June 20, 1991. A five-man hit team waited in a car outside the Long Island home of Victor Orena, the acting crime boss of the Colombo crime family. Orena recognized the vehicle—and managed to escape with his life. Over the next year, more shots would be fired in what would become the last major mob war in New York's crime-soaked history—and one of the bloodiest. The war ended with Orena's 1992 arrest and conviction for racketeering.

The first serious external threat to the mafia's existence in America comes from U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who repeatedly expresses his desire to eradicate organized crime in America. Kennedy unleashes the full force of the U.S. Justice Department to the apparent dismay of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The mafia's unforgiving response is executed by Louisiana don Carlos Marcello along with Florida don Santo Trafficante, who together take aim at the attorney general's brother, the president of the United States.

In 2003, local Genovese family captain "Big Al" Bruno got shot five times with a .45 caliber handgun as he walked out of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel social club in Springfield, Massachusetts. Since Vito Genovese took his empire north from New York City, a string of mobsters dating back a hundred years have operated in the Greater Springfield area. With this migration came murders, mayhem, treachery, criminal trials, and constant corruption.

Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon.

No episode in NYPD history surpasses the depravities of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two decorated detectives who covertly acted as mafia informants and paid assassins in the Scorsese world of 1980s Brooklyn. For more than ten years, Eppolito and Caracappa moonlighted as the mob's early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and crippling investigations by sharing details of surveillance, phone taps, and impending arrests. The Lucchese boss called the two detectives his crystal ball: Whatever detectives knew, the mafia soon learned.

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

‘Paddy’ Mayne was one of the most outstanding special forces leaders of the Second World War. Hamish Ross’s authoritative study follows Mayne from solicitor and a rugby international to troop commander in the Commandos and then the SAS, whose leader he later became and whose annals he graced, winning the DSO and three bars, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur.

Packed with jaw-dropping stories of public violence and personal vengeance, vivid insights into the Mafia's way of life, and shocking portraits of America's most wanted crime families, Red Hook is a must-listen for anyone fascinated by the history of organized crime in America.

Historian Bennett Parten provides a groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted. In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world—from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio—the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums.

In 2002, Bill Zehme landed one of the most coveted assignments for a magazine writer: an interview with Johnny Carson—the only one he’d granted since retiring from hosting The Tonight Show a decade earlier. Zehme was tapped for the Esquire feature story thanks to his years of legendary celebrity profiles, and the resulting piece portrayed Carson as more human being than showbiz legend. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005 and urged on by many of those closest to Carson, Zehme signed a contract to do an expansive biography.

A captivating chronicle of the incredible story of one of America’s most iconic, charismatic, and still polarizing figures—baseball immortal Pete Rose—and an exquisite cultural history of baseball and America in the second half of the twentieth century.

More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.”

Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall were three hideouts that collectively were known to outlaws as “Bandit Heaven.” During the 1880s and ‘90s these remote locations in Wyoming and Utah harbored hundreds of train and bank robbers, horse and cattle thieves, the occasional killer, and anyone else with a price on his head.

Rick Atkinson recounts the first 21 months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.