Frank DiMatteo Sr.

He was one of the four Mafia leaders who inspired Mario Puzo's The Godfather—and perhaps, next to Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mob boss of them all. Born into a mafioso family in Sicily, Carlo Gambino came to America illegally as a stowaway in 1921. Jumping ship in Virginia, he joined his...

For more than a hundred years, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn was Ground Zero for organized crime. Whoever controlled the piers controlled everything. From the infamous Irish gang known as The White Hand at the turn of the century, to the notorious Italian Gallo brothers who ran President...

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on...

Frank DiMatteo was born into a family of mob hit men. His father and godfather were shooters and bodyguards for infamous Mafia legends, the Gallo brothers. His uncle was a capo in the Genovese crime family and bodyguard to Frank Costello. Needless to say, DiMatteo saw and heard things that a boy...

Who really killed "Crazy Joe" Gallo? It wasn't Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran as he claimed. "Sober, he was nothing, but drunk he would blow your head off." That's how Pete the Greek described Carmine "Sonny" DiBiase, the Colombo crime family hitman who'd been terrorizing Manhattan's Little Italy...

Umberto "Albert" Anastasia was born in Italy at the turn of the century. Five decades later, he would be gunned down in a barber shop in New York City. What happened in the years in between - and why every crime family had reason to want him dead - is one of the most brutal and fascinating...

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Camillo Carmine Galante was raised in Manhattan's Little Italy and by all accounts born bad. By fifteen he was terrorizing the streets of New York's Lower East Side, scoring high marks for the "errands" he was running for his La Cosa Nostra elders. When he turned...