The First Family Terror, Extortion and the Birth of the American Mafia

'An indefatigable researcher with prodigious descriptive flair.' Sunday Telegraph 'Cracking history... Mike Dash brings a confident organisation to his material, a rapid grasp of both personality and circumstance, and a bold eye for significant detail.' Daily Telegraph 'Writes with an unabashedly cinematic flair, and his accounts are backed by meticulous research.' New York Times 'No historian I've read in years places you so deeply inside a piece of the past.' National Geographic Adventure 'Dash captures the reader with narrative based on dogged research, more richly evocative of character and place than any fiction, and so well written he is impossible to put down.' The Australian Mike Dash's extensively researched and well-laid-out book goes some of the way towards deconstructing the Mafia as a romantic alternative to law and order...This book, with its parade of bloodthirsty miscreants, is most absorbing when it deals with the counterfeiting rackets that partly ended in 1910 when Morello went to jail for a decade...Dash brings a well-ordered and sober eye to the birth of organised crime and its squalid reality' Irish Times 30/3 'We love the Mafia, its dons and its capos, its soldiers and consiglieres. But know them? No. We don't know them. In fact, until now we've never even understood where they came from. That's been put right by Mike Dash. The English historian has set himself the task of explaining how scruffy and penniless Sicilian immigrants formed the most powerful criminal organisation in the world's most powerful nation. And it's some story' Scotland on Sunday 22/03 'Dash's sources, among which are some dramatic and detailed confessions from New York gang members, bring to life this bloody period of organised crime history' Sunday Telegraph BOOK OF THE WEEK 08/03