The first book in the classic vigilante action series from a “writer who spawned a genre” (The New York Times). Overseas, Mack Bolan was dubbed “Sgt. Mercy” for the compassion he showed the innocent. On the home front, they’re calling him the Executioner for what he’s doing to the guilty. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, American sniper Mack Bolan honed his skills. After twelve years, with ninety-five confirmed hits, he returns home to Massachusetts. But it’s not to reunite with his family, it’s to bury them—victims in a mass murder/suicide. Even though Bolan’s own father pulled the trigger, he knows the old man was no killer. He was driven to madness by Mafia thugs who have turned his idyllic hometown into a new kind of war zone. Duty calls . . . Introducing an action hero “who would make Jack Reacher think twice,” this is the first book in the iconic series of vigilante justice that has become a publishing phenomenon (Empireonline.com). With more than two hundred million Executioner books sold since its debut, the series continues to stimulate. Gerry Conway, cocreator of Marvel Comics’ The Punisher, credits the Executioner as “my inspiration . . . that’s what gave me the idea for the lone, slightly psychotic avenger.” The series is also now in development as a major motion picture. War Against the Mafia is the 1st book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'A parable written for the age of technological disruption . . . brilliantly told' Sunday Times The international bestselling author returns with an exploration of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century 'The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens, it does not land softly in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.' In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past? This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay, who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War. In this tale of innovation and obsession, Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war? And what is the price of progress?

A “truly compelling” (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war—from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

The Executioner, a lone-wolf vigilante “who would make Jack Reacher think twice,” takes his war on the mob to a new level (Empireonline.com). Once a Vietnam military hero, crack sniper Mack Bolan is now a vigilante, driven by the death of his Massachusetts family to exact vengeance on the mob. Waging war on the West Coast, the Executioner amassed a ten-man army as backup. Seven are now dead. Two are in jail. Only Bolan remains. With a bounty on his head, and every cop in Los Angeles on his tail, Bolan decides to erase his greatest liability: his face. Under the knife of a former army surgeon, Bolan is transformed. With trademark cunning, he infiltrates the Sicilian syndicate that butchered his friends. In cozying up to the boss’s daughter, Bolan’s plan of revenge has never been so intimate. The Executioner may have a new look, but he’s got the same attitude. Soon his fury is going explode, and strike terror in the very heart of the Mafiosi. In writing his iconic Executioner series, Don Pendleton turned his lone-wolf vigilante into a bestselling phenomenon and “spawned a genre” that still influences artists today (The New York Times). Gerry Conway, cocreator of the Marvel Comics avenger, The Punisher, cited the novels as “my inspiration . . . [the] modern equivalent of the pulps.” More than two hundred million copies of the Executioner books have been sold—and a major motion picture based on this classic action series is now in development. Battle Mask is the 3rd book in the Executioner series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

A true crime account of the old-school New York Police Department from the detective who helped catch the Son of Sam and waged a one-man war against the Mafia. In 1978, a gang war erupted in New York City, and the five boroughs ran red with blood. Men with names like “Matty the Horse” and “Tony Ugly” were found dismembered in garbage dumps, dead on the roadside in the far reaches of the Bronx, or suffocated in the trunks of cars parked at LaGuardia Airport. For years, the New York Police Department hadn’t bothered to investigate Mafia murders, preferring to let the mob handle its own bloody affairs—but that was about to change. The NYPD was going to war with the Cosa Nostra, and Det. Joseph Coffey would lead the charge. A hard-nosed veteran of the force, Detective Coffey took down some of the highest-profile organized-crime associations of the 1970s, from the conspiracy between the Mafia and the Catholic Church known as the Vatican Connection to the homegrown terrorists who called themselves the Black Liberation Army. In 1977, when the city was terrorized by serial killer David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, Coffey led the NYPD’s nighttime operations as they worked to lure the murderer into a trap. But the war against the mob would be his greatest challenge—one that would take him right into the heart of gritty, dangerous NYC. Cowritten by New York Daily News veteran Jerry Schmetterer, Coffey’s work is crime reporting at its finest. Fans of the two-fisted journalism of Jimmy Breslin and New York stories like The French Connection will find The Coffey Files has the thunderous intensity of a runaway subway train.

