Grey: 921 books

Meyer Shapiro and his brothers, Irving and Willy, were tutored by Irish American hoodlum Legs Diamond. Aside from Willie Shapiro all of them died the same year, 1931. Diamond was gunned down in Albany in December. Meyer was found dead in a Lower East Side tenement with a single bullet wound in his...

Verne Sankey had a job as a railroad engineer in Canada before he became a bootlegger and then a kidnapper. Born in Pottawatamie County, Iowa, Sankey lived in South Dakota. Later he maintained a hideout near Mitchell, SD where he kept one of his captives away from the law. Sankey was caught in Chicago...

Jimmy Hoffa was tried in Nashville, Tennessee in December 1962. Hoffa was indicted for violating the Taft-Hartley Act when after he took money from a Detroit transportation in return for settling a labor dispute. Before this case the Teamsters boss had beaten federal government raps on three successive...

The fire at the Park Avenue studios of Pathe' film company snuffed out the lives of ten persons. Nineteen others were injured in a disaster that might have been prevented had the building been equipped with an adequate sprinkler system. Following the tragedy a grand jury inquest revealed that...

Eduardo Aronica was part of the Carlo Gambino crime organization in New York City. Aronica got his start in illicit, untaxed, unregistered liquor stills. Stills operated by Eduardo and his cronies were discovered by government agents during sweeps conducted in 1938 and 1939. Aronica was prosecuted...

John "Sonny" Franzese was a rising star in the Profaci-Magliocco/Colombo family crime organization. Born in Naples, Sonny was raised by his bakery owner father in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. By 1965 he was the fastest ascending Cosa Nostra leader in the underworld. A Newsday article...

Angelo Amico was a significant organized crime boss in Rochester and western New York during the mid 20th century and after. One newspaper article described him as part of the "new leadership" among mobsters. In one of his trials he was indicted for extorting gambling revenue from sixteen...

John "Poppa John" Priziola was a lynchpin Mafioso in the annals of Detroit, Michigan crime. He was notorious as a receiver of narcotics for a heroin smuggling syndicate that thrived in the mid twentieth century. His crimes and illicit activities were a focus of the McClellan U.S. Senate...

Andy Warhol was shot by a radical feminist at the studio he regularly called The Factory. Near Union Square the date was June 3, 1968. Warhol was busy opening his mail when the woman walked in dressed in a trench coat. She had a loaded weapon in one of its pockets. As usual the place was bustling...

The Gambino and Bonanno crime families struggled over the mozzarella cheese business in Pennsylvania, South New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania. An FBI sting operation in Buffalo, New York began the unraveling of a Gambino family operation that smuggled heroin into the United States from Milan,...

An American Airlines transcontinental flight crashed into the Mississippi River near midnight on February 10, 1944. The cause of the crash has never been entirely explained. The Civil Aeronautics Board promised additional investigation into the tragedy but never went through with it. The plane had...

Nancy Evans married Lewis Titterton in Manhattan in 1929. An aspiring author she met the Englishman, who soon became an executive with NBC, in one of New York's literary circles. They lived for a time in a West Side neighborhood that was a part of Hell's Kitchen. Nancy disliked the noisy area and...

Johnny Dio rose to great heights in the Lucchese crime family of New York City. He was indicted on numerous occasions for bankruptcy fraud and other crimes. Dio had two brothers who were also involved in crime. One of them was a heroin trafficker in Miami Beach and the other had a prominent position...

The Gambino family is one of five that control organized crime in New York City, Most people think of John Gotti when they think of the Gambinos. My book looks at an earlier era, beginning with the family's move to take over the garbage industry in Mount Vernon, New York. This began in 1964 when...