing on an enormous archive of previously unseen records held by international law agencies, the FBI, the CIA and big-city police departments, Rothmiller and Thompson reveal Sinatra’s pact with the Mob in shocking detail. With additional evidence from decades of investigations and testimony, they expose Sinatra’s lifelong association with the Mafia, which he always denied, and its deadly collateral damage.

Todos saben que el oficio periodístico significa resistencia y muchas veces arriesgar la propia vida. Estamos en uno de los países más peligrosos para ejercer el periodismo, no sólo por el acecho de los criminales, sino porque el poder corruptor de éstos ha convertido a policías y funcionarios del gobierno en sus aliados.

Giovanni's Ring is the story of "Giovanni Rocco," a New Jersey police officer, known undercover as "Giovanni Gatto," who was the mysterious agent at the epicenter of Operation Charlie Horse, a federal undercover operation that ultimately brought down ten members and associates of New Jersey's DeCavalcante Mafia family, the criminal organization known as "the real Sopranos." The book is not simply a chronicle of Giovanni Rocco's adventures in the murky and dangerous Mafia world he inhabited, but also a fascinating window into the psychological struggles that such a life entails.

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.

Havana Nocturne takes listeners back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Thanks to strong ties with the island's brutal dictator, President Batista, the mob soon owned the biggest luxury hotels and casinos and launched an unprecedented tourist boom. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others.

George Anastasia exposes what it really means to be married to the mob—and fathered by it. As revealed in their personal accounts, life for the wife and sons of Thomas "Tommy Del" DelGiorno became a descent into hell. In the end, guilty of a raft of crimes that included multiple murders, Tommy Del served less than a year in prison in exchange for turning government witness during a dozen trials against fellow mobsters. Based on years of reporting, thousands of pages of court testimony, and extensive interviews, Mobfather takes the listener deep into the heart of corruption.

The definitive portrait of the powerful, corruption-ridden Teamsters union and its legendary president Jimmy Hoffa - organizer, gangster, convict, and conspirator - with a new afterword by the author.

Meet Michael D. Blutrich, founder of Scores, the hottest strip club in New York history. A resourceful lawyer at one of the city's most respected firms, Blutrich fell into the skin trade almost by accident, but it was his legal savvy that made Scores the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dances and enabled him to neatly sidestep a law requiring dancers to wear pasties by instead covering their nipples with latex paint. Soon Scores was a home away from home for everyone from sports superstars and Oscar-winning actors to pop singers and political notables alike.

In his second memoir, a true crime story, David Alan Arnold takes us on a life and death adventure in his helicopter as an aerial cameraman for Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch. He also gets into adventures at home, when he picks a fight with an organized crime ring that took over a school bus stop. David's town has so few residents that good people are afraid to speak about the crimes, for fear of reprisal.

What do Wyatt Earp, Belle Gunness, Big Foot the Renegade, Billy the Kid, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and The Black Hand have in common? They were all subjects of true crime newspaper reporting in the 1800s. Now their stories and that of many others are brought together in their original form in this compilation by New York Times best-selling author Mike Rothmiller. These classic works of journalism resurrect astonishing stories that will take the listener back to when these horrific tales mesmerized a nation.

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.

In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was 21, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit.

The ‘Ndrangheta (pronounced an-drang-et-ah) is a close neighbor of the Cosa Nostra and currently considered the most powerful (and difficult to spell) criminal organization in Italy. The ‘Ndrangheta is centered around Calabria, the most southwestern region of Italy, almost touching the Sicilian city of Messina. Though it began as far back as the late 19th century, it was not until the 1950s that the ‘Ndrangheta started to spread its tentacles throughout Italy and then across the entire globe, forming an empire that now ranges from Australia and Turkey, to Chile to Canada.