C-1 and the Chicago Mob

by Vincent L. Inserra

Author	: Vincent L. Inserra
Publisher	: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages	: 316
Release	: 2014
Genre	: Law
ISBN	: 149318279X

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This book was written as a tribute to all the agents who were assigned to Criminal Squad #1, more commonly referred to as the C-1 Squad, of the Chicago Division of the FBI from 1957 to 1976, a period of nineteen years. These agents were pioneers, who were required to wage war against one of the most powerfully entrenched organized crime organizations in the country since the days of Al Capone. It was at a time when the FBI did not have all the tools or legislation necessary to combat organized crime but they accomplished their goals aggressively with whatever means were available. This is a story of the unique challenges confronting these dedicated agents and the incomparable results achieved which resulted in severely disrupting and curtailing the activities of the Chicago mob. Mr. Inserra also chronicles parts of his career prior to and following his FBI experiences.

C-1 and the Chicago Mob

by Vincent L. Inserra

Author	: Vincent L. Inserra
Publisher	: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages	: 316
Release	: 2014-09-18
Genre	: True Crime
ISBN	: 1493182773

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This book was written as a tribute to all the agents who were assigned to Criminal Squad #1, more commonly referred to as the C-1 Squad, of the Chicago Division of the FBI from 1957 to 1976, a period of nineteen years. These agents were pioneers, who were required to wage war against one of the most powerfully entrenched organized crime organizations in the country since the days of Al Capone. It was at a time when the FBI did not have all the tools or legislation necessary to combat organized crime but they accomplished their goals aggressively with whatever means were available. This is a story of the unique challenges confronting these dedicated agents and the incomparable results achieved which resulted in severely disrupting and curtailing the activities of the Chicago mob. Mr. Inserra also chronicles parts of his career prior to and following his FBI experiences.

Bullets for Dead Hoods

by John Corbett

Author	: John Corbett
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 224
Release	: 2020
Genre	: True Crime
ISBN	: 9781940190266

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This haunting dossier--anonymously assembled and found in a thrift store--gives an unprecedented and intimate lowdown on the Chicago mafia In the early 2000s, Chicago author, curator and gallerist John Corbett struck thrifter's gold in a going-out-of-business Chicago junk shop when he stumbled onto a 1933 manuscript intimately documenting the Chicago Mafia. The tone of the browned and brittled pages immediately grabbed him--sensationalistic and funny, they read like an embellished police blotter as they named names, gave addresses, and detailed crimes. Presented here in facsimile in order to capture the physicality of the typewritten and annotated document, Bullets for Dead Hoods: An Encyclopedia of Chicago Mobsters, c. 1933offers an expanded overview of the Chicago Outfit through 140 character sketches that range from the infamous--Al Capone, Big Jim Colosimo, the Everleigh Sisters--to their lesser-known aiders and abetters. Whoever dared to put this testament together was clearly someone with access to information--a cop? a detective? a newspaperman? a bitter mafioso?--but who would've risked sharing this information, and why, is a mystery that will most likely never be solved. What is left for us is a concise introduction to a particularly gripping chapter in American history that, through its details, knits Chicago together in a new way. In addition to the 1933 manuscript in facsimile (approximately 185 pages), the book includes an introduction by John Corbett; a compilation of the 500+ locations referenced in the manuscript; and a map featuring those street addresses in Chicago.

American Mafia: Chicago

by William Griffith

Author	: William Griffith
Publisher	: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages	: 235
Release	: 2013-10-01
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1493006045

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Everyone knows stories about the American Mafia and its varied forms of crime, from racketeering to stock manipulation to murder. American Mafia: Chicago explores the Windy City, strolling through its neighborhoods and imagining scenes from the past—telling the stories of the men, women, and families and revealing the events behind the legends and the history of the families' beginnings and founding members. Featuring the most fascinating stories from the early days, when loosely-organized, incredibly secretive gangs terrorized neighborhoods with names like Little Hell, through the mob’s headiest years, when Al Capone and his men pretty well controlled the city, American Mafia: Chicago offers tantalizing glimpses into the era when Chicago was ruled by gangs with their ever-twisting allegiances and tangled webs of relationships. Most of the buildings are gone now. But the stories are still there, if you know where to look.

The Insane Chicago Way

by John Hagedorn

Author	: John Hagedorn
Publisher	: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages	: 309
Release	: 2015-08-19
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 022623293X

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Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called "Spanish Growth & Development." Hagedorn's main informant is 'Sal Martino, ' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the "In$ane Family," one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of "disorganized crime" but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGD-the reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 "peace" conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland, "The In$ane Chicago Way" makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.

