Bringing down the Mob : The War Against the American Mafia

"American Mafia . . . was lucid, concise, and devoid of sensationalism . . . This equally well-written sequel [is] cogent [and] coherent."―The New York Times Book Review

In his critically acclaimed American Mafia, Thomas Reppetto revealed the details of organized crime's ascendancy in America. His fascinating sequel follows the mob after its peak during Prohibition and the mayhem that followed. Drawing on a lifetime of field experience, he tells the stories of the Mafia's twentieth-century bosses, showing how men such as Sam Giancana, "Crazy Joe" Gallo, and John Gotti became household names. By 1960 crusaders such as Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, Robert Kennedy, and scores of ordinary cops and U.S. marshals began to gain the upper hand in what became a war against organized crime.

In vivid, fast-paced prose, Bringing Down the Mob reads like a dramatic fifty-year military campaign. Reppetto concludes his lively history with evidence for a provocative theory that, given the right formula of global connections and shrewd business decisions, a new generation of multinational criminals appears poised to take up the Mafia mantle.

Thomas Reppetto is a former Chicago commander of detectives and was president of New York City's Citizens Crime Commission for more than twenty years. He is the author of NYPD: A City and Its Police, a New York Times Notable Book, and of American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power (0-8050-7798-7). He lives in Westchester, New York.