Longtime readers of this blog may know that I’m something of a history buff. The thing about me, though, is that I don’t want to be an expert on just one thing or one field. I want to know everything. Literally every topic, area, or time period of human history, I want to know about it. I will say that the US Civil War is probably my area of expertise but even then there’s so much more that I could read about that conflict.

Instead, I tend to roam the historical wilds. I look to my left and right and whatever catches my eye, that’s the direction I go. Around last November, it was the American Mafia that consumed my attention. I watched that ‘Gotti’ special on Netflix, then ‘Fear City: New York vs the Mob’, and finally “The Irishman”, a historical fiction film about the Mafia produced and directed by Martin Scorsese.

After all this viewing, I decided I also wanted to read a book about all that. I can’t speak for everyone, but I feel like I can only gain so much knowledge from the TV medium. Reading about something, seeing physical words on the page, helps me retain knowledge much better. So, I went straight to one of the authorities on the American Mafia: Selwyn Raab. Raab is a reporter who has covered the mafia for decades for The New York Times and is considered a living legend among people who have taken on the mob.

It was a fascinating book, and the 800 pages seemed to fly by. Raab rights about a serious topic with the flare and panache of the best novelists. He puts you in the jury box as mob lawyers and public servants wage war in the courtroom. He places you at the scenes of the most heinous murders imaginable, like when mob boss Albert Anastasia was shot to death as he reclined in a barber’s chair with a towel over his face, or when Dutch Schultz murdered his closest lieutenant by encasing his feet in cement and dropping him into the East River. He shows you the backroom business deals and how easily labor unions become huge money-making rackets for the Mafia.

The history in this book spans well over a century, from the birth of the Sicilian mafia in the mid-19th century, its emigration into America following the crackdowns by Benito Mussolini, the mob’s golden age in the New World, and finally with its seeming downfall in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

I say ‘seeming’ because the mob unfortunately is on the rise again, according to Raab. Many politicians, law enforcement agencies, and investigators believed that the conviction of John Gotti, followed by a few other high-profile indictments, had permanently chopped the head off the snake, and for a while they were right. They had the mob on the ropes, but the mob gained a reprieve in 2001. After the September 11th terror attacks, everyone forgot about the mob. All the time, money, and assets that the FBI and other agencies had in place to catch gangsters was reassigned to tracking down Al-Qaeda operatives.

The Mafia saw their opportunity and took it, and Raab fears that they are as strong as ever, especially with the new revenue streams they’ve gained through the internet and sports gambling.

If you want to learn more about the American Mafia, I can point you to no finer source than The Five Families by Selwyn Raab. It’s a hefty tome, make no mistake about that, but it’s size should only make it more enticing.