True Organized Crime

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

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.

Widely known in the criminal underworld as the 'Black Widow', Linda Calvey spent the first half of her life running with the UK's top gangsters, robbing banks and rubbing shoulders with the Kray twins. That is, until, in 1990, her lover Robbie Cook was murdered at point-blank, and she found herself falsely convicted. Linda was sent away for decades, and would go on to become Britain's longest-serving female prisoner. This is her story of life inside, and how she learnt to survive the many years she spent behind bars.

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.

The Calabrese family of Chicago is a close-knit, middle-class, multi-generational Italian-Irish-American clan. They operate family businesses. They work day and night striving for the American Dream. All three sons forge a bond with their controlling father, Frank Sr., and their soft-spoken favorite uncle, Nick. As a boy, the oldest son, Frank Jr., realizes that his father and uncle are also "made" members of another close-knit family: the outfit.

The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico’s powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren’t often connected in our heated discussions of gun control - but they should be. In Ioan Grillo’s groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.

On the streets of the tough Dublin inner-city neighbourhood where he grew up, Gerry Hutch was perceived as an ordinary decent criminal, a quintessential Robin Hood figure who fought the law—and won. To the rest of the world he was an elusive criminal godfather called the Monk: an enigmatic criminal mastermind and the hunted leader of one side in the deadliest gangland feud in Irish criminal history.

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.

J. Jesús Esquivel, autor de La D.E.A. en México, ha conseguido develar los entresijos del narcotráfico en Estados Unidos al sumergirse en la lectura de incontables expedientes judiciales, además de entrevistar a informantes clave.

Testimonios de sobrevivientes y secuestradores. El secuestro en México es un delito que ha revolucionado y crecido de forma voraz: lo mismo destroza la vida de personas millonarias que de hombres y mujeres con escasos recursos.

Frank DiMatteo was born into a family of mob hit men. His father and godfather were shooters and bodyguards for infamous Mafia legends, the Gallo brothers. His uncle was a capo in the Genovese crime family and bodyguard to Frank Costello. Needless to say, DiMatteo saw and heard things that a boy shouldn't see or hear. He knew everybody in the neighborhood. And they knew him...and his family. And does he have some wild stories to tell....

The grandson and great-grandson of Chicago police officers, Chicago Police Detective James Sherlock was CPD through and through. His career had seen its share of twists and turns, from his time working undercover to thwart robberies on Chicago's L trains to his years as a homicide detective. He thought he had seen it all. But on this day, he was at the records center to see the case file for the murder of John Hughes, who was 17 years old when he was gunned down on Chicago's Southwest Side in 1976. The case's threads led everywhere.

In 2006, J Deeh was hired as a video editor for Pornobec, a mysterious adult film company based in Montreal, Quebec. By 2008, J Deeh and his partner Miguel had become two of the leading porn directors in the nation, creating an endless stream of explicit films while struggling to maintain control over a lifestyle increasingly riddled with sexual temptation, sadistic bosses, wild parties, dangerous psychopaths, clashing egos, doomed relationships, and criminal organizations.

Chicago was the worldwide leader in gangster wars and bootlegging in the 1920s, as Al Capone set the stage for his tremendous success and popularity. When he was safely away in prison, the Chicago Outfit expanded into more rackets involving gambling and loan sharking, making bosses like Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo rich beyond even Capone’s wildest dreams.

A vain man of good looks, small means, and no family links to the mob, Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano steadily worked his way up to acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, becoming its leader when official boss Joseph Massino went to the clink in 2003. But at a time when the Mob was crawling with secret operatives and informants caving to government pressure to flip, Basciano obeyed the code of La Cosa Nostra. "I got faith in one guy," he told a group of mobsters during a secretly taped meeting.

June 20, 1991. A five-man hit team waited in a car outside the Long Island home of Victor Orena, the acting crime boss of the Colombo crime family. Orena recognized the vehicle—and managed to escape with his life. Over the next year, more shots would be fired in what would become the last major mob war in New York's crime-soaked history—and one of the bloodiest. The war ended with Orena's 1992 arrest and conviction for racketeering.

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.

John Gilligan is no altar boy, by his own admission. One of Ireland's most infamous criminals and drug lords, and widely believed in the court of public opinion to have ordered the cold-blooded murder of crime reporter Veronica Guerin, he remains a defiant figure. In this remarkable book—the first of its kind—journalist Jason O'Toole distills hours of sensational face-to-face, no-holds-barred interviews with the feared criminal into a fast-paced and jaw-dropping account of the Irish gangland scene.

Buffalo has housed its fair share of thugs and mobsters. Besides common criminals and bank robbers, a powerful crime family headed by local boss Stefano Magaddino emerged in the 1920s. Close to Canada, Niagara Falls and Buffalo were perfect avenues through which to transport booze, and Magaddino and his Mafiosi maintained a stranglehold on the city until his death in 1974. Local mob expert Michael Rizzo takes a tour of Buffalo's mafia exploits everything from these brutal gangsters' favorite hangouts to secret underground tunnels to murder.

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.