Borgata: Rise of Empire
A History of the American Mafia
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
The American mafia has long held powerful sway over our collective cultural imagination. But how many of us truly understand how a clandestine Sicilian criminal organisation came to exert its influence over nearly every level of American society?
In BORGATA: RISE OF EMPIRE, former mafia member Louis Ferrante pulls back the curtain on the criminal organisation that transformed America. From the potent political cauldron of nineteenth-century Sicily to American cities such as New Orleans, New York and the gangster's paradise of Las Vegas, Ferrante traces the social, economic and political forces that powered the mafia's unstoppable rise. We follow the early mob as they provide alcohol to the American public during prohibition, aid U. S. Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, establish a gambling mecca in the Nevada desert - and unofficially take control of the island of Cuba.
Ferrante's vivid portrayal of early American mobsters - among them Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky - fills in crucial gaps of mafia history to deliver the most comprehensive account yet of the world's most famous criminal fraternity.
This volume is the first in a groundbreaking new trilogy from a man who has seen it all from the inside. Ferrante's masterful account journeys from the group's inauspicious beginnings to the height of their power as the most influential organised criminal network in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former mobster Ferrante (Mob Rules) supplies a fascinating inside look at the history of the Mafia, the first entry in a three-volume series charting the rise of Italian organized crime. Drawing a straight line from the bond between Italian feudal lords and serfs to the ties between 20th-century Mafia dons and "soldiers," Ferrante convincingly examines how "men of honor" controlled labor in Sicily, and how, through mass immigration to the United States from 1880 to 1930, they brought those customs stateside. He notes that it was lawless New Orleans where the first American Mafia (or "borgata") families made their mark, before prohibition facilitated the rise of East Coast families who allied with Jewish gangsters to distribute alcohol. While burning through bios of such infamous names as Dutch Schultz, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano, Ferrante exhumes some oft-overlooked tales, including that of the close partnership between the New York families and the Navy to protect Eastern shorelines during WWII. Ferrante's familiarity with Mafia customs gives flesh and immediacy to what could otherwise be a rote historical tome, but he doesn't draw his authority from affiliation alone: this is a well-researched history in its own right. True crime fans will be captivated.
