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"Murdertown," "Bombtown," "Crimetown." Through decades, the City of Youngstown, Ohio, has been branded with such painful nicknames, due in large part to the rackets, violence and corruption of organized crime in the region. The streets of Youngstown and other communities in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys of northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania have been bloodied through numerous shootings and stabbings and, during an especially disturbing period, a series of gruesome car-bombings. In too many cases, public officials and officers of the law were complicit in the criminal activity, profiting through bribery and graft. Some authorities who resisted corruption and attempted to perform t...
Joseph Valachi was a special figure in the history of American crime. Noteworthy as a rare primary source into Mafia events of the Castellammarese War-era (1930-1931), Valachi's documented memories also provide a window into the early gangland of East Harlem, Manhattan and the Bronx. Through his recollections, historians gain a unique soldier-level view of New York-area organized crime families between Prohibition and the Mafia convention at Apalachin, New York. As an early Mafia turncoat and a celebrated informant for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, Valachi became the focus of a best-selling book, a popular motion picture, many hours of televised Senate testimony and a detailed but never published a...
Journalists Craig Thompson and Allen Raymond in 1940 wrote that “...the lower East Side of Manhattan in the first twenty years of the twentieth century was the greatest breeding ground for gunmen and racketeers, since risen to eminence, that this country has ever seen...” Conditions in the pre-Prohibition twentieth century Lower East Side certainly fueled an explosion in gangs and racketeering. Such underworld giants as Meyer Lansky, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania were products of that overcrowded and hard environment. But that was just a small part of the area’s underworld history. In this issue, Informer presents a collection of articles repre...
For many years, the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, ignored organized crime, as the Bureau regarded local law enforcement as best equipped to handle it. That changed when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (in the 1960s) and New York City's Rudy Giuliani (in the 1980s) pursued eradication of the Mafia.. In this book, readers are introduced to several characters in the American Mafia, known as "rats" in the criminal world, whose cooperation with law enforcement resulted in the arrest of Mafia members across the country. Short biographies of each informant detail their crimes and deals made to stay alive or reduce lengthy prison sentences. FBI and CIA records released in 2017, and books written by the criminals themselves, reveal why previously loyal Mafia members and associates became informants. Most of the criminals written about are dead; a few are presumed to be alive and in the witness protection program.
"Report of the Dominion fishery commission on the fisheries of the province of Ontario, 1893", issued as vol. 26, no. 7, supplement.
With Boston to the north and New York City to the south, Connecticut’s history of organized crime is often overlooked. This is the untold story of New Haven’s illegal past. One of America’s most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf—working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses. Representing the Genoveses, Midge Renault reigned supreme thanks to his reputation for wanton violence. Meanwhile, Colombo capo Ralph “Whitey” Tropiano maintained a lower profile, which belied his reputation as a vicious killer. But it was his lieutenant, Billy “The Wild Guy” Grasso, who ultimately rose to the top after joining the New England Patriarca Family, enjoying a short rule that ended with a murder plot that left him on the wrong end of a bullet.
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