My husband is a made man, a villain, the boss of the Mafia... He stole me from my normal life and catapulted me into the center of the underworld. He imprinted his crimson fingerprints on my psyche and tried to set me free. It's wrong of me to be attracted to the viciousness in him. And yet I can't... won't stop until he loves me back. It's why I returned to him. It's why I allowed him to use me... But when he springs a surprise... he breaks my heart and this time, I will not forgive him. I run from him. Only he's not the only one hunting me... This is book 3 in Michael and Karma's story. You are not ready for this rollercoaster ride of emotions that will have you throwing your kindle across the room. 1-CLICK NOW

The sequel to American Mafia chronicles the fifty-year attack by the federal government that virtually extinguished the nation’s most powerful crime syndicate. In the critically acclaimed American Mafia, Thomas Reppetto narrated the ferocious ascendancy of organized crime in America. In this fascinating sequel, he follows the mob from its peak into a shadowy period of decline as the government, no longer able to deny its existence, made subduing the Mafia a matter of national priority. Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience to tell the stories of the Mafia’s twentieth-century leadership, showing how men such as Sam Giancana and John Gotti became household names. Crusaders like Robert Kennedy led concerted—if sometimes sporadic—attacks against organized crime. As the battles between the feds and the Mafia moved from the streets to the courtrooms, Reppetto describes how it came to resemble a conflict between sovereign powers. In direct, shoot-from-the-hip prose, Reppetto chronicles a turning point in American Mafia history, and offers the provocative theory that, given the right formula of connections and shrewd business, a new generation of multinational criminals may be poised to take up the Mafia’s mantle. “Reppetto . . . is one of the rare commentators on the contemporary Mafia who has been able to view the Mob’s power grabs and struggles from the inside . . . [an] exhaustive and fascinating study.” —Booklist

It has been called the most dangerous gang in American history. In Los Angeles alone it is responsible for over 100 homicides per year. Although it has fewer than 300 members, it controls a 40,000-strong street army that is eager to advance its agenda. It waves the flag of the Black Hand and its business is murder. Although known on the streets for over fifty years, the Mexican Mafia has flown under the radar of public awareness and has flourished beneath a deep cover of secrecy. Members are forbidden even to acknowledge its existence. For the first time in its history, the Mexican Mafia is now getting the attention it has been striving to avoid. In this briskly written and thoroughly researched book, Tony Rafael looks at the birth and the blood-soaked growth of this criminal enterprise through the eyes of the victims, the dropouts, the cops and DAs on the front lines of the war against the Mexican Mafia. The first book ever published on the subject, Southern Soldiers is a pioneering work that unveils the operations of this California prison gang and describes how it grew from a small clique of inmates into a transnational criminal organization. As the first prison gang ever to project its power beyond prison walls, the Mexican Mafia controls virtually every Hispanic neighborhood in Southern California and is rapidly expanding its influence into the entire Southwest, across the East Coast, and even into Canada. Riding a wave of unchecked immigration and seemingly beyond the reach of law enforcement, the Mexican Mafia is poised to become the Cosa Nostra of twenty-first-century America.

