The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia

Dash, Mike

ISBN 10: 0385667515 / ISBN 13: 9780385667517

Published by Doubleday Canada, 2009

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Seller Inventory # ERICA79103856675156

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia
• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385667515
• ISBN 13: 9780385667517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Book Type: book

About this title

Synopsis

Hundreds of books have been written about the American Mafia, but none has told how it came into existence. This one does. Mafia books are notoriously unreliable, too often filled with the recycled errors of earlier authors. This one has been painstakingly researched from primary sources, including interviews with surviving family members and a vast, previously unexamined Secret Service archive. The result is an extraordinary work of history that grips, astonishes and chills the blood like a thriller.

It tells the little-known story of the Morello family, pioneers of protection rackets, bizarre rituals and Mafia wars. Before the Five Families who dominated US organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare.

Mike Dash follows the birth of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the wharves of New Orleans to the streets of Little Italy. He brings to life the remarkable villains and unusual heroes of the Mafia’s early years, and does so without ever resorting to fiction or “imagined” history.

The First Family is more than just a pulse-quickening Mafia narrative. This is how it really happened.

About the Author

Mike Dash is a historian with an MA from Cambridge University and a PhD from the University of London. A former journalist whose work has appeared in numerous national newspapers and magazines, Dash is the author of seven books, including Tulipomania, Satan’s Circus Thug, and Batavia’s Graveyard. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.