Oct 07 2007
The government has opened an old treasure trove of information on some 800 gangland goons who wielded power during the Mafia’s Golden Age - a virtual Social Register of the worst sociopaths to have packed a silenced pistol, wielded an ice pick or driven a getaway car in a sharkskin suit. Continue Reading »
Aug 03 2007
As head of the anti-mafia squad in Naples and then Florence, followed by an eight-year stint as the chief of Florence’s elite police force, the Squadra Mobile, Michele Giuttari knows a thing or two about both criminal behaviour and investigations. Continue Reading »
Jul 05 2007
Who Is Lou Sciortino? Ottavio Cappellani Picador, 227pp, £14.99
In April 2006, Italian police captured a 73-year-old man they found hiding in a run-down farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Dressed in jeans and a pullover, he may have looked harmless to the untrained eye, but this man was in fact Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, wanted for a string of murders. For years, Provenzano had evaded capture, communicating with his family through a system of handwritten notes and a network of underlings. It’s this mix of the scarily powerful and the banal that drives Ottavio Cappellani’s farcical tale of Mafia life in modern-day Sicily. So much so, in fact, that there’s a character who appears to be modelled on Provenzano: Jacobbo Maretta, who hides from police in an underground bunker. “Whenever he has to go out, he takes a tractor as far as the village, where a yellow Fiat 127 is waiting to take him to a dealer in garden statues in Ispica. There he gets on a truck, changes inside it, and when he gets out, usually at Catania airport, he’s all spruced up.” Continue Reading »
May 26 2007
Nigel Jones reviews The Mafia at War by Tim Newark - The two things that almost everyone once knew about Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, were that he made Italian trains run on time, and that he, uniquely among Italian rulers, successfully, if temporarily, crushed the Sicilian Mafia. Never forgetting a slight, the Mob, so the legend goes, ate their revenge cold years later when they handed over their Sicilian heartland without a shot being fired, lock, stock, and non-smoking barrel to the invading Allies.
Not having investigated Italian railway timetables between 1922-43 I cannot report on the veracity of the first claim, but Tim Newark has exhaustively examined the second, and establishes beyond doubt that any notion that it was the Mob that won Sicily for the Allies is a myth. Continue Reading »
May 10 2007
What’s in a Mafia name? Christopher J. Gambino: author, fashion designer, wine distributor. So where did he get the material for his book?
Christopher J. Gambino may not be a Mafioso, but he certainly looks the part: six-foot-one, with black hair graying at the temples and a gold chain dangling around his neck. He also has the requisite qualifications: the team of bodyguards, the background in trash collection, the criminal history, the mysterious stream of income — and, of course, the infamous last name. Continue Reading »
Mar 17 2007
THE SIXTH FAMILY: THE COLLAPSE OF THE NEW YORK MAFIA AND THE RISE OF VITO RIZZUTO
by Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys (Wiley, 386 pages, $34.99 hardcover)
A sensational mob trial will likely get underway in a New York City courtroom later this year and the leading figure in Canadian organized crime will be front and centre.
The defendant is Vito Rizzuto, the reputed “godfather” of the Canadian Mafia, who was extradited to the United States last summer. Continue Reading »
Mar 04 2007
A former mobster has written a tell-all book, for the first time ever exposing the inner workings of an Israeli gang that took over the New York drug trade for a brief period in the eighties.
Ron Gonen, who has spent the past 18 years in the US Witness Protection Program, has teamed up with author Dave Copeland to offer an insider’s glance into a parallel universe of crime, murder and deceit. Continue Reading »
Feb 16 2007
The Bulletin was able to obtain an exclusive interview with one of America’s most famous and successful FBI agents, Joe Pistone, who is more commonly known as Donnie Brasco, the undercover FBI agent who put over 150 mobsters in prison and was played by Johnny Depp on the big screen. Former Agent Pistone has come out with his sixth book, Unfinished Business, published by local publisher, Running Press.
For anyone interested in the past and current state of the Italian Mafia, particularly the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia mobs, this book is a must read. Pistone himself looks like a character out of “The Sopranos” or “Goodfellas.” Continue Reading »
Feb 05 2007
You’ve seen the Arcadia Publishing books in your local bookstore. They are the photo-filled paperbacks that celebrate the uplifting local histories of Detroit, its suburbs, and assorted ethnic groups, generally taking a warts-free approach that plays up the bucolic and nostalgic side of yesteryear.
Then there is Arcadia’s “Motor City Mafia,” Scott Burnstein’s history of organized crime in Detroit. It is filled with images of bodies lying in their own blood, mug shots, FBI surveillance photos, Mafia weddings and wise guys with nicknames like Cockeyed Sam, Sammy B, Swinging Sammy, Jimmy Q., Pat the Pimp, Joe the Barber, Tony Pro, Tony Z, Joey Jack, Billy Jack, Frank the Irishman, Sally Buggs, Joe the Whip, Papa John and Black Jack. Continue Reading »
Jan 06 2007
Andrea Camilleri’s food-mad sleuth is Italy’s most famous cop, and one of the nation’s leading cultural exports. Peter Popham meets his creator in Rome
Salvo Montalbano, Italy’s most popular fictional detective, is notorious for his filthy temper, but in the latest novel in Andrea Camilleri’s series he outdoes himself. Somewhere in the south Sicilian countryside is a luxuriantly twisted Saracen olive tree to which the detective likes to repair when he has things on his mind. He goes to find the tree again in The Scent of the Night (translated by Stephen Sartarelli; Picador, £12.99), but this time not to meditate on a case. At a trattoria he has just sunk a litre of “very dense red wine” to wash down a dish of “burning pirciati” - a fiercely spiced pasta dish. He discovers as he leaves the restaurant that he is completely drunk, and narrowly avoids crashing his car several times in the aftermath. He seeks out the comforting tree in order to sober up. Continue Reading »
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