Gangsterismo is an extraordinary accomplishment, the most comprehensive history yet of the clash of epic forces over several decades in Cuba. It is a chronicle that touches upon deep and ongoing themes in the history of the Americas, and more specifically of the United States government, Cuba before and after the revolution, and the criminal networks known as the Mafia. The result of 18 years’ research at national archives and presidential libraries in Kansas, Maryland, Texas, and Massachusetts, here is the story of the making and unmaking of a gangster state in Cuba. In the early 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky sowed the seeds of gangsterismo when he won Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista’s support for a mutually beneficial arrangement: the North American Mafia were to share the profits from a future colony of casinos, hotels, and nightclubs with Batista, his inner circle, and senior Cuban Army and police officers. In return, Cuban authorities allowed the Mafia to operate its establishments without interference. Over the next twenty-five years, a gangster state took root in Cuba as Batista, other corrupt Cuban politicians, and senior Cuban army and police officers got rich. All was going swimmingly until a handful of revolutionaries upended the neat arrangement: and the CIA, Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and the Mafia joined forces to attempt the overthrow of Castro. Gangsterismo is unique in the literature on Cuba, and establishes for the first time the integral, extensive role of mobsters in the Cuban exile movement. The narrative unfolds against a broader historical backdrop of which it was a part: the confrontation between the United States and the Cuban revolution, which turned Cuba into one of the most perilous battlegrounds of the Cold War. ……………………………… “The anti-communist hysteria generated by the Cold War frequently unhinged the policy judgments of US government officials in many areas, but nowhere so completely as in our relations with Cuba. This conclusion is inescapable as Gangsterismo brilliantly unravels the bizarre tale of the Mafia army the Kennedy brothers recruited in their manic determination to rid Cuba of Castro, that vexing, seemingly indomitable Communist.” —Martin J. Sherwin, co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize (together with Kai Bird) for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer “What is shocking is not what is new, but how much that is old – already on the record in presidential and other archives, CIA and FBI files, memoirs and histories – in Jack Colhoun’s Gangsterismo. Drawing on the National Security Archives, papers and books, public and private, he damningly documents the pathetic, incompetent and sometimes comic, but always inappropriate and anti-democratic, attempts by the CIA and/or its confederates, working in tandem with members of the mob, to assassinate Castro and overthrow the Cuban revolution.” —Victor S. Navasky, publisher emeritus, The Nation; professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism “Gangsterismo is an invaluable addition to our background knowledge about that small island nation that has incurred so much devotion and ire from U.S. Americans. Books about Cuba abound, but this one lays bare an often forgotten pre-revolutionary history of U.S.-based organized crime, and subsequent hidden U.S. government covert action. Colhoun has done his homework. This is a must-read.” —Margaret Randall, author of To Change the World: My Years in Cuba “Few aspects of Cuba-U.S. relations have so doggedly resisted serious inquiry as the subject of organized crime in Cuba. Much of what we know has reached us by way of popular culture, principally through film and fiction, to which the subject of the underworld in the tropics so aptly lends itself. Colhoun represents a breakthrough: serious scholarship on a serious subject. He casts light upon one of the darkest recesses of a dark history, calling attention to the convergence of interests between the underworld of criminal activity and nether world of covert operations – and reveals in the process that film and fiction have actually only scratched the surface of a sordid story.” —Louis A. Pérez, Jr.editor, Cuba Journal; professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Sicilian mafia is a subject of endless fascination, but few serious books have been written about it. In this provocative work, Christopher Duggan argues that the idea of the mafia is a fiction, born of political calculation and genuine misunderstanding of the behaviour of Sicilians. The first part of the book looks at the development of the idea of the mafia from the 1860s, when the term first appeared, to the Second World War. Although all serious observers realised that there was no organised criminal society in Sicily, Duggan explains why the idea was perpetuated. When the island became part of unified Italy in 1860, hostility to the new state was claimed by officials to be criminally inspired, and they spoke for the first time of 'the Mafia'. The distinctive values of the Sicilians, such as their belief in private justice and unwillingness to cooperate with the police, reinforced the idea of a secret criminal society. From then on, many of Sicily's political and social problems were attributed to this mythical organisation. In the second part of the book, to illustrate the general observations made in the first, Duggan provides a detailed study of the repressive campaign conducted by the fascist government against the mafia in the 1920s. Making use of private papers, police files, and trial proceedings, he concludes that the mafia was primarily an idea exploited for political ends, and that its use only strengthened many Sicilians' deep mistrust of the state. This lively book is a penetrating account of the origins of the mafia myth and the first study of the impact of fascism on Sicily. It will be of great interest to historians of modern Italy, to anthropologists, and to criminologists, as well as to those who are actively engaged in the fight against organised crime. Christopher Duggan was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Lecturer in Italian History and Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Italian Society at Reading University. He is co-author, with Denis Mack Smith and Moses Finley, of 'A History of Sicily' (1986).