Mafia Spies

by Thomas Maier

Author	: Thomas Maier
Publisher	: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages	: 558
Release	: 2019-04-02
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1510741720

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From the Bestselling Author and Television Producer of MASTERS OF SEX, a True Story of Espionage and Mobsters, Based on the Never-Before-Released JFK Files, and Optioned by Warner Bros. Mafia Spies is the definitive account of America’s most remarkable espionage plots ever—with CIA agents, mob hitmen, “kompromat” sex, presidential indiscretion, and James Bond-like killing devices together in a top-secret mystery full of surprise twists and deadly intrigue. In the early 1960s, two top gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, were hired by the CIA to kill Cuba’s Communist leader, Fidel Castro, only to wind up murdered themselves amidst Congressional hearings and a national debate about the JFK assassination. Mafia Spies revolves around the outlaw friendship of these two mob buddies and their fascinating world of CIA spies, fellow Mafioso in Chicago, Cuban exile commandos in Miami, beautiful Hollywood women, famous entertainers like Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack in Las Vegas, Castro’s own spies in Havana and his double agents hidden in Florida, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI snooping, and the Kennedy administration’s “Get Castro” obsession in Washington. Thomas Maier is among the first to take full advantage of the National Archives’ 2017–18 release of the long-suppressed JFK files, many of which deal with the CIA’s top secret anti-Castro operation in Florida and Cuba. With several new investigative findings, Mafia Spies is a spy exposé, murder mystery, and shocking true story that recounts America’s first foray into the assassination business, a tale with profound impact for today’s Trump era. Who killed Johnny and Sam—and why wasn’t Castro assassinated despite the CIA’s many clandestine efforts?

Chicago Heights

by Charles Hager

Author	: Charles Hager
Publisher	: SIU Press
Total Pages	: 186
Release	: 2018-07-12
Genre	: True Crime
ISBN	: 0809336731

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Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019 In this riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights. Street-smart and good with his hands, Hager is accepted into the working life of a chauffeur and “street tax” collector, earning the moniker “Little Joe College” by notorious mob boss Albert Tocco. But when his childhood friend is gunned down by a hit man, Hager finds himself a bit player in the events surrounding the mysterious, and yet unsolved, murder of mafia chief Sam Giancana. Chicago Heights is part rags-to-riches story, part murder mystery, and part redemption tale. Hager, with author David T. Miller, juxtaposes his early years in West Virginia with his life in crime, intricately weaving his own experiences into the fabric of mob life, its many characters, and the murder of Giancana. Fueled by vivid recollections of turf wars and chop shops, of fix-ridden harness racing and the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Chicago Heights reveals similarities between high-level organized crime in the city and the corrupt lawlessness of Appalachia. Hager candidly reveals how he got caught up in a criminal life, what it cost him, and how he rebuilt his life back in West Virginia with a prison record. Based on interviews with Hager and supplemented by additional interviews and extensive research by Miller, the book also adds Hager’s unique voice to the volumes of speculation about Giancana’s murder, offering a plausible theory of what happened on that June night in 1975.

Get Capone

by Jonathan Eig

Author	: Jonathan Eig
Publisher	: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages	: 498
Release	: 2010-04-27
Genre	: True Crime
ISBN	: 1439199892

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The real story of how the federal government finally apprehended and convicted America’s most notorious criminal, Al Capone. Drawing on recently discovered government documents, wiretap transcripts, and Al Capone’s handwritten personal letters, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Eig tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the nation’s most infamous criminal in rich new detail. From the moment he arrived in Chicago in 1920, Capone found himself in a world with limitless opportunity. Within a few years Capone controlled an illegal bootlegging business with annual revenue rivaling that of some of the nation’s largest corporations. Along the way he corrupted the Chicago police force and local courts while becoming one of the world’s first international celebrities. Legend credits Eliot Ness and his “Untouchables” with apprehending Capone, but Eig shows that this wasn’t so. In Get Capone, the man known as “Scarface” emerges as a complex man, doomed as much by his ego as by his vicious criminality. This is the real Al Capone.

Historic Chicago Bakeries

by Jennifer Billock

Author	: Jennifer Billock
Publisher	: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages	: 160
Release	: 2021-09-27
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1467150118

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As immigrants came from outside the United States and settled in pockets around Chicago, each neighborhood had its own bakery--and sometimes several. At one time, more than seven thousand bakeries dotted the city streets. Stalwarts like Dinkel's, Roeser's, Weber's, Pticek and Ferrara continue a legacy that shaped Chicago's food traditions: an atomic cake for family celebrations, bacon buns in the morning or a poppy seed bun for hot dogs and pączki and zeppole for holidays. Even the never-ending debate over seeded or unseeded rye. From pioneering bakers to today's cake makers, author Jennifer Billock puts the sweet and doughy history of Chicago on display.