True Organized Crime

Here's what we now know: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Mafia contract killers hired by Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello. Kennedy was killed in that city because it was the only place in the country where a crime of that magnitude could be committed without fear of punishment. Long-time local district attorney Henry Wade, an LBJ crony who would have sole jurisdiction over the prosecution of those responsible, had been corrupted by the local Civello crime family. Lyndon B. Johnson, while a U.S. senator during the 1950s, had accepted bribes from the same mobsters so that they could avoid deportation.

Imagine walking alongside a retired Chicago police officer as he recalls some of the most chilling, bizarre, and noteworthy true-life crime cases of his career. Author Frank Goff shares the inner workings of law enforcement and the politics involved, but also the realities of the streets. Sometimes humorous, sometimes heart-wrenching, these stories transport us into the shoes of real cops, real criminals, and real victims. The bottom line? Policing is a calling for the very few at great personal cost and sacrifice. Here's to the men and women of law enforcement who protect and serve. ...

John "Sonny" Franzese reportedly committed his first murder at the age of fourteen. As a "made man" for the Colombo crime family, he operated out of his Long Island home specializing in racketeering, fraud, and other illicit deeds he would deny to his dying day. His career in organized crime spanned over eight decades - and he was sentenced to fifty years in prison for robbery. This is the true story of an old-school Mafioso as it's never been told. Newsday reporter S. J. Peddie interviewed Franzese in prison and uncovered a lifetime of shocking secrets from the legend himself.

Drug Lord, a firsthand account of drug dealing, murder, and corruption, tells of drug kingpin Pablo Acosta, who smuggled up to 20 tons of cocaine each year into the United States before treachery brought about his downfall and grisly death.

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind.

In this gritty New York Times best-seller, the true story of a crooked deal between the FBI and the Irish Mob is exposed. By providing a penetrating look into the mean streets of mid-1970s South Boston, the author shows how two kids from the neighborhood cross paths again years later, ending in the biggest informant scandal in FBI history.

Mobster Al "Scarface" Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Robert Stroud, aka the Birdman: only the most violent, desperate criminals went to Alcatraz Island, called "The Rock" and known for its harsh conditions. This gripping true crime classic, originally written in 1963 and newly reissued, tells the story of life on The Rock and of 14 ingenious escape attempts by the prisoners.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut Wellesley boy who entered outlaw culture on a trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He became a member of the Hippie Mafia, traveling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favor of marijuana and hashish.

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.

When Scott Payne was growing up, he never envisioned a future that included what happened on Halloween night 2019. Out in the woods of Georgia, he tried desperately to save a goat from being sacrificed in a ritual by a group of neo-Nazis without revealing that he was actually an undercover agent. Now, this retired FBI agent reveals how and why he infiltrated the rapidly growing American Nazi group, The Base. Known as the “Hillbilly Donnie Brasco,” Payne was guided through some of the most terrifying assignments in the FBI’s history by his devotion to his family and his Christian faith.

Author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country's most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.

After 40 years in the Hells Angels, George Christie was ready to retire. As president of the high-profile Ventura charter of the club, he had been the yin to Sonny Barger's yang. Barger was the reckless figurehead and de facto world leader of the Hells Angels. Christie was the negotiator, the spokesman, the thinker, the guy who smoothed things out.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano presents the rise and fall of Vito Genovese in this first comprehensive biography of the legendary mafioso - from his childhood in Naples, Italy, and the beginnings of his bullet-ridden criminal career on lower Manhattan's mean streets, through his self-exile in the mid-1930s back to his homeland where he ran a black market operation under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, and his return to New York where Genovese made a fortune as the head of an illegal narcotics empire.

No episode in NYPD history surpasses the depravities of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two decorated detectives who covertly acted as mafia informants and paid assassins in the Scorsese world of 1980s Brooklyn. For more than ten years, Eppolito and Caracappa moonlighted as the mob's early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and crippling investigations by sharing details of surveillance, phone taps, and impending arrests. The Lucchese boss called the two detectives his crystal ball: Whatever detectives knew, the mafia soon learned.

On December 11th, 1978, a daring armed robbery rocked Kennedy Airport, resulting in the largest unrecovered cash haul in world history, totaling six million dollars. The perpetrators were never apprehended and thirteen people connected to the crime were murdered in homicides that, like the crime itself, remain unsolved to this day. The burglary has fascinated the public for years, dominating headlines around the globe due to the story's unending ravel of mysteries that baffled the authorities.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

Dive into the raw, unfiltered world of motorcycle clubs and street life with Power and Betrayal—a gripping memoir by James "Hollywood" Macecari. From brotherhood to betrayal, love to loss, this true story exposes the brutal risks of the gangster lifestyle: death, prison, and shattered lives. Follow Macecari’s harrowing journey— and the brotherhood that turned toxic. With unflinching honesty, he reflects on the cost of power, sharing hard-earned wisdom for those drawn to the outlaw life. Perfect for fans of biker culture, true crime, and raw memoirs, Power and Betrayal is a must-read ...

From 2001 to 2013, Michael Vecchione was chief of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which was the largest urban prosecution agency in the country. Vecchione grappled with organized crime and dirty politicians, during which he supervised, investigated, and prosecuted major felony cases. Crooked Brooklyn is a gritty story of corruption, greed, and law enforcement.

Hailed in Italy as the best book ever written about the mafia in any language, Cosa Nostra is a fascinating, violent, and darkly comic account that takes us deep into the inner sanctum of this secret society. John Dickie uses startling new research to reveal the inner workings of this secret society with a murderous record. He explains how the mafia began, how it responds to threats and challenges, and introduces us to the real-life characters that inspired the American imagination for generations, making the mafia an international, larger than life cultural phenomenon.