Showing titles in Organized Crime

Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell is surfer and former war reporter Chas Smith's wild and unflinching look at the high-stakes world of surfing on Oahu's North Shore - a riveting, often humorous, account of beauty, greed, danger, and crime. For two months every winter, when Pacific storms make landfall, swarms of mainlanders, Brazilians, Australians, and Europeans flock to Oahu's paradisiacal North Shore for surfing's Triple Crown competition. Smith reveals how this influx transforms a sleepy strip of coast into a lawless, violent, drug-addled, and adrenaline-soaked mecca.

In 1976, the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota—or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up.

From its beginnings in the 1890s, Miami Beach has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach was the training ground for half a million army recruits, even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar boom, the city's luck gave out. But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans arrived by the boatload.

The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, White and Brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics - and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States.

A murder in Belfast of gangland's most wanted man, Robbie Lawlor, uncovers a web of betrayal that spans out across the Irish underworld and beyond. Follow a bloody trail that leads all the way into the heart of one of the worst gang feuds Ireland has ever seen which culminates in the Narco style dismemberment of a teenage boy, Keane Mulready Woods. And as the curtain is pulled back on the inner workings of the world of organised crime, a cast of ruthless characters take centre stage for their place in a double-cross plot that feels like a fast-paced thriller.

The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago’s Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate’s “Jewish wing.”

John Ibrahim's incredible life story told in his own words. Last King of the Cross lays bare Australia's most notorious underworld figure. In the mongrel tongue of the streets, John writes of fleeing war-torn Tripoli with his family and growing up in Sydney's rough and tumble west - before establishing himself as a tough guy and teen delinquent, then a bouncer, enforcer and nightclub king on the Golden Mile.

A gay man who created New York's most notorious den of heterosexuality . . . an anxious, anything-but-hardboiled lawyer who became one of the most successful undercover mob informants in history. . . . In this hilarious and fascinating account, Michael Blutrich takes you inside star-studded 1990s New York, mafia sit-downs, and the witness protection program.

A college baseball scholarship was his way out of the inner city, but his dreams of going pro were crushed by an arm injury. John Alite was forced to return home to the only life he knew, where having to live on the streets of New York meant one thing - earning how to survive. From a young age, he found himself influenced by the wrong crowd. Enticed by the wealth, power, and prestige of the mafia, he immersed himself in a world that was foreign to most. But the cold, bitter truth was he was expendable, and his sworn allegiance was rewarded with betrayal.

In the early days, before he founded the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas and became the patron saint of the World Series of Poker, cowboy Benny Binion was a horse trader, a bootlegger, and the "boss gambler" of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. This book traces Binion's rise to power in the Dallas underworld during World War II. By 1946, more than two dozen "casinos" operated illegally in downtown Dallas in hotel suites, and Benny Binion owned at least half of them.

La minería es uno de los negocios más jugosos del país...pero no para los trabajadores o las comunidades donde se desarrolla. Solapadas por el gobierno desde hace al menos veinticinco años, cerca de 267 compañías—principalmente canadienses y estadounidenses—operan en México sin escrúpulos ni restricciones. Esta investigación revela por primera vez las operaciones ilegales de la industria minera que opacan la brutalidad del narcotráfico, y lanza una alerta urgente sobre los peligros que representan para la soberanía y la supervivencia de nuestro país.

In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associatesas the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Mafia. Author James Higdon takes listeners back to the 1970s and ‘80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is the most legendary of Mexican narcos. As leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, he was one of the most dangerous men in the world. His fearless climb to power, his brutality, his charm, his taste for luxury, his penchant for disguise, his multiple dramatic prison escapes, his unlikely encounters with Sean Penn - all of these burnished the image of the world's most famous outlaw. He was finally captured by US and Mexican law enforcement in a daring operation years in the making. Here is that entire epic story.

Dinero, drogas y cárteles: eso es lo que el novato agente del FBI esperaba tener cuando lo enviaron al pueblo fronterizo de Laredo; pero en cambio, se encontró con una tarea sedentaria, redactando reportes de inteligencia acerca de la guerra contra el narcotráfico. Hasta que, un día, le piden a Lawson que chequee una pista anónima: un caballo que se vendió en una subasta en Oklahoma por un precio mucho más elevado de lo usual, y el comprador fue Miguel Treviño, uno de los líderes de los Zetas, el cártel más brutal de México.

Breaking bones, burying bodies, and planting bombs became second nature to Two Tonys while working for the Bonanno Crime Family, whose exploits inspired The Godfather. After a dispute with an outlaw motorcycle club, Two Tonys left a trail of corpses from Arizona to Alaska. On the run, he was pursued by bikers and a neo-Nazi gang bloodthirsty for revenge, while a homicide detective launched a nationwide manhunt.

Ronnie Earle was a Texas legend. During his three decades as the district attorney responsible for Austin and surrounding Travis County, he prosecuted corrupt corporate executives and state officials, including the notorious US congressman Tom DeLay. But Earle maintained that the biggest case of his career was the one involving Frank Hughey Smith, the ex-convict millionaire, alleged criminal mastermind, and Dixie Mafia figure. With the help of corrupt local authorities, Smith spent the 1970s building a criminal empire in auto salvage and bail bonds.

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.

More than any other sport, boxing has a history of being easy to rig. There are only two athletes and one or both may be induced to accept a bribe; if not the fighters, then the judges or referee might be swayed. In such inviting circumstances, the mob moved into boxing in the 1930s and profited by corrupting a sport ripe for exploitation. In Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science, Jeffrey Sussman tells the story of the coercive and criminal underside of boxing, covering nearly the entire 20th century.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter comes the captivating true-crime story of a Mafia moll - “the female counterpart of the pseudonymous Henry Hill, the star of Wiseguy.... An insider’s view of mob life that is by turns comic and chilling” (Los Angeles Times).

While some of these cases are sure to tickle the memory of any true crime enthusiast, some might just be new to you. One thing all these cold cases have in common is that they’ve finally been solved, some with incredibly shocking outcomes.