4 pretty good books reviewed by Dave Freedman.
The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia By Mike Dash Random House, 2009, 416 pages
Giuseppe Morello arrived in the USA from Corleone, Sicily, in 1892, and resumed a successful counterfeiting operation that his family had begun in Italy. He broadened his criminal activities to include extortion, insurance scams, and kidnapping; and eventually became the head of the nascent New York Mafia.
Bestselling history author Dash (Satan’s Circus) writes, “Morello and his henchmen were parasites who terrorized their fellow countrymen, exploited the weak, and dealt in fear.” A consummately cold-blooded killer, Morello himself was gunned down in 1930.
“Dash depicts the balance between loyalty and betrayal as an ever-changing dance, and nimbly catalogues the endless gruesome murders committed in the name of revenge and honor,” said Publishers Weekly.
The author destroys any romantic notions Americans might have about the mob from watching the “Godfather” movies and “The Sopranos.” There is nothing civilized about organized crime.
The First Family is “comprehensively researched. Riveting details and engrossing dialogue create novelistic scenes and tensions, but it’s all true” (American History).
Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires By Selwyn Raab St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006, 784 pages
Neither does Raab romanticize the Mafia — he exposes romantic myths and shows that “the collective goal of the five families of New York [Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese] was pillaging the nation’s richest city and region.” That included corrupting labor unions, garbage collection, the garment industry, construction, police departments, and Wall Street. They also flooded eastern and midwest cities with heroin and other drugs.
“Former New York Times crime reporter Raab sets a new gold standard for organized crime nonfiction” with this book (Publishers Weekly), which includes 24 pages of photos.
American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power By Thomas Reppetto Holt Paperbacks, 2004, 352 pages
Repetto (an ex-Chicago police detective) contends that the mob’s corruption of politicians, not its management of crime (which actually was more mismanagement), made rich men of the mob bosses, most of whom started out as poor immigrants.
History of the Mafia By Salvatore Lupo Columbia University Press, 2009, 352 pages
The idea that the American Mafia’s culture was based on traditional Sicilian peasant values, with strong family solidarity and codes of honor, is a grotesque, self-serving myth, according to historian Lupo. His history follows the Mafia from its roots in Italy’s wars of unification in the 1800s, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, to the anti-Mafia trials of the 1980s and 90s in Palermo. Publishers Weekly said, sadly, that this book “is almost as byzantine as the Mafia.”
About the reviewer Dave Freedman has worked as a legal and financial journalist since 1978.