Books about Wiseguy from Amazon.com

"At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster To be a wiseguy Being a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world." -- Henry Hill

Wiseguy is Nicholas Pileggi's remarkable bestseller, the most intimate account ever printed of life inside the deadly high-stakes world of what some people call the Mafia. Wiseguy is Henry Hill's story, in fascinating, brutal detail, the never-before-revealed day-to-day life of a working mobster -- his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistresses, his code of honor.

Henry Hill knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he turned Federal witness to save his own life. The mob is still hunting him for what he reveals in Wiseguy: hundreds of crimes including arson, extortion, hijacking, and the $6 million Lufthansa heist, the biggest successful cash robbery in U.S. history, which led to ten murders. A firsthand account of the secret world of the mob,

Wiseguy is more compelling than any novel.

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Price: $3.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

New in paperback with a 60-minute audio CD featuring dramatic FBI surveillance from the Donnie Brasco operation which was used in court to put 120 Mafia members in jail, here's the first nonfiction work from Joe Pistone since his New York Times #1 bestseller and hit movie, Donnie Brasco. Perhaps no man alive knows the lifestyle of wiseguys better than Pistone does, having spent six years infiltrating the Mafia as an undercover FBI agent. Now, years later, Pistone reassesses the underworld, and the surveillance audio provides additional insight. Often poignant, and in startling detail, The Way Of The Wiseguy gives readers a first-hand look at the psychology and customs of the wiseguy.

The book features 34 chapters that reveal key principles of wiseguy life, including "How Wiseguys Carry Out a Hit," "How Wiseguys Get Straightened Out," and "A Typical Day in the Life of a Wiseguy." Pistone's spellbinding stories provide a first-hand look at this lawless realm of badguys, which is often uncannily relevant to the workings of legitimate big business and everyday social discourse..
Price: $0.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

After a quarter of a century of silence, Henry Hill can finally tell us the rest of his story. Taking readers on a crazy ride of his life hiding out in the Witness Protection Program, doing prison time for drug charges and testifying in high profile mafia trials..
Price: $6.18 [Notify me when price goes down.]

COP: “Buddy, I think this is a whorehouse ”

BUDDY CIANCI: “Now I know why they made you a detective ”

Welcome to Providence, Rhode Island, where corruption is entertainment and Mayor Buddy Cianci presided over the longest-running lounge act in American politics. In The Prince of Providence, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mike Stanton tells a classic story of wiseguys, feds, and politicians on a carousel of crime and redemption.

Buddy Cianci was part urban visionary, part Tony Soprano—a flawed political genius in the mold of Huey Long and James Michael Curley. His lust for power cost him his marriage, his family, and close friendships. Yet he also revitalized the city of Providence, where ethnic factions jostle with old-moneyed New Englanders and black-clad artists from the Rhode Island School of Design rub shoulders with scam artists from City Hall.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Cianci dominated this uneasy melting pot. During his first administration, twenty-two political insiders were convicted of corruption. In 1984, Cianci resigned after pleading guilty to felony assault, for torturing a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife. In 1990, in a remarkable comeback, Cianci was elected mayor once again; he went on to win national acclaim for transforming a dying industrial city into a trendy arts and tourism mecca.

But in 2001, a federal corruption probe dubbed Operation Plunder Dome threatened to bring the curtain down on Cianci once and for all.

Mike Stanton takes readers on a remarkable journey through the underside of city life, into the bizarre world of the mayor and his supporting cast, including:

• “Buckles” Melise, the city official in charge of vermin control, who bought Providence twice as much rat poison as the city of Cleveland, which was at the time four times as large, and wound up increasing Providence’s rat population. During a garbage strike, Buckles sledgehammered one city employee and stuck his thumb in another’s eye. Cianci would later describe this as “great public policy.”

• Anthony “the Saint” St. Laurent, a major Rhode Island bookmaker and loan shark, who tried to avoid prison by citing his medical need for forty bowel irrigations a day, thus earning himself the nickname “Public Enema Number One.”

• Dennis Aiken, a celebrated FBI agent and public corruption expert, who asked to be sent to “the Louisiana of the North,” where he enlisted an undercover businessman to expose the corrupt secrets of Cianci’s City Hall.

The Prince of Providence is a colorful and engrossing account of one of the most tragicomic figures in modern American life—and the city he transformed..
Price: $2.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $7.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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 thirty-five years Ron Previte roamed the underworld. A six foot-tall, 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. By the 1990s, Previte, an old-school workhorse, found himself answering to younger mob bosses like "Skinny Joey" Merlina. Spoiled, cocky, and careless, the young, up-and-coming gangsters were hungry for the media's attention and the public's recognition. Gone were the days of loyalty and discretion.

Convinced that the honor of the "business" was over, Previte 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, Previte recorded it all: the murder, the mayhem, and the betrayal. In The Last Gangster, George Anastasia -- the critically acclaimed author of Blood and Honor and The Goodfella Tapes -- tells Previte's story for the first time. Unflinching and enthralling, The Last Gangster is the true story of how the once monolithic, highly organized, powerful, and secretive Cosa Nostra was defeated by its own hand..
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

See how the real Godfathers of organized crime jerk the justice system An absorbing story...richly served up and dotted with absurd moments as the fat cats go free and the Feds eat their shoes. -Kirkus Reviews The notorious Fat Jack DiNorscio and the Lucchese crime family were facing a six page indictment that threatened to knock out the entire organization, from godfather to street soldier. In the longest Mafia trial in American history, the Mob manages to turn the courtroom into a carnival sideshow. They are behind everything from number running to murder, they boldly claim that they own New Jersey and now they are riding roughshod over the Feds and the courts. Be there as journalist Robert Rudolph, award-winning organized crime specialist, puts you in the backrooms, anterooms, and courtrooms of this lurid, real-life Mafia drama..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Considering that they thrive on secrecy, mobsters have, over the years, proven themselves to be notorious gossips-even out-and-out blabbermouths The fact is, mobsters DO say the darnedest things, and whether discussing business, women, food, death, sex, or "the life," you can always count on a mobster to spill it in an unintentionally funny, incredibly insightful, or simply terrifying way. With quotable quotes from both semi-literate stooges and the smoothest professionals who ever made headlines, this book speaks to the millions of people who are fascinated by the mob..
Price: $2.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As the real American gangsters of yesterday recede into the history books, their iconic figures loom larger than ever. From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the cultural figure of the gangster, and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States.

Gardaphe shows how the gangster can be seen as a 'trickster' figure. The trickster figure exists in many cultures and serves as a model of improper behavior. The gangster has served as that figure in American culture by showing what is and is not authentically American. It is not American to speak a language other than English. It is not American to use violence to secure business deals. It is not American to have both a mistress and a wife and family. However, in the hands of Italian-American artists, the gangster becomes a more telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity-a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population.

While this figure has been a part of American literature since even before Fitzgerald's TheGreat Gatsby, it has only been with the revolution in cinema, and the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese that the figure of the gangster has been humanized and disseminated on a large scale. Gardaphe investigates the role of the gangster in their films, as well as the literature of such great Italian American writers as Mario Puzo and Gay Talese.

By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender and masculinity From Wiseguys to Wise Men presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years..
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