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Before the notorious Five Family members who dominated U.S. arranged criminal offenses for a bloody half century, there was the one-fingered legal genius Giuseppe Morello–known as “The Clutch Palm”–and his lethal coterie of associates. In The First Family, historian, journalist, and New York Times bestselling writer Mike Dash brings alive this little-known story, following the rise of the Mafia in the us from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the lawless villages of Sicily to the streets of Little Italy. Using an impressive array of principal options–hitherto untapped Top secret Service archives, prison information, trial transcripts, and interviews with making it through family associates–this is the first Mafia background that is applicable scholarly rigor to the story of the Morello syndicate and the beginning of organized criminal offenses on these shores.
Progressing from small-time scams to counterfeiting bands to even bigger criminal businesses, Giuseppe Morello exerted ruthless control of Italian neighborhoods in New York, and through adroit coordination with other Sicilian criminal offenses young families, his Clutch Palm soon reached way beyond the Hudson River.
The men who battled Morello’s crews were themselves brilliant and legendary statistics, including William Flynn, a fearless Top secret Service agent, and Lieutenant Detective Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino of the New York Police Division’s top notch Italian Squad, whose quest for the brutal gangs ultimately cost him his life.
Merging first-rate scholarship or grant and pulse-quickening action, and arranged amid rustic Sicilian panoramas and the streets of old New York, The First Family is a groundbreaking consideration of the key period when the American legal underworld exploded with violent fury over the nation.
