Red Hook
Brooklyn Mafia, Ground Zero
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The shocking crime-drenched saga of the New York mobs in Red Hook, Brooklyn—where the streets ran red with blood—by a Mafia survivor who grew up there . . .
For more than a hundred years, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn was Ground Zero for organized crime. Whoever controlled the piers controlled everything. From the infamous Irish gang known as The White Hand at the turn of the century, to the notorious Italian Gallo brothers who ran President Street—and everything else—generations later, the blood-soaked history of Red Hook is the story of American crime at its most powerful, corrupt, and coldly efficient.
It's all here: the brutal mob hits, bullet storms, and backstabbings of the most colorful cutthroats to ever terrorize the streets. A rogue’s gallery of killers with nicknames like “The Mad Hatter,” “The Executioner,” “Wild Bill,” and “Peg Leg.” The Brooklyn bar fight that gave Al “Scarface” Capone his legendary scars. The godfather of America’s first Sicilian crime family whose gruesomely mangled hand could scare men half to death. And, to bring it all home, the author’s own eyewitness account of multiple shootings growing up as the son of a Mafia bodyguard.
Packed with jaw-dropping stories of public violence and personal vengeance, vivid insights into the Mafia’s way of life, and shocking portraits of America’s most wanted crime families, Red Hook is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the history of organized crime in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lackluster latest collaboration between DiMatteo (The President Street Boys), whose father was in the Mafia, and true crime author Benson (The Cigar) traces the history of organized crime in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood. The authors begin in 1636, then rush through 250 years of Red Hook history leading up to the early 1900s arrival of Irish gangsters who called themselves the White Hand—so-named for their feud with the established Italian Black Hand. Subsequent chapters provide superficial coverage of the following decades, including the early years of Al Capone, who attended school in Red Hook. Most immediate are the sections covering more recent events, including the experiences of DiMatteo's father, who worked as the right-hand man to mobster "Crazy" Joey Gallo in the mid-20th century, and DiMatteo's own recollections of witnessing his first mob hit as a five-year-old in 1961. Elsewhere, hyperbolic assertions and a lack of supporting evidence will test readers' patience ("There was no place on earth, not even in Italy, where the texture of mob life was so ingrained in the structures and the people and the system" as it was in Red Hook, the authors claim, without offering any follow-up). Those interested in the history of organized crime in New York City would be better served by Selwyn Raab's Five Families.
