LOYALTY AND BETRAYAL The Story of the American Mob

Softcover. Companion to the Fox TV Special. Executive producers Bill Couterie and Nicholas Pileggi. The definitive photographic history of organised crime in America tells the story of the rise and fall of the Mob in America. The narrative by Sidney Zion is accompanied by 200 photographs and exclusive interviews from the TV Special with the wives and girlfriends, the good cops and the bad cops, the turncoats and the lawyers and the mobsters themselves. The book vividly portrays the story of the American Mob, the deep loyalties that marked its success, and the betrayals that led to its collapse. The story begins with turn-of-the-century immigrants arriving in an America already plundered by the robber barons, who owned the railroads, industry and Wall Street. The immigrants settled in rat-infested ghettos and by the 1920s the toughs were fighting their way out of the slums, defining their own set of laws and traditions and killing their way to their share of the American Dream. It took Al Capone, who ran Chicago in the 1920s to understand what could be gained from breaking out. And it took Lucky Luciano in the 1930s to organise a tight-knit crime family, ruled by what came to be known as the Organisation. While America idolised the Hollywood gangster, the real mobsters quietly built an ironclad organisation whose tentacles reached into all of American life. By the 1950s organised crime controlled unions and businesses, influenced governments and basked in the power it held over the entertainment industry. In the 1960s, however, this syndicate began to crack and the Mob went to war with itself. Hounded by stronger legislation and eager prosecutors, the Mob lost its control when its members, starting with Joe Valachi, began to turn. The inevitable decline followed. Profusely Illus. 144pp. 4to softcover. F.