True Organized Crime

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.

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.

Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor.

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.

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.

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.

For months he was mired in administrative tasks, including the transcription of secret recordings of the DeCavalcante and Bonanno crime families. Eighteen months later, McElearney assisted in his squad's arrest of 39 Mafia suspects; he led the team arresting Anthony Capo, a DeCavalcante soldier linked to stock fraud and conspiracy to commit murder.

Umberto "Albert" Anastasia was born in Italy at the turn of the century. Five decades later, he would be gunned down in a barber shop in New York City. What happened in the years in between is one of the most brutal and fascinating stories in the history of American organized crime. This in-depth account of the man who became one of the most powerful and homicidal crime bosses of the 20th century from Mafia insider Frank Dimatteo is the first full-length book to chronicle Anastasia's bloody rise from immigrant to founder of the notorious killer's club Murder, Inc.

In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-20th-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.

In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associatesas the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Mafia. Author James Higdon takes listeners back to the 1970s and ‘80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers.

Behind the headlines and Hollywood myths lies the true story of America’s most secretive Mafia empire. The Genovese Crime Family: The Mafia’s Silent Superpower traces their rise from Prohibition-era gangs to shadow rulers of unions, Wall Street, construction, and even Las Vegas. While rivals crumbled under betrayals and FBI heat, the Genovese thrived through discipline, deception, and invisibility.

Mafia Hits, Misses, Wars, and Prosecutions is about pivotal events that changed the way the Italian American Mafia has done business since its establishment in the United States. This book covers the murders and wars that ended the careers of Mafia bosses from the Five Families and the prosecutors who built successful political careers following noteworthy mob convictions for ambitious prosecutors like Thomas Dewey, Robert F. Kennedy, and Rudolph Giuliani.

Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime. Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’. However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby. Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation.

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.

2019 erschien das Erstlingswerk von Adrian Langenscheid True Crime Deutschland und erstürmte aus dem Nichts die Siegertreppchen der genrerelevanten Kategorien. Knapp 2 Jahre und 6 Bücher später ist Langenscheid einer der bekanntesten True Crime-Autoren Deutschlands. Für das siebte Werk seiner Erfolgsserie recherchierte der Bestsellerautor aufs Neue einige der spektakulärsten deutschen Kriminalfälle der letzten Jahrzehnte.

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.

In 1997 a six-year-old boy questioned by authorities relayed disturbing stories of abuse. The more he talked, the more people were implicated in his shocking revelations. And he was only the first child to come forward. Within a year, fifteen more children with similar tales were transferred out of the Bassa region of Italy to protected locations. Their parents were accused of belonging to a satanic sect that performed sex rituals under the aegis of beloved local priest Don Giorgio Govoni. With each child’s confession, the network of monsters grew.

Michael Corleone Blanco, after more than fifteen years of research, writing, and reconstructing each of the stories of his life, his family, and his mother, Griselda Blanco, unveils not only truths but also presents a profound reflection on how drug trafficking, wars, and corruption claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people. Being part of the Blanco family was an arduous journey for each of them. However, Michael Corleone Blanco managed to transform his life. Now, he shares his own story and that of his mother, Griselda Blanco, with the hope that such a tale will never be repeated.

As featured on Netflix’s “Bad Sport,” the high-octane, Seabiscuit-meets-Scarface story of how Randy Lanier became a 1980s international sports star, soaring through the ranks of car racing while holding a dark secret: he was also one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history As a...

Naples et la Campanie sont dominées par la criminalité organisée - la camorra - sur fond de guerre entre clans rivaux et de trafics en tout genre : contrefaçon, armes, drogues et déchets toxiques. C'est ainsi que le Système, comme le désignent ses affiliés, accroît ses profits, conforte sa toute-puissance et se pose en avant-garde criminelle de l'économie mondialisée. Roberto Saviano, au péril de sa vie, a choisi l'écriture pour mener son combat contre la camorra. Il met au jour les structures économiques et territoriales de cette mafia surpuissante.