BY ANY MEANS

Three civil rights workers vanished. Mississippi closed ranks. The FBI needed answers. And according to one of the most controversial accounts in American law-enforcement history, the search reached all the way into the Mafia.

On June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

They had come together during Freedom Summer, when challenging segregation and helping Black Americans exercise the right to vote could carry deadly consequences. Within days, their disappearance became a national crisis. President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration demanded answers. The FBI launched an enormous investigation. Agents searched roads, swamps, fields, and communities where fear—and sometimes complicity—made the truth extraordinarily difficult to uncover.

Then the story took a darker turn.

Gregory “Greg” Scarpa Sr. was no ordinary government source. Associated with New York's Colombo crime family and feared within the criminal underworld, Scarpa also maintained a secret relationship with the FBI. Later accounts would connect him to controversial federal efforts in Mississippi, producing one of the strangest questions to emerge from the civil rights era:

Did the government turn to a gangster when conventional law enforcement could not break the silence?

BY ANY MEANS enters the dangerous intersection of organized crime, federal law enforcement, white-supremacist violence, confidential informants, and the struggle for civil rights.

From the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church and the disappearance of three young activists to the massive investigation known as MIBURN, the book reconstructs the events that exposed the violent machinery operating beneath Mississippi's racial order.

But this is not a story of simple heroes and villains.

It examines what happened when the FBI confronted men determined to protect their secrets—and what could happen when federal agents relied on informants whose own lives were steeped in crime. It separates documented history from the legends surrounding Scarpa, explores the disputed accounts of his Mississippi activities, and asks a question that reaches far beyond a single investigation:

If the cause is just, does that make every method acceptable?

Inside this gripping historical true-crime account, discover:

The story of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and why they entered Mississippi's dangerous Freedom Summer
What happened after the three men disappeared on June 21, 1964
How the FBI launched the historic Mississippi Burning investigation
How the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation to defend segregation
The disturbing connections between racial extremists and figures within local authority
How investigators struggled to penetrate a culture of fear and silence
Greg Scarpa's extraordinary double life as an organized-crime figure and FBI informant
The controversial and disputed stories connecting Scarpa to federal activity in Mississippi
How the victims were finally located—and why that breakthrough should not simply be attributed to Scarpa
The federal prosecutions that followed when Mississippi failed to bring immediate murder charges
The decades-long pursuit of accountability that culminated in the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen
What the case reveals about informants, government power, institutional compromise, race, justice, and accountability

Above all, BY ANY MEANS returns the story to the three young men whose lives gave the investigation its meaning.

Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were more than names in one of America's most infamous murder cases. They were young men who believed ordinary citizens could confront extraordinary injustice—and entered a struggle in which registering voters could make someone a target.

Their killers tried to make terror stronger than citizenship.

The investigation that followed would test whether American institutions were prepared to prove otherw