A quiet neighborhood in 1950s Rochester, New York, turns deadly when Ike Van Savage's latest case draws him into a complex mystery concerning the city's most notorious mobster, a dead heiress, and a lethal series of "accidents."

What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality. Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.

With a bitterly divided nation plunged into the War of 1812, a fiery young Federalist editor named Alexander Hanson risked his life to defend a newspaper that dared express unpopular views. His words provoked a violent standoff that crippled the city of Baltimore and left Hanson beaten within an inch of his life. This little-known episode in American history - complete with a midnight jailbreak, bloodthirsty mobs and unspeakable acts of torture - helped shape the course of war, the Federalist Party and the nation's very notion of the freedom of the press. Josh Cutler's history of the Mobtown Massacre offers a lesson in liberty that reverberates today.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

Forget what you think you know about the Mafia. After reading this book, even life-long mob aficionados will have a new perspective on organized crime. Informative, authoritative, and eye-opening, this is the first full-length book devoted exclusively to uncovering the hidden history of how the Mafia came to dominate organized crime in New York City during the 1930s through 1950s. Based on exhaustive research of archives and secret files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, author and attorney C. Alexander Hortis draws on the deepest collection of primary sources, many newly discovered, of any history of the modern mob. Shattering myths, Hortis reveals how Cosa Nostra actually obtained power at the inception. The author goes beyond conventional who-shot-who mob stories, providing answers to fresh questions such as: * Why did the Sicilian gangs come out on top of the criminal underworld? * Can economics explain how the Mafia families operated? * What was the Mafia's real role in the drug trade? * Why was Cosa Nostra involved in gay bars in New York since the 1930s? Drawing on an unprecedented array of primary sources, The Mob and the City is the most thorough and authentic history of the Mafia's rise to power in the early-to-mid twentieth century.

How politics and race shaped Baltimore's distinctive disarray of cultures and subcultures. Charm City or Mobtown? People from Baltimore glory in its eccentric charm, small-town character, and North-cum-South culture. But for much of the nineteenth century, violence and disorder plagued the city. More recently, the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody has prompted Baltimoreans—and the entire nation—to focus critically on the rich and tangled narrative of black–white relations in Baltimore, where slavery once existed alongside the largest community of free blacks in the United States. Matthew A. Crenson, a distinguished political scientist and Baltimore native, examines the role of politics and race throughout Baltimore's history. From its founding in 1729 up through the recent past, Crenson follows Baltimore's political evolution from an empty expanse of marsh and hills to a complicated city with distinct ways of doing business. Revealing how residents at large engage (and disengage) with one another across an expansive agenda of issues and conflicts, Crenson shows how politics helped form this complex city's personality. Crenson provocatively argues that Baltimore's many quirks are likely symptoms of urban underdevelopment. The city's longtime domination by the general assembly—and the corresponding weakness of its municipal authority—forced residents to adopt the private and extra-governmental institutions that shaped early Baltimore. On the one hand, Baltimore was resolutely parochial, split by curious political quarrels over issues as minor as loose pigs. On the other, it was keenly attuned to national politics: during the Revolution, for instance, Baltimoreans were known for their comparative radicalism. Crenson describes how, as Baltimore and the nation grew, whites competed with blacks, slave and free, for menial and low-skill work. He also explores how the urban elite thrived by avoiding, wherever possible, questions of slavery versus freedom—just as wealthier Baltimoreans, long after the Civil War and emancipation, preferred to sidestep racial controversy. Peering into the city's 300-odd neighborhoods, this fascinating account holds up a mirror to Baltimore, asking whites in particular to reexamine the past and accept due responsibility for future racial progress.

A captivating history of a notorious neighborhood and the first book to reveal why London’s East End became synonymous with lawlessness and crime Even before Jack the Ripper haunted its streets for prey, London’s East End had earned a reputation for immorality, filth, and vice. John Bennett, a writer and tour guide who has walked and researched the area for more than thirty years, delves into four centuries of history to chronicle the crimes, their perpetrators, and the circumstances that made the East End an ideal breeding ground for illegal activity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain’s industrial boom drew thousands of workers to the area, leading to overcrowding and squalor. But crime in the area flourished long past the Victorian period. Drawing on original archival history and featuring a fascinating cast of characters including the infamous Ripper, highwayman Dick Turpin, the Kray brothers, and a host of ordinary evildoers, this gripping and deliciously unsavory volume will fascinate Londonphiles and true crime lovers alike.