When Prohibition shut off the taps on January 17, 1920, everything changed. The roaring twenties came on “with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bar legs, jangled morals and wild weekends,” the singer Hoagy Carmichael said. For mobsters, the explosion of speakeasies and illicit nightclubs was an unexpected windfall. Men who had scrabbled for…
Table Mountain towers over the skyline of Cape Town like a monolith. When the Dutch settlers first arrived here in 1652 they contemplated digging a canal around the cape into an island, separating their colony from ‘Darkest Africa’. The city itself isn’t actually that big: you can comfortably walk from one side to the other…
An hour’s bus ride from Serbia’s capital Belgrade lies Novi Sad, Vojvodina. Unlike the capital’s brutalist, graffiti-covered apartment blocks, Novi Sad’s got a more baroque look thanks to its history as part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. There, as the sun set over a gothic church on the main square I walked into a café…
In Richard Armstrong’s The Don Con, Joey Volpe is a bit of a has-been. He’s broke and unemployed after his short-lived appearance on The Sopranos, and his life only gets worse when a real mobster shows up in his autograph line and makes him an offer he can’t refuse. “So how much cash is a star’s…
Hollywood Godfather is Gianni Russo’s glamorous over-the-top reflection on his time—both real-life and on-screen—spent with the Italian mob in the 1980s. Gianni Russo’s memoir, Hollywood Godfather, opens with a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s the mid-1980s and Russo is the owner of an exclusive Las Vegas nightclub. What…
Handsome Johnny from New York Times bestselling author Lee Server is a look at the life of the legendary mobster Johnny Rosselli who was at the center of the century’s darkest secrets: an untold story of golden age Hollywood, modern Las Vegas, JFK-era scandal and international intrigue. Johnny Rosselli is a singular figure in the annals of…
I write books, mostly thrillers. But earlier, and for many years, I tried civil cases, large and small, of almost every variety. I never thought of it as research for writing, but of course, it was. I also never thought that any of it—being almost entirely civil not criminal—would lead me into Mafia territory, much…
It’s been nearly a decade since The Sopranos concluded. On June 10, 2007, HBO aired “Made in America,” the final episode of David Chase’s gangster opus, and it was met with both rage and befuddlement from millions of viewers—but the show’s last scene has certainly expanded in clarity in the 9 years since. It’s more…
Bloodlineby Warren Murphy is a gritty historical novel about the Mafia in 1920s New York City (available November 10, 2015). The Falcones are an immigrant family living in New York City in 1920. Their patriarch, Tony, is a respected policeman. His sons, Tommy and Mario, both served in the Great War and are now upstanding…
The Year of Fear by Joe Urshel is a true-crime recap of the thrilling manhunt for Machine Gun Kelly (available September 8, 2015). It's 1933 and Prohibition has given rise to the American gangster—now infamous names like Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger. Bank robberies at gunpoint are commonplace and kidnapping for ransom is the…
