The rise of Castro and the fall of the Havana Mob
When Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and 79 other Cuban rebels piled into the 43-foot yacht Granma on…
Year: 2018
The Kansas City connection
In the 1995 movie Casino, the Mob’s control of skimming at Las Vegas casinos is exposed when authorities learn about…
Hoodlums at the Statler
In the early morning hours of December 5, 1928, patrol officer Frank Osowski was walking his beat in downtown Cleveland…
Gus Greenbaum, Las Vegas casino operator for the Mob, and his wife were murdered 60 years ago this week
After nightfall on December 2, 1958, Bess Greenbaum, wife of Las Vegas casino boss Gus Greenbaum, drove from their Phoenix…
Whitey in Hollywood
One of the most overtly symbolic scenes in Mob movie-making comes at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning film The…
The world’s top five Mob bosses
There was a time when Mob bosses in the United States were household names, but not anymore. Consider the FBI’s…
World War I played key role in passage of Prohibition
In January 1919, Albert Von Tinzler and Edward Laska published “The Alcoholic Blues,” a song describing the feelings of a…
Ninety years later, Arnold Rothstein murder still a mystery
Ninety years ago this week, with the dying breath of New York’s most provocative Mob entrepreneur, one of America’s great…
Boston mobster Whitey Bulger killed
James “Whitey” Bulger, the violent Boston mobster serving a life sentence for taking part in 11 murders, was reportedly beaten…
‘At home on the streets, and always on the job’
A freelance newspaper photographer named Arthur Fellig, a squat, rumpled, cigar-chomping immigrant who liked being called Weegee, will forever be…