Oct
11
2007
New Mafia Fiction Thriller – “Sopranos Style”
Just when you think you are safe – all hell breaks loose! That’s what has happened to Frankie Granstino and his fiancée, Alicia.
“Better Off Dead In Paradise” is the new action packed, Mafia thriller novel, and sequel to “Better Off Dead”. “Better Off Dead” told the story of Frankie Granstino, the young life insurance salesman from Brooklyn New York, who got trapped by the Vongemi Mafia Family into writing life insurance policies on people who ended up dying mysteriously. Continue Reading »
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 »
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