The Best Organized True Crime Books 2025

1. The Wise Guy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes from My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run, (Paperback)

Now, in his inimitable style, Henry Hill tells some spicy stories of his life in the Mob and shows you how to whip up his favorite dishes, Sicilian style--even when you're cooking on the run. Learn delicious recipes that make even the toughest tough guy beg for more... Henry Hill was a born wiseguy. At the pizzeria where he worked as a kid, he learned to substitute pork for veal in cutlets--which came in handy later when the bankroll was low. At thirteen, he got his first percentage from a local deli--that lost business when he started supplying the neighborhood wiseguys with his own heroes. And what great heroes they were. Once he entered Witness Protection, though, Hill found himself in places where prosciutto was impossible to get and gravy was something you put on mashed potatoes. So he learned to fake it when necessary (for example, Romano with white pepper took the place of real pecorino-siciliano cheese), and wherever he found himself, Hill managed to keep good Italian food on the table. He still brings this flair for improvisation to his cooking. No recipe is set in stone. And substitutions are listed in case you need them for these recipes and many more: Mom's Antipasto - Sunday Gravy (Meat Sauce) - Cheater's Chicken Stock - Striped Bass for Paulie - Fat Larry's Pizza Dough - Henry's Kickback Antipasti Hero - Sicilian Easter Bread with Colored Eggs - Clams Casino - Osso Buco - Oven Penitentiary Sauce with Sausage - Michael's Favorite Ziti with Meat Sauce

The Wise Guy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes from My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run, (Paperback) Author: Berkley Books ISBN: 9780451207067 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2002-10-01 Page Count: 352

2. Blue Helmets and Black Markets (Hardcover)

The 1992-1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys. Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja, Blue Helmets and Black Markets is a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.

Blue Helmets and Black Markets (Hardcover)

3. Contrabando: Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy, (Paperback)

Don Henry Ford, Jr., is an unapologetic outlaw. For seven years he made his living smuggling marijuana across the U.S.-Mexico border in the Big Bend region of Texas. His business partners were some of the era's biggest narcotraficantes like Pablo Acosta and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. After Ford was arrested and imprisoned, he escaped and lived for a year in rural Mexico, raising a bumper crop of weed and hiding out from the federales, before his recapture and return to the penitentiary. Contrabando is the extraordinary, unabashed memoir of a rebel -- a warrior on the other side of the War on Drugs who lived to tell the tale. But more than a riveting and remarkable true crime confession, Contrabando is an ode to the beauty of the dry, dusty West Texas plains and the lonely hills of Mexico -- and a tribute to Ford's friends, protectors, and fellow outlaws who stood by him during the dangerous smuggling years.

Contrabando: Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy, (Paperback) Author: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780060883102 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2015-12-29 Page Count: 240

4. Born to Kill: The Rise and Fall of America's Bloodiest Asian Gang, (Paperback)

Throughout the late eighties and nineties, a gang of young Asian refugees cut a bloody swath through New York's Chinatown. They were the lost children of the Vietnam War, severed from their families by violence and cast adrift in a strange land. Banding together under the leadership of a megalomaniacal young psychopath, David Thai, they took their name from a slogan they had seen on helicopters and the helmets of U.S. soldiers: \"Born to Kill.\" For a decade their empire was unassailable, built on a foundation of fear, ruthlessness, and unimaginable brutality--until one courageous gang brother helped bring it down from the inside.

Born to Kill: The Rise and Fall of America's Bloodiest Asian Gang, (Paperback) Author: William Morrow & Company ISBN: 9780061782381 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2009-06-09 Page Count: 310

5. Honor Thy Father, (Paperback)

A classic masterwork newly updated The electrifying true story of the rise and fall of New York's notorious Bonanno crime family On New York's Park Avenue on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. More than a year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, setting off a bloody mob feud that came to be known as the \"Banana War.\" In this monumental work--packed with intimate details and brilliant reporting--bestselling author Gay Talese first brought to the American consciousness a world and a life previously known to only a few. No other book has done more to acquaint readers with the secrets, structure, wars, power plays, family lives, and fascinating, frightening personalities of the Mafia.

Honor Thy Father, (Paperback) Author: Ecco Press ISBN: 9780061665363 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2009-04-14 Page Count: 592

6. Bringing Down the Mob: The War Against the American Mafia (Paperback)

American Mafia . . . was lucid, concise, and devoid of sensationalism . . . This equally well-written sequel [is] cogent [and] coherent.--The New York Times Book Review 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.

