The Three Secret Cities

George Anastasia

The Last Gangster

"It's over. You'd have to be Ray Charles not to see it." --former New Jersey capo Ron Previte, on the mob today As a cop, Ron Previte was corrupt. As a mobster he was brutal. And in his final role, as a confidential informant to the FBI, Previte was deadly. The Last Gangster is his story--the story of the last days of the Philadelphia Mob, and of the clash of generations that brought it down once and for all. For 35 years Ron Previte roamed the underworld. A six-foot, 300-pound capo in the Philadelphia-South Jersey crime family, he ran every mob scam and gambit from drug trafficking and prostitution to the extortion of millions from Atlantic City. In his own words, "Every day was a different felony." By the 1990s, Previte, an old-school workhorse, found himself answering to younger mob bosses like "Skinny Joe" Merlino, who seemed increasingly spoiled, cocky, and careless. Convinced that the honor of the "business" was gone, he became the FBI's secret weapon in an intense and highly personalized war on the Philadelphia mob. Operating with the same guile, wit, and stone-cold bravado that had made him a force in the underworld--and armed with only a wiretap secured to his ...

Joseph Wambaugh

Fire Lover

On an October evening in South Pasadena, a horrifying wave of flame swept through a large home improvement center, snuffing out the lives of four innocent people, including a two-year-old boy. Firefighters rushed to the scene, even as a pair of equally suspicious fires broke out in two nearby stores. Silently watching the raging inferno in the midst of the heat, smoke, and chaos was a man respected as one of California's foremost arson investigators, a captain in the Glendale Fire Department ... From Joseph Wambaugh, the critically acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of The Onion Field , comes the astonishing true story of a nightmarish obsession -- and the hunt for a brilliant psychopath who lived a double life filled with professional tributes and terrifying secrets.

Peter Maas

Serpico: The Classic Story of the Cop Who Couldn't Be Bought

THE CLASSIC TRUE STORY OF THE COP WHO COULDN'T BE BOUGHT "I don't think anyone can come away from Serpico without admiration for one man's lonely integrity." -- New York Times With an Afterword by Frank Serpico The 1960s was a time of social and generational upheaval felt with particular intensity in the melting pot of New York City. A culture of corruption pervaded the New York Police Department, where payoffs, protection, and shakedowns of gambling rackets and drug dealers were common practice. The so-called blue code of silence protected the minority of crooked cops from the sanction of the majority. Into this maelstrom came a working class, Brooklyn-born, Italian cop with long hair, a beard, and a taste for opera and ballet. Frank Serpico was a man who couldn't be silenced--or bought--and he refused to go along with the system. He had sworn an oath to uphold the law, even if the perpetrators happened to be other cops. For this unwavering commitment to justice, Serpico nearly paid with his life.