Bringing Down the Mob: The War Against the American Mafia

In his critically acclaimed American Mafia, Thomas Reppetto revealed the details of organized crime’s ascendancy in America. His fascinating sequel follows the mob after its peak during Prohibition and the mayhem that followed. Drawing on a lifetime of field experience, he tells the stories of the Mafia’s twentieth-century bosses, showing how men such as Sam Giancana, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, and John Gotti became household names. By 1960 crusaders such as Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, Robert Kennedy, and scores of ordinary cops and U.S. marshals began to gain the upper hand in what became a war against organized crime.

In vivid, fast-paced prose, Bringing Down the Mob reads like a dramatic fifty-year military campaign. Reppetto concludes his lively history with evidence for a provocative theory that, given the right formula of global connections and shrewd business decisions, a new generation of multinational criminals appears poised to take up the Mafia mantle.