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Pub. Date
2020
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English
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"The drunken '20s started roaring almost immediately, but they were loudest in Manhattan. David Rosen's [book] has all the snazzy, jazzy details." —NY Daily News
Texas Guinan was the queen of New York's speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city's biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown's "Wet Zone,"...
Texas Guinan was the queen of New York's speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city's biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown's "Wet Zone,"...
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Beginning in the 1920s, an all-star team of goons, gunmen and garrotters transformed America's criminal landscape. Its membership was diverse; the mob recruited men from all ethnicities and religious backgrounds. Most were natives of the Big Apple, handpicked from the city's toughest neighborhoods: Brownsville, Ocean Hill, Flushing. So prolific were their exploits that the media soon dubbed this bevy of hired hands Murder, Incorporated. The brainchild...
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During the early twentieth century, Sicilian and Southern Italian immigrants poured into New York City. Looking to escape poverty and persecution at home, they soon discovered that certain criminal enterprises followed them to America. Before any codes of honor were established in the New World, violent bosses wreaked havoc on their communities in their quest to rule the underworld. It took several decades for the Mafia to mature into a contemporary...
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In the town of lawmaking, three brothers thrived in lawbreaking
Before Prohibition, Leo, Emmitt, and Charles "Rags" Warring worked as laborers in their father's barrel shop. When the (illegal) booze started flowing, all three quickly got caught up in the wild and sometimes violent underworld of Washington, D.C. Their exploits-including a lucrative numbers racket, gangland shootings, and high-profile courtroom trials-created sensational headlines...
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Hopes have been crushed. Fortunes gained. Lives celebrated while others were snuffed out too soon. In the shadows, where corners are cut, and ambition unchecked - that is where the notorious stories live. Step into the dark alleyways, back rooms and even board rooms with me, as I recount Pittsburgh's seedier past. Notorious Pittsburgh features more than 20 stories, including Pittsburgh's first bank robbery, a famous jailbreak, as well as several stories...
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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...
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The never-before-told story of The Peppermint Lounge, the famed Manhattan nightspot and mobster hangout that launched an era
The Peppermint Lounge was intended to be nothing more than a front for gambling and other rackets but the club became a sensation after Dick "Cami" Camillucci began to feature a new kind of music, rock and roll. The mobsters running the place found themselves juggling rebellious youths alongside celebrities like Greta Garbo...
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Sensational tales of true-life crime, the devastation of the Irish potato famine, the upheaval of the Civil War, and the turbulent emergence of the American labor movement are connected in a captivating exploration of the roots of the Molly Maguires. A secret society of peasant assassins in Ireland that re-emerged in Pennsylvania's hard-coal region, the Mollies organized strikes, murdered mine bosses, and fought the Civil War draft. Their shadowy...
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What if the world of the old New York waterfront was as violent and mob-controlled as it appears in Hollywood movies? Well, it really was, and the story of its downfall, told here in high style by Nathan Ward, is the original New York mob story.
New York Sun reporter Malcolm "Mike" Johnson was sent to cover the murder of a West Side boss stevedore and discovered a "waterfront jungle, set against a background of New York's magnificent skyscrapers"...
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In 1988, Judge Joe O'Kicki was regarded by his peers as one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States. He was newly re-married, sworn in as the president judge of a Pennsylvania county and on the fast track to a federal bench.
Silently, however, a state police vice unit was in the midst of covert operation into O'Kicki's personal affairs. The judge would be accused of soliciting bribes, frequenting brothels and running the county as...
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Now in hiding, a former wiseguy teams up with a veteran true-crime writer to take you inside Brooklyn's gangland at the height of its violence.
This is the true story of Carmine Imbriale-a gambler, a brawler, a bandit, a bookie, an enforcer. For two decades, Imbriale was a street-level operative in one of the most violent crews in the Colombo Family, and he endeared himself to some of the major figures of organized crime while developing deadly disputes...
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Prohibition attempted to kill John Barleycorn, the personification of intoxicating drinks, but in Delaware the notice of his death was premature. Government agents tried in vain to stop bootleggers and rumrunners, who fed the speakeasies that quenched the thirst of the people of the First State. Against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, bootleggers sped up and down the new Du Pont Boulevard, while enforcement agents, such as the Bible-thumping...
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Discover the darker side of New York City history with this collection of stories and photos. Amid the bustle of the city's ever-changing landscape, Manhattan's past still whispers. At Fraunces Tavern, George Washington's emotional farewell luncheon in 1783 echoes in the Long Room. Gertrude Tredwell's ghost appears to visitors at the Merchant's House Museum. Long since deceased, Olive Thomas shows herself to the men of the New Amsterdam Theatre, and...
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Pittsburgh is a hardworking city. And hard workers sometimes enjoy the occasional spirit. So, when Prohibition hit the Steel City, it created a level of violence and corruption residents had never witnessed. Illegal producers ran stills in kitchens, basements, bathroom tubs, warehouses and even abandoned distilleries. War between gangs of bootleggers resulted in a number of murders and bombings that placed Pittsburgh on the same level as New York...
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The second installment of this saga of gangland lore follows gregarious gangster, Michael Hardy, further down his twisted criminal path. “The Last Jewish Gangster, The Middle Years”, starts in 1968 with Hardy sentenced to twelve years in the world's most dangerous prison in Mexico after taking the rap for his mother's counterfeiting scheme, hoping to have finally earned her love and respect.
Once he's released from prison, Hardy returns to Brooklyn...
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There was perhaps no region more opposed to Prohibition than Baltimore and Maryland. The Free State was defiant in its protest from thoroughly wet Governor Albert Ritchie to esteemed Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons. Maryland was the only state to not pass a "baby" Volstead enforcement act. Speakeasies emerged at Frostburg's Gunter Hotel and at Baltimore's famed Belvedere Hotel, whose famous owls' blinking eyes would notify its patrons if it was safe...
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Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s explores a little-known but spirited chapter of the Quaker City's history. The hoodlums, hucksters, and racketeers of Prohibition-era Philadelphia sold bootleg booze, peddled illicit drugs, ran numbers, and operated prostitution and insurance rings. Among the fascinating personalities that created and contributed to the Philadelphia crime scene of the 1920s and 1930s were empire builders like Mickey...
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