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Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires, by Selwyn Raab
Get Free Ebook Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires, by Selwyn Raab
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Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals and generational changes that produced violent and unreliable leaders and recruits. A twenty year assault against the five families in particular blossomed into the most successful law enforcement campaign of the last century.
Selwyn Raab's Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York's premier dons from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and more. The book also brings the reader right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime.
- Sales Rank: #23291 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-05-13
- Released on: 2014-05-13
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
The Mafia has long held a spot in the American imagination. Despite their earned reputation for brutality, the Mafia has been glorified in countless movies, books, and television shows. Not so in this book. Selwyn Raab makes no attempt to perpetuate myths about the Mafia; instead, he exposes them as a serious threat to honest citizens: "The collective goal of the five families of New York was the pillaging of the nation's richest city and region," he writes. These five families--Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese--were responsible for corrupting labor unions in order to control waterfront commerce, garbage collection, the garment industry, and construction in New York. They also ran illegal gambling operations, engaged in stock schemes, and initiated the widespread introduction of heroin (among other drugs) into cities of the East and Midwest in the 1950s, leading to "accelerated crime rates, law-enforcement corruption, and the erosion of inner-city neighborhoods in New York and throughout the United States." Five Families offers a comprehensive look at the inner workings of the various clans along with vivid profiles of the gangsters who led--and continue to maintain--this criminal empire.
Beginning with a brief history of the Sicilian origins of the Mafia, Raab exhaustively explains how the Mob took over New York before spreading to cities across America, particularly Las Vegas, their most successful outside venture. He also shows how the New York Mafia lost a great deal of power in the 1980s and '90s due to many significant busts and effective plea-bargaining. However, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the F.B.I. has been focused mainly on external threats, leaving the Mafia room to regain some lost turf by moving into new avenues of crime. An investigative reporter for 40 years, Raab interviewed dozens of prosecutors, law enforcement officers, Mafia members, informants, and "Mob lawyers," providing anecdotes and inside information that tell the true story of the Mafia and their influence over the past 80 years. --Shawn Carkonen
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Former New York Times crime reporter Raab sets a new gold standard for organized crime nonfiction with his outstanding history of the Mafia in New York City. Combining the diligent research and analysis of a historian with the savvy of a beat journalist who has extensive inside sources, the author succeeds at an ambitious task by rendering the byzantine history of New York's five families—Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese—easily comprehensible to any lay reader. Of necessity, Raab also illuminates the Mafia's origin in 19th-century Sicily and its transition to this country. Throughout his survey of the mob's evolution—from simple protection rackets to pump-and-dump stock schemes—Raab renders the mobsters (including men less well known than John Gotti, but no less significant) as three-dimensional figures, without glossing over their vicious crimes and their impact on honest citizens. Law enforcement's varying responses as well as society's view of gangsters enrich the narrative, which merits comparison with the classic true-crime writing of Kurt Eichenwald. While Raab surprisingly gives short shrift to the 1980s pizza connection case, which revealed the growing influence of the Sicilian Mafia on America's heroin trade, he otherwise demonstrates mastery of his subject. This masterpiece stands an excellent chance of becoming a bestseller with crossover appeal beyond devoted watchers of The Sopranos. 24 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Beginning with its 1931 organization into five gangs, the history of the Sicilian Mob in New York unfolds in Raab's riveting reportage. To be sure, that history has been explored in numerous books, but Raab drills deep into the investigations and trials that have taken place over the past 20 years. Until adoption of the RICO law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), mobsters weren't much bothered by law enforcement, Raab explains, before turning to a dramatic recounting of key investigations that led to RICO indictments. The narrative kicks into high gear as Raab describes how one leg-breaker or another, confronted on tape with his crimes, breaks the Mob's code of silence and starts singing for the feds. Eventually resulting in the imprisonment of all five godfathers of the recent past--"Gaspipe" Casso, Joe Massino, John Gotti, "Chin" Gigante, and Carmine Persico--these investigations solved a number of murders and exposed the Mob as never before. With vivid characterizations of a cavalcade of thugs, Raab's account is the most lively and informative Mafia history in years. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
If you are fascinated with the mafia, this puts it all in context
By Robert J. Crawford
I have long been interested in that force in our society, the Cosa Nostra, first from film narratives and later as a source of political power. I saw all of the major films, from Godfather and Wiseguy to Prizzi's Honor, and avidly read newspaper accounts. When I lived in Manhattan, I felt close to a lot of mafia war incidents. I guess you could say I became a connoisseur of parasitic violence. But I never got a chance to assess this force in historical context - until now.
This is a fat, dense book with so many characters and legal minutiae that it has to be read very very slowly. IT is difficult, at times dry and too much, often without telling riveting personal stories, but in the end it delivers in a way that will forever change the readers' perception and understanding. It is a completely satisfying work of journalistic history.
