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The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia
By Mike Dash
Random House, 2009, 416 pages
$17.82 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

Giuseppe Morello arrived in the USA from Corleone, Sicily, in 1892, and resumed a successful counterfeiting operation that his family had begun in Italy. He broadened his criminal activities to include extortion, insurance scams, and kidnapping; and eventually became the head of the nascent New York Mafia.

Bestselling history author Dash (Satan’s Circus) writes, “Morello and his henchmen were parasites who terrorized their fellow countrymen, exploited the weak, and dealt in fear.” A consummately cold-blooded killer, Morello himself was gunned down in 1930. “Dash depicts the balance between loyalty and betrayal as an ever-changing dance, and nimbly catalogues the endless gruesome murders committed in the name of revenge and honor” (Publishers Weekly).

The author destroys any romantic notions Americans might have about the mob from watching the “Godfather” movies and “The Sopranos.” There is nothing civilized about organized crime.

The First Family is “comprehensively researched. Riveting details and engrossing dialogue create novelistic scenes and tensions, but it’s all true” (American History).

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires
By Selwyn Raab
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006, 784 pages
$12.89 paperback

Neither does Raab romanticize the Mafia—he exposes romantic myths and shows that “the collective goal of the five families of New York [Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese] was pillaging the nation’s richest city and region.” That included corrupting labor unions, garbage collection, the garment industry, construction, police departments, and Wall Street. They also flooded eastern and midwest cities with heroin and other drugs.

“Former New York Times crime reporter Raab sets a new gold standard for organized crime nonfiction” with this book (Publishers Weekly), which includes 24 pages of photos.

American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
By Thomas Reppetto
Holt Paperbacks, 2004, 352 pages
$12.75 paperback

Repetto (an ex-Chicago police detective) contends that the mob’s corruption of politicians, not its management of crime (which actually was more mismanagement), made rich men of the mob bosses, most of whom started out as poor immigrants.

History of the Mafia
By Salvatore Lupo
Columbia University Press, 2009, 352 pages
$21.75 hardcover

The idea that the American Mafia’s culture was based on traditional Sicilian peasant values, with strong family solidarity and codes of honor, is a grotesque, self-serving myth, according to historian Lupo. His history follows the Mafia from its roots in Italy’s wars of unification in the 1800s, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, to the anti-Mafia trials of the 1980s and 90s in Palermo. Publishers Weekly said, sadly, that this book “is almost as byzantine as the Mafia.”

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
By John Buntin
Harmony, 2009, 432 pages
$17.16 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle
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Buntin’s book is a dual biography that weaves together the careers of (a) ruthless and flamboyant mobster Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen, and (b) uncorruptible but racist L.A. police chief William Parker. The Los Angeles criminal scene that Buntin describes, mostly from the Great Depression through the Watts race riots of 1965, is brutal and appalling.

Parker joined the L.A. police in 1927, became chief in 1950, and died in 1966. Before he took over as chief, the police “didn’t fight organized crime, they managed it.” Police were poorly educated, hardly trained, often drunk on the job, and hostile to minorities. City hall was equally corrupt. Parker hired 1,400 new cops and instilled discipline (not respect for civil liberties) in the force.

The diminutive Cohen, kingpin of the Los Angeles underworld, was “Hollywood’s favorite gangster” (Esotouric). Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. hung around with him. He was brought down not by Parker but by the feds twice for tax evasion, for which he served two hitches in the pen. When he died (in his sleep) in 1975, he still owed the USA almost $500,000.

L.A. Noir is entertaining, but Buntin “writes in cliched journalese,” says Jonathan Yardley in his Washington Post review, “and tries to cram too much” into the book. Kirkus called it “a roller coaster ride [and] gripping social history.”

Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
By Bryan Burrough
Penguin 2009, 624 pages
$10.88 paperback, $9.99 Kindle, $11.69 audio CD

Burrough, the award-winning author of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, turns his focus from finace to true crime with this “definitive account of the 1930s crime wave” (according to Publishers Weekly) that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barker family to America’s front pages.

Dillinger, the anti-hero of the 2009 Hollywood movie “Public Enemies,” was a “haunting figure, a man of meanness and sorrow and deep rural pessimism.”

The book “balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today,” said PW.

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Hoover had a gift for organization, and was incorruptible at a time when most local police departments were on the take. But he also “comes off as a borderline hysteric poignantly struggling for self-control.” (NY Times)

The Washington Post said, “It is a wild and amazing story. Burroughs debunks many of the tall tales that have accrued around these almost mythical figures.” For example, Ma Barker may have been the matriarch of a family of violent crooks, but she was not the evil genius mastermind of the gang—that was a false image manufactured by Hoover after Ma was found with a bullet in her head.

Through the 1930s, Hoover’s FBI improved its skill at law enforcement “while gaining a great deal of power that it often abused. As the power of the FBI and its director became ‘absolute,’ the agency, according to Burrough, was itself ‘corrupted absolutely.’” (the Post)