l2910

My son stood in the doorway of the guest room I’d been sleeping in for four months and said, “Dad, honestly, if you’re not going to pull your weight around here, maybe this living arrangement isn’t the right fit. ” I was 61 years old, nine months into a stay that was supposed to be … Read more

In 1952, Bumpy Johnson was released from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after nearly four years behind bars, having lost 23 pounds and returned to a Harlem that no longer resembled the kingdom he had built. The moment he stepped off the bus in New York, he saw the evidence everywhere: Italian names on storefronts that had … Read more

Few film scenes look more authoritative than Jimmy Conway in *Goodfellas*, standing in his kitchen at a Christmas party and berating his crew after the Lufthansa heist. The message is unmistakable: he runs the operation, he controls the money, and he disciplines the men. But the real man behind that character, James Burke, could not … Read more

On November 2008, all charges were dropped against R. Lindley DeVecchio, a 30-year FBI veteran who had been indicted on four counts of second-degree murder. Six months later, he published a memoir defending his career. The case centered on his two-decade relationship with Gregory Scarpa Sr. , a Colombo crime family hit man attributed with … Read more

Roy Albert DeMeo was found dead in the driver’s seat of his Cadillac near a canal in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn on January 10, 1983. He had been shot multiple times. The car was frozen in the bitter winter cold, the windows iced over. There was no fanfare and no spectacle—just the silent … Read more

Joseph Valachi, an American mobster in the Genovese crime family, became the first member of the Italian-American Mafia to publicly acknowledge its existence when he testified before a U. S. Senate committee in 1963. His decision to break the Mafia’s blood oath of silence, known as omertà, exposed the inner workings of organized crime to … Read more