Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s explores a little-known but spirited chapter of the Quaker City's history. The hoodlums, hucksters, and racketeers of Prohibition-era Philadelphia sold bootleg booze, peddled illicit drugs, ran numbers, and operated prostitution and insurance rings. Among the fascinating personalities that created and contributed to the Philadelphia crime scene of the 1920s and 1930s were empire builders like Mickey Duffy, known as "Prohibition's Mr. Big," and Max "Boo Boo" Hoff, dubbed the "King of the Bootleggers"; the violent Lanzetti brothers, who ran their own illegal enterprise; mobster Harry "Nig Rosen" Stromberg, a New York transplant; and the arsenic widows poison ring, which specialized in fraud and murder. Bringing to light rare photographs and forgotten characters, the authors chronicle the underworld of Philadelphia in the interwar era. The upheaval caused by the gangs and groups herein mirrors the frenzied cultural and political shifts of the Roaring Twenties and the austere 1930s.

Introduction -- Black hand, Calabrians, and the Mafia -- "First family" of the New York Mafia -- The Mafia and the Baff murder -- The neapolitan challenge -- New York City in the 1920s -- Castellammare war and "La Cosa Nostra" -- Americanization and the families -- Localism, tradition, and innovation.

Hundreds of books have been written about the American Mafia, but none has told how it came into existence. This one does. Mafia books are notoriously unreliable, too often filled with the recycled errors of earlier authors. This one has been painstakingly researched from primary sources, including interviews with surviving family members and a vast, previously unexamined Secret Service archive. The result is an extraordinary work of history that grips, astonishes and chills the blood like a thriller. It tells the little-known story of the Morello family, pioneers of protection rackets, bizarre rituals and Mafia wars. Before the Five Families who dominated US organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare. Mike Dash follows the birth of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the wharves of New Orleans to the streets of Little Italy. He brings to life the remarkable villains and unusual heroes of the Mafia’s early years, and does so without ever resorting to fiction or “imagined” history. The First Family is more than just a pulse-quickening Mafia narrative. This is how it really happened.

Take a tour of Buffalo, NY's mobster and mafia history. Local mob expert reveals gangsters' stories, hangouts and more. Buffalo has housed its fair share of thugs and mobsters. Besides common criminals and bank robbers, a powerful crime family headed by local boss Stefano Magaddino emerged in the 1920s. Close to Canada, Niagara Falls and Buffalo were perfect avenues through which to transport booze, and Magaddino and his Mafiosi maintained a stranglehold on the city until his death in 1974. Local mob expert Michael Rizzo takes a tour of Buffalo's mafia exploits everything from these brutal gangsters' favorite hangouts to secret underground tunnels to murder.

From the Author of Off Color: The Violent History of Detroit's Notorious Purple Gang It was the winter of 1919, and it was the height of a gang war the Motor City hadn't seen before. Detroit's Mafia family had split into two factions, both vying to not only avenge ancient wrongs but also gain control of the city's lucrative illegal alcohol trade at the dawn of Prohibition. In Vìnnitta, author Daniel Waugh offers an in-depth account of the formation of the Detroit Mafia and how they grew from a small band of Sicilian immigrants into one of the most powerful criminal sects. He shares how the mafia infiltrated the Detroit business community and established themselves in illegal rackets ranging from extortion, auto theft, bootlegging, burglary, and construction racketeering. The story is told through the eyes of not only the gangsters themselves, but also those of an undertaker forced to prepare many of his friends for burial after their murders.

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.” Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.