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Umberto Anastasio, better known as Albert Anastasia, was an Italian-American mobster and hitman who became one of the deadliest criminals in American history and one of the founders of the modern American Mafia in New York City. For all-out savagery and ruthlessness, few other leaders of the Mafia worldwide have rivaled Anastasia, known to peers as "The Mad Hatter" and to journalists as "The Lord High Executioner." After escaping a death sentence in 1921 and multiple other arrests for murder, he later served as director of the national crime syndicate's contract murder department ("Murder, Inc.") from 1931 until informers brought it down ten years later. By 1951 he led one of New York City's Five Families, a post he held until his public barbershop assassination in October 1957. This first-ever book-length biography of Anastasia traces the mobster's life and the ripple effects his career had on the American crime world. The story also tracks his brothers and their families, while debunking certain widespread myths about their parentage, various deportations, trials, convictions, and eventual retirement from the mob, dead or alive.
Largely forgotten now, Frankie Yale was an influential New York mobster of the early 20th century whose proteges included future leaders of New York's five Mafia families and Chicago's outfit. His influence extended to Chicago, where he personally committed two of the city's most notorious underworld assassinations and waged a five-year war to wrest control of Brooklyn's docks from Irish rivals. His murder marked New York City's first use of a Tommy gun in gangland warfare, the same weapon used in Chicago's St. Valentine's Day massacre seven months later. Yale's passing destabilized Gotham's Mafia, paving the way for an upheaval that modified and modernized the structure of American syndicated crime for the next six decades. Despite Yale's prominence during his life, this is the first biography to survey his life and career.
The book takes its lead from academic Annamaria Pagliaro’s experience straddling Australia and Italy over a thirty-year period. As both former colleagues and collaborators of Pagliaro, we editors intend to open a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the international research landscape in the fields of Italian and Anglophone studies, starting from Pagliaro’s own contribution to the creation of relations between the two cultures in the period that saw her work transnationally as Director of the Monash University Prato Centre (2005-2008).
By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities...
Vincenzo Consolo is counted by many critics among the most significant voices in contemporary world literature. This volume makes available for the first in English an edited and annotated volume of Consolo's short stories, essays, and other writings pertaining to the diverse cultures and histories of Sicily and the Mediterranean basin. The Mediterranean region holds a particular fascination for Consolo, who seeks through his writing to recover the memory of a Sicilian and Mediterranean history, which he feels is presently being threatened by the forces of late-capitalist Western culture. His writings about the region also voice a commitment to questions of ethics and human rights, which hav...
Introduction -- Black hand, Calabrians, and the Mafia -- "First family" of the New York Mafia -- The Mafia and the Baff murder -- The neapolitan challenge -- New York City in the 1920s -- Castellammare war and "La Cosa Nostra" -- Americanization and the families -- Localism, tradition, and innovation.