Coming out of medieval Sicily, the Cosa Nostra was originally a secretive brotherhood to protect locals against foreign invaders. It was a group sworn to blood loyalty, with a tight hierarchical organization, and relied on disciplined violence for its political purposes. In a way, it functioned like a feudal empire within a state. Of course, it was only a matter of time before these lawless vigilantes turned their power into a way to enrich themselves at the expense of those they were supposedly protecting. For centuries, it was a peculiar institution of petty crime, based on threats and extortion, capable of hiding its activities behind a wall of silence (omerta) that was enforced by murder. It was not until the early 20C that a peculiar set of circumstances - prohibition with vast sums of money, but also an influx of Italians who understood the mafia's structure - that it took hold in the US.
At first, the mafia was based on the old traditions of secrecy, hierarchy, and controlled violence. The "families" became immensely rich and influential, with bosses seemingly untouchable because their underlings shielded them from direct links to crime, taking advantage of the legal system. As such, law enforcement could only go after individual crimes by lowly thugs and never touch the bosses. In this context, Donnie Brasco and Henry Hill were used to prosecute certain crews, but did not touch those at the very top.
After a terrible war between groups, Lucky Luciano negotiated a cooperative agreement between the five biggest "families" in New York: they would set policies together, even to the point of approving who could get killed in accordance with their code, and provided support for orderly succession, ensuring that the overall organization would survive death or prosecution of supreme leaders (the "capos"). This added a new level of organization and control, far beyond anything that had existed in Sicily. For a time, it proved unbeatable. The author is very hard on Hoover's FBI, which he sees as a publicity machine that focused on easy-to-solve crimes like bank robberies rather than the long cases that mafia organizations would require lawmakers to build, all without guarantees. Indeed, it was only under Bobby Kennedy's brief tenure at Justice that any effective attention was given to the mafia, which Hoover long denied had even existed.
Regarding the secrets, with omerta it was not until the 1960s, with Joe Valacchi, that the organization was finally understood. From prison, he explained the mechanisms of the organization, its rigid hierarchies, and the extent of its reach. To all but a select few, these revelations were truly shocking. He asserted that the mafia controlled many unions, set up protections rackets that extorted money from innumerable legitimate businesses, and enforced its demands by violence or its threat. That made one of the best early films, starring Bronson, but the author points out that it led to no major convictions.
In this period, the most significant new effort to combat the mafia was created in the RICO legislation, which treated the organization like corporations: all top officers became legally responsible for the actions of their underlings. This in effect removed the need to directly connect criminal action with explicit orders from capos. Add to this advances in technological detection - microphones and film devices that were legally authorized as evidence - and the mafia could be prosecuted, at least in theory. Amazingly, law enforcement avoided RICO for an entire decade as both constitutionally suspicious and costly in terms of their resources. Rudy Giuliano first used the law, in combination with an activist FBI officer in New York, the seat of the 5 families that controlled organized crime in the entire US. Once applied, the result was devastating: all 5 top mafia bosses, e.g. the "Teflon Don" Gotti and Persico, were imprisoned for life. Fears of convictions by testimony of underlings caused capos to become extremely cautious; after many decisions to kill those they suspected, it eventually led to a rash of defections under the witness protection program. While their organizations survived, they were severely diminished in scope, just not fatally. As attention of the FBI was diverted by 9/11, the remaining families had a chance to revive themselves and so the story continues.
One thing that is very fun in this book is the references to popular culture. The reader learns what was accurate in which film or TV series and what was romanticized or stereotypical, creating unrealistic images in the viewers' minds. Wiseguy and Donnie Brasco did not use RICO, but convicted relatively unimportant under-bosses and thugs. The Godfather films, which I love, come in for very heavy criticism: in his view, they romanticize family loyalties, elevate them to exaggerated cultural levels, and are unrealistic in that RICO would have devastated the organization like it did the other families.
An additional strength is the coverage of the economics and sociology of mafia crime. The details of their parasitic activites - and they add no value to the economy, but only finds ways to pass hidden costs to consumers - are explained with exceptional clarity. The personality type of those who went into organized crime is also explained: they tended to be lower middle class, early dropouts from school, and utterly without scruple when it came to hurting, intimidating, or murdering targets under orders. I.e. simple, rather stupid sociopaths.
This is an extremely informative read. If you want to understand the mafia, this is your book. Recommended with the greatest enthusiasm.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best yet
By JSMet
Comprehensive is the word which to me best describes Mr. Raab's book. Well-researched, and to me it was interesting because it hit the main points of the New York organized crime history and development from it's inception. If a person with no knowledge whatsoever of the New York organized crime scene wanted to read a book to become familiar with it, I would recommend this book. It's one of the best I have read on the subject.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Very Comprehensive History of the Mafia
By Kindle Customer
What I like best about this book is the absence of sensationalism and romanticism of the mafia life. These are criminals who cheated and murdered. Throughout its history reading account after account of these criminals shows that these were power hungry and wealth hungry individuals who were basically sociopaths. Bunch of losers.
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