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.

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.

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.

One of America's most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf—working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses.

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse—offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines.

Nestled in the warm embrace of his immigrant grandmother, Mike Moy was raised hearing bloodcurdling tales of the brutal life she escaped in China. But growing up on the mean streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Mike has also faced shocking violence coupled with destructive racism. In a tight-knit community besieged with fear and alienation, teenage Mike takes refuge in one of Chinatown’s notorious gangs, tattooing his membership in Fuk Ching on his body.

As young men, Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, devoted their lives to helping the poor. But it wasn't until they moved to an extraordinarily dangerous neighborhood in Honduras that they came to a radical conclusion: The charity world was combating poverty incorrectly. In gripping prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two best friends became quasi vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles.

On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet “Belle Starr”—was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American West.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout history: from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture.

Citizen Wynn recounts the cautionary saga of uber-wealthy casino king Steve Wynn, who built a global gambling empire on fantasy, grift, and misogyny before hubris and #MeToo brought him down. Part Mafia history, part deeply researched social commentary, part Horatio Alger gone horribly awry, Citizen Wynn is a modern morality tale with instant appeal to 100 million Americans who gamble regularly as well as millions more who recognize the Wynn name from Macao to Monaco.

The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually. At first, days are just a few seconds shorter than normal. Awareness of the mysterious phenomenon hasn’t reached Tanner, a young man preoccupied with dreams of escaping his tiny Alaskan hometown. One night, desperate to make his mark on the world, he runs away. He lands an unlikely job at CWC, the operator of a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionizing global transportation.

Puritan Christianity, Matthew J. Tuininga shows, shaped both the spiritual and military conquests of New England from beginning to end.

The Houdini Club captures the personal drama of World War II Special Forces warfare. The men of maverick Colonel William O. Darby's Rangers had abundant tales of glory, yes, but also tales of misery, fear, and murderous intent. Then, there was the utter exhaustion contrasted by the thrill of combat, the devastating final battle that all but destroyed them, and the ingenuity and sheer determination that made the highly vaunted German Afrika Korps and veteran German Parachute and Panzer units marvel at their guerilla tactics and their prison breakouts.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.

When it first came to the public’s attention in the fall of 1986, the story of the Billionaire Boys Club and its leader, Joe Hunt, a young man labeled a “yuppie Charles Manson” by the prosecutor, was splashed across headlines and TV screens throughout the nation. The story of rich kids, flagrant excess, and multiple murders fascinated the American public, but deeper truths lay buried beneath. The saga was so complex that neither its scope nor its implications could be clearly discerned—that is, until The Price of Experience was published in 1996.

Investigative reporter James Renner reopens cold cases that have baffled Clevelanders for years.

In Crisis on Mount Hood, author and emergency room doctor Christopher Van Tilburg looks at the history of America's oldest all-volunteer mountain rescue team, the Hood River Crag Rats, and his own three-decade commitment to search and rescue. Centered on Oregon's iconic 11,249-foot-high Mount Hood, considered by many to be the world's most-climbed glaciated peak, this dramatic narrative leads listeners through a century of life-and-death challenges.

In The Raider, Cundill Prize-winning historian Stephen R. Platt gives us the first authoritative account of Carlson’s larger-than-life exploits: the real story, based on years of research including newly discovered diaries and correspondence in English and Chinese, with deep insight into the conflicted idealism about the Chinese Communists that would prove Carlson’s undoing in the McCarthy era. Tracing the rise and fall of an unlikely American war hero, The Raider is a story of exploration, of cultural (mis)understanding, and of one man’s awakening to the sheer breadth of the world.

In 1987, Leo Schofield was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle. Always insistent on his innocence, he was poorly served by his legal defense: the investigation was sloppy, the case flimsy, and numerous pieces of evidence were ignored. He was sentenced to life in prison. Over thirty years later, Gilbert King is tipped off to Leo’s case and is astonished by what he found: layers of corruption, flawed evidence, and deep-seated errors. He can’t shake the story and starts to get to know Leo and his family.

On April 9th, 2019, Jonathan got the dreaded call: his father Thomas had been rushed to the ER. He’d known for a while that Thomas’s health was in decline, but at this pivotal moment, he had no choice but to step into the role of caretaker—a role Thomas himself was never able to grasp. In The Mind is Burning, Jonathan recounts the stranger-than-fiction true story of the Hirsch family.