Nicknamed "Liquor Island," Long Island was rumrunner's paradise during Prohibition. With its proximity to major markets and coastal communities for easy transit, Suffolk County was awash in illegal hooch. Smugglers bringing cases of booze from offshore often secretly hid product temporarily in local garages and sheds, leaving a bottle as a thank-you. Coded communication crisscrossed the county on shortwave radios arranging sales and logistics. Violence...

It is a little known fact that one immigrant Italian family ran London's thriving vice trade unchecked from the mid-1930s for some twenty years. The five Messina brothers imported prostitutes from the Continent on an industrial scale, acquiring the women British citizenship by phony marriages. Demanding 80% of earnings, the Messina family became fabulously wealthy, purchasing expensive properties, cars and influence. As this revealing and absorbing...

Of all the thousands of stories he had written across his lifetime, author and journalist William John Stapleton had never been happier to write the words "The End" than when he completed The Twilight Soi series with the short book "Bangkok Busted: You Go To Jail For Sure". The series began in an anguished state after the author wrote a book detailing the decline of Bangkok's famous strip of go-go boy bars known as Soi Twilight, a narrow street adjacent...

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Black Mass tells you what you need to know-before or after you read Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Black Mass by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill includes: Historical context, chapter-by-chapter summaries, detailed timeline...

Virginia Hill would be found dead at the age of forty-nine, 5,000 miles away from her hometown of Lipscomb, Alabama. She had left behind a suicide note that she was "tired of life"...But the police authorities had no idea what kind of life Virginia led...She had left her small town in Alabama to journey out west. Once there, her beauty would capture the attention of numerous powerful men which included gangster Bugsy Siegel and she would eventually...

"Some people join chess club, some people play football. Jack Shannon runs a secret blackjack ring in his private school's basement. What else is the son of a Las Vegas casino mogul supposed to do? Everything starts falling apart when Jack's mom is arrested for their family's ties to organized crime. His sister Beth thinks this is the Shannon family's chance to finally go straight, but Jack knows that something's not right. His mom was sold out,...

From Matt Birkbeck, investigative journalist and executive producer of Netflix's #1 movie Girl in the Picture, a revelatory father/surrogate son story that takes readers deep inside the inner workings of the mob through the eyes of William "Big Billy" D'Elia, the right-hand man to legendary mafia kingpin Russell Bufalino, who ran organized crime in the US for more than fifty years. William "Big Billy" D'Elia is Mafia royalty. The "adopted" son of...

Two-bit hustler Harry Fabian aches for a life of ease and plenty. With a history of nowhere schemes, he stumbles upon a chance of a lifetime. But there is no easy money in this underworld and soon Fabian learns the horrible price of his ambition.

48 hours in the life of a burnt-out City lawyer who loses his job, falls for a call girl and steals £400,000 from a gangland boss - who wants every penny of it back.

You Can't Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in 1926, then reprinted in 1988 by Adam Parfrey's Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs. After its Amok Press edition went out of print, You Can't Win found popularity once again with the AK Press edition. Feral House's new version will take this classic American narrative a lot further, including two remarkable nonfiction...