BookView Review

Mafia Library delivers an engrossing chronicle of the New England underworld and the Mafia clan that once stood shoulder to shoulder with New York’s feared Five Families. Drawing on a century of mob testimony and hard-won court documents, the book plunges into the smoke-stained alleys of Boston’s North End and Providence’s Federal Hill, where Sicilian immigrants built neighborhoods by day and rackets by night. It opens with the 1916 street murder of Gaspare DiCola, a prosperous fruit dealer whose dying silence announced the arrival of omertà in New England, then follows Gaspare Messina and Frank Morelli as they exploit the chaos of Prohibition to spin small-time smuggling into a multi-state web of gambling halls, rum-running routes, and hijacked trucks.

At the center is Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the quiet tactician who shifted the family’s base to Providence, imposed iron discipline, and forged an organization that could match the Genovese and Gambino machines. The portrait is of a boss with the cold patience of a chess player and the charm to keep soldiers loyal while staying a step ahead of federal agents. History and crime bleed together as the narrative races through the mob wars of the 1970s, the bloody faction fights of the 1990s, and the federal campaigns that finally cracked the code of silence. Even as RICO indictments thinned the ranks, figures like Carmen “Cheese Man” DiNunzio kept gambling and loan-sharking alive. Meticulously sourced and briskly told, this is true crime with the drive of a thriller and the depth of serious history. 

Readers fascinated by grand-scale crime stories and the intricate gears of the Mafia will find it impossible to put down.

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