My 17 year old son is very interested in learning the history of the Mafia in America. True crime books are not my thing so I have no idea what to recommend. He has read Donnie Brasco and liked it but he is looking for something with a broader view of the entire Mafia. To be specific I need a non fiction book on the American Mafia covering its entire history and preferably not just concentrated on one georgraphic area. If one book doesn’t cover it then several books would be fine.
Thanks in advance. (I told him I would have the name of a good book within 5 minutes if I post it here. tick tock )
One book isn’t going to cover too much in detail. Most of the books I’ve read are era and area specific. I’ve probably read 50+ books in my day regarding the mob, and while I’m sure there are some books that attempt to cover it all, it’s better to focus on specifics. The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas would be a good start for the older stuff. Nicholas Pileggi’s done several (including Wise Guy, which became Goodfellas when they made the movie.) I also really enjoyed War of the Godfathers about the Chicago mobs involvement in the rise of Las Vegas.
Every library has a giant section devoted to the mafia. Send him off into the Crime section and he’ll find more than he could read in a year.
It’s not so much about the mafia that we know today, but Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York is a very interesting history of organized (and not so organized, many places were free-for-alls) crime during 19th-century New York, which paved the way for the 20th-century mafia.
Note: it’s an actual history book written in the 1920’s. The Scorsese film of the same name borrows names of historic figures and gangs, but tosses the history into a blender. The real Bill the Butcher, for example, died in a barroom gunfight years before the Civil War started.
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