Bringing Down the Mob: The War Against the American Mafia (Paperback)

7. A License to Steal : A Father's Genius, a Son's Revenge, but Payback Has a Price (Hardcover) 9780978605902

ISBN: 9780978605902 ISBN10: 097860590X Contributors: Robinson, Mary Jane, Shaw, Walter T., Jr.,

Walter T. Shaw's Autobiography - As early as the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Walter L. Shaw was thinking of speaker phones, conference calls and call forwarding. Of the thirty-nine patents to his credit, those three telephonic breakthroughs were his biggest inventions, yet nobody knows his name. Ahead of the world by decades, Shaw was leading us into a high-tech future as part of the intellectual elite, but he was repeatedly cheated by shrewd businessmen and big corporations. His son, Walter T. Shaw, was enraged by the ill treatment of his father and embraced a personal mission to even the score. Shaw Jr. would become one of the most prolific jewel thieves . history. Shaw Sr. spent a lifetime inventing and patenting the many means of communication we take for granted today, but it was all for nothing.Tragically, only the Mafia rewarded him. Just to make ends meet for his family, he was persuaded to put his brilliance to work for the mob.

8. Befriend and Betray : Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods (Hardcover) 9780312537197

ISBN: 9780312537197 ISBN10: 0312537190 Contributors: Caine, Alex,

The Hells Angels. The Bandidos. Asian triads. Russian mobsters and corrupt cops. Even the KKK. Just part of a day’s work for Alex Caine, an undercover agent who has seen it all. ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ Alex Caine started life as a working-class boy who always thought he’d end up in a blue-collar job. But after a tour in Vietnam and a stretch in prison on marijuana-possession charges, he fell into the cloak-and-dagger world of a contracted agent or “kite” infiltrating criminal groups that cops across North America and around the globe were unable to penetrate themselves. ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ Thanks to his quick-wittedness and his tough but unthreatening demeanor, Caine could fit into whatever unsavory situation he found himself. Over twenty-five years, his assignments ran the gamut from bad-ass bikers to triad toughs. When a job was over, he’d slip away to a new part of the continent or world, where he would assume a new identity and then go back to work on another group of bad guys. ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ Told with page-turning immediacy, "Befriend and Betray" gives a candid look behind the scenes at some familiar police operations and blows the lid off others that law enforcement would much prefer to keep hidden. And it offers an unvarnished account of the toll such a life takes, one that often left Caine to wonder who he really was, behind those decades of assumed identities. Or whether justice was ever truly served.

9. Terror on the Seas : True Tales of Modern-Day Pirates

Sekulich takes readers on a voyage into the world of high-seas piracy, a multinational, multi-billion-dollar enterprise controlled by organized crime syndicates and local warlords.

Pirates. To many, the word conjures up images of swashbucklers in the eighteenth century. The very idea that pirates might stillﾠply the seas today seems preposterous and far-fetched. But pirates most definitely still exist. And as "Terror On the Seas" shows, their violent activities on the other side of the glove can have wide-reaching effects— whether on our economy or the war on terror. Daniel Sekulich takes readers on an eye-opening voyage into the world of high seas piracy, a multinational, multibillion-dollar enterprise controlled by organized crime syndicates and local warlords. Sekulich sails through some of the most dangerous waters on the planet to chronicle this threat to national and international security. He meets with victims of attacks, those fighting the perils, and even pirates themselves. "Terror on the Seas "tells an explosive story of modern piracy, one that’s costing over $25 billion a year to battle and that poses the risks of environmental disaster, economic chaos, and holy war.

10. Do or Die, (Paperback)

Do or Die is the first insider account of teenage gangs--the lives, loves, and battles of children who kill--from the only journalist ever allowed inside this closed and dangerous world. This is no West Side Story. Welcome to a world where teenagers wear colostomy bags and have scrapbooks filled with funeral invitations; where a young man, after being shot in the chest, drives himself to the hospital; where another youngster, caught in crossfire, uses his girlfriend as a human shield; where teenage gangsters are kidnapped, tortured, and held for six-figure ransoms; where kids hum the latest movie's theme music while killing people. It's a world of clickheads, sherms, bangers, ballers, and mummyheads; a world where the strongest feelings of family come from other gang members; a world where the most potent feelings of self-worth come from murder.

Do or Die, (Paperback) Author: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780060922917 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2019-03-21 Page Count: 304