Robert: 5744 books

Karyn Kupcinet's murder is still unsolved in 2014. She was strangled in the early morning hours of November 28, 1963. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy occurred only days before. Karyn was a popular guest on numerous 1960s television shows. Her final appearance was on Perry Mason. My...

Dana was a native of Frankfurt (Oder) and a college student in East Berlin in the mid and late 1980s. She answered a letter that I wrote to Bulgaria Today magazine, which was located in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1984. Dana is somewhat younger than I am. She often wrote to me while traveling on a train from...

Nathan Kaplan, also known as Kid Dropper, was one of a number of powerful gangsters who were active in the pre-Prohibition era of New York City history. He was probably the most noteworthy racketeer at the outset of the 1920s. He acquired his nickname by running a scam that conned people into buying...

Tammaso Buscetta was part of a joint Italian-American effort to clean up an international drug ring that operated out of Sicily in the 1970s and 1980s. Earlier Buscetta was involved in tobacco smuggling. He turned against the Mafia because of seven murders they carried out against his relatives. In...

Stefano Magaddino dominated organized crime in Buffalo, New York during the 1960s. His criminal network extended into Ontario, Canada and the Ohio Valley region. My e-book is a close, short look at the power structure of Magaddino's criminal syndicate, with the names of lieutenants, family members,...

Linda Lovelace starred in the most lucrative adult film of all time, Deep Throat (1972). I have traced her maternal and paternal ancestors who came to the United States from Italy, Ireland and England. Linda died in 2002 in Colorado. Her family spread out from several locations in Maine, Massachusetts...

Johnny Torrio is sometimes seen as a footnote to Al Capone who is most often associated with the heyday of Chicago criminal activity. Yet it was Torrio who moved from Italy to New York to Chicago who established the first empire in Chicago. At the time there were two rival gangs in the windy city,...

Aniello DellaCroce led an insurrection to wrest power away from Gambino crime family boss Carlo Gambino. The underboss was a protege of the late Mafia enforcer Albert Anastasia. DellaCroce was a prominent figure in mob history from the early 1970s until his death from cancer in 1985. He was a fierce...

Counterfeiters operated in the early years of the 20th Century in New York's Lower East Side. Perhaps the best known of these was the Giuseppe Morello gang which was based on Prince Street in Manhattan. In April 1903 a Buffalo resident named Benedetto Madonia was found stuffed in a barrel on...

Carmine Lombardozzi was once targeted to be killed by mafia assassins so flagrant were the liberties that he took with the money he collected for the mob. Case in point was the Apalachin meeting in upstate New York in 1957. His fate was decided while he waited in the garage of the Joseph Barbara home...

Herman Webster Mudgett was responsible for the deaths of as many as 200 people. Most of them were murdered during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which was held in Chicago. Mudgett confessed to 27 of these killings. So far as I know there has not been a published account of Herman Mudgett's...

Anthony Carminati was a Gambino family caporegime who was involved in gambling operations in northern New Jersey. In 1975 he was indicted with multiple co-conspirators in a bribery and gambling racket that involved a high level police detective. On several occasions the mobsters offered lists of names...

Owney Madden owned a large stake in the Cotton Club, perhaps the most famous of New York City nightclubs in the 1920s and 1930s. He also controlled the supply of beer distributed to America's largest metropolitan area. These two facts alone make him an important figure in the history of early twentieth...

Big John La Rocca was a somewhat insignificant crime boss as far a big cities are concerned. He got his start as a whiskey runner after he failed running a gas station. The Pittsburgh crime structure is different than New York, Philadelphia or Chicago. For example crime in the city was controlled...