I have all of those books on your wishlist... you can find many of them online as "used" and save yourself some money doing that. Barnes & Noble and Abebooks both have excellent used book connections.

I actully had a good look at your list that you posted last year sometime,and got them from there.Thank you hope you don't mind..

ive really gotten into reading about the Luciano era 1930-50s,how they formed and worked etc.Fascinating and brutal men at the same time.

Thank for the info SC

Thanks, PB--I'll check out the Katz book.

Paperback Alert

THE BROTHERHOODS, by Guy Lawson and William Oldham, has just been released in paperback, and is available wherever books are sold. It's touted as the better of the two "Mafia Cops" books.

Has anybody read Mickey Cohens book? if so is it good?

David Flusfeder reviews The Havana Mob: Gangsters, Gamblers, Showgirls and Revolutionaries in 1950s Cuba by T J English

One of the great pleasures in reading any chronicle of the Mafia is the rough street poetry of the names. In the pages of T J English's enjoyable – yet morally uncertain – account of the rise and fall of the Mob's Caribbean empire of gambling, pleasure, sin, murder and profit, we come across such figures as Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, William "Lefty Clark" Bischoff, and Nicholas "the Fat Butcher" di Costanzo.

The hero of the piece, though, is Meyer Lansky, who early on in his career was referred to as "the brightest boy in the combination", but never did gain a gangster moniker. Instead, as suited his somewhat colourless but gentlemanly persona, he was referred to as "Mr Lansky".


"Gambling pulls at the heart of a man," Lansky once said. He learned much of his trade during Prohibition and much of his wisdom from Arnold Rothstein ("The Brain", "The Big Bankroll"), especially the importance of bribing politicians. Rothstein had the New York city mayor Jimmy Walker; Lansky had Fulgencio Batista, whom he chose early on in both their careers, long before Batista had become the self-styled "democratic dictator" of Cuba.

Unlike Rothstein, who was gunned down after an acrimonious poker game, Lansky only wanted to profit from other people's impulses, not to indulge in his own. He became a kind of corporate visionary of gangsterism, one of the inventors of modern Las Vegas, particularly adept both at the "creative" use of money and at leaving no trace back to blood or a corpse.

Between 1952 and 1959, Batista's second period of rulership of Cuba, "Havana became a volatile mix of Monte Carlo, Casablanca and the ancient city of Cádiz all rolled into one", English breathlessly writes, "a bitches' brew of high-stakes gambling, secret revolutionary plots, violent repression and gangsterism".

Lansky and his associates controlled or owned the casinos and clubs, as well as the police, who often moonlighted as security guards for the Mob's hotel-casinos, the banks and most of the politicians.

This was the consummation of a plan that Lansky had had for Cuba well before the Second World War, and which was first put into action following a convention of "dignitaries" in 1946, when Cuba's future was carved up by the East Coast bosses, in between dining on such delicacies as tortoise stew and flamingo breast.

English is good on food – there is a telling image of Batista going crazy in the last days before Fidel Castro's revolution, dining for hours at his country estate, interrupting the feast only to watch American horror movies and to vomit in the garden.

The author is less good on morality.

English denies any Mafia involvement in the drugs trade – this at a time when VIP members at one of the smarter Havana nightclubs had their own lockers to hold their cocaine stash. The generally held belief that Lansky's colleague Santo Trafficante was one of the prime movers in the trade is implausibly dismissed as a result of the coincidence of Trafficante being the Spanish term for drugs trafficker.

English tends to praise Lansky's business sense, while saving his condemnation for the likes of Albert Anastasia, a brutal assassin for the Mob who was in turn brutally assassinated. He is unable, or unwilling, to draw a connection between the gent and the beast.

When the rebels finally took control in 1959, the first things that went were the parking meters that were the personal money machines of Batista's brother-in-law. The crowds went after them with hammers, lead pipes and baseball bats.

Then they took to the casinos, to demolish the slot machines, before setting a truckload of pigs free in the lobby of Lansky's latest resort, the Riviera.

Just as Castro irked the US government for geo-political reasons, he outraged the gangsters with his low opinion of the profit motive.

It is a welcome reminder for those with nothing but hatred for Cuba's current, declining dictator, that the US government and the Mafia frantically and farcically collaborated to get rid of Castro to restore their own vision of paradise.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/20/boeng115.xml

i am currently reading 'for the sins of my father' by Albert Demeo and have 'murder machine' coming soon...........

Can anybody tell me the best book to read on Jewish Gangster

MEYER LANSKY

There are many on Amazon and Ebay but which is the definitive book on his life and crimes..

Thanks

I finally got my hands on The five families by Raab. I'm going to start reading it tonight.

LITTLE MAN: Meyer Lansky And The Gangster Life, by Robert Lacey, is the definitive biography on Lansky. It's probably the best single mob biography I've ever read, and second only to FIVE FAMILIES, as my personal favorite "true crime" book.

I'll wholeheartedly second everything PB said above. That rarest of books: a definitive, accurate Mob biography.

Thanks for the Info PB,i'll look into this

ive just been bought a goodfellas guide to new york ive only read a couple of pages but im quite enjoying it

Has anybody read this.Is it recommended, as i was thinking of buying this..

I'd say, like most of Roemer's books, it reads pretty well. Just be ready for some historical innacuracies and a tremendous amount of ego, a la Pistone. I swear, I'm not sure who has the bigger ego, the high profile wiseguy or the high profile cop.

But still worth the read then..

Yes.

Just wondering if anybody has read any good books or could recommend any about Jimmy Hoffa..

An interesting, fairly recent one is: "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. I think I reviewed this a while ago. While not a bio of Hoffa per se, the author recounts how he was brought into the Teamsters Union by mobsters, got very close to Hoffa, played a role (he says) in the JFK assassination, and participated in Hoffa's murder. I don't say I believe everything in it, but it holds your interest.

I noticed this one on Amazon.

Thanks

I have heard of "I Heard You Paint Houses" before!
I will have to put it on my Xmas list!

i could not put this book down :-) great read and a good insight of how it was for a Mafia son growing up in the day of John gotti and the real top mobsters.....it shows the Mafia life is not so glamorous

its well written and i recommend it to all

If you want to read a horror story about the impact of wiseguy life on children, you really have to read ON THE RUN: A Mafia Childhood , by Gregg and Gina Hill. It's about life in hiding after their famous father, Henry, testified against his friends. You'll come away with a much different picture than that of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco. To me, not only was Henry a useless, drug addled thug, both he AND his wife were utter lowlives.

Ive been meaning to read this one for a while now..

Just Ordered..



Heard some good things on this book.

DeNiro, that's the best book I've ever read on the Irish mob, set in New York, anyway. You're gonna love it!

Read both The Westies and On The Run.
Both are very good!
Well worth reading!

Thanks ill let you know what i think of it when finished..

any recommendations for reading on the colombian organized drug cartels or Whitey Bulger in South Boston?

Try THE BROTHERS BULGER by Howie Carr, which I reviewed here a couple of months ago.