Reading list · 10 books

Crime and the mob

Books on the Mafia, corruption in the police department, Prohibition and the crime decline.

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Reporting

The Five Families (opens Bookshop.org)

The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

Selwyn Raab · 2005

Raab, a longtime New York Times crime reporter, writes about the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno and Colombo families from Prohibition to the 2000s.
Reporting

Wiseguy (opens Bookshop.org)

Life in a Mafia Family

Nicholas Pileggi · 1985

Henry Hill's life inside the Lucchese crime family in Brooklyn, told by Pileggi largely in Hill's voice. It is the source for the film Goodfellas.
Reporting

The Westies (opens Bookshop.org)

Inside the Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob

T. J. English · 1990

English reports on the Irish-American gang that ran Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and 1980s, and its ties to the Gambino family.
Reporting

Serpico (opens Bookshop.org)

Peter Maas · 1973

Frank Serpico was the plainclothes officer who reported corruption in the NYPD. Maas tells his story and that of the Knapp Commission that followed.
The history

Dry Manhattan (opens Bookshop.org)

Prohibition in New York City

Michael A. Lerner · 2007

Lerner shows how the city's police, politicians and drinkers resisted Prohibition, and how enforcement broke down.
The history

Last Call (opens Bookshop.org)

The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Daniel Okrent · 2010

Okrent's history of Prohibition runs from the temperance movement to repeal, with New York's speakeasies, bootleggers and politicians among the cast.
The history

Low Life (opens Bookshop.org)

Lures and Snares of Old New York

Luc Sante · 1991

Sante describes the city's underworld from the 1840s to the 1920s: the saloons, brothels, gangs and gambling dens, and the reformers and journalists who wrote about them.
The history

The City That Became Safe (opens Bookshop.org)

New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control

Franklin E. Zimring · 2012

Zimring, a criminologist, examines the decline in New York's crime rate after 1990 and tests which explanations hold up.
Memoir

Turnaround (opens Bookshop.org)

How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic

William Bratton and Peter Knobler · 1998

Bratton, NYPD commissioner in the mid-1990s, describes the strategies and internal fights behind the department's crime reduction.
Reporting

The Central Park Five (opens Bookshop.org)

The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes

Sarah Burns · 2011

Burns reconstructs the 1989 attack in Central Park, the confessions of five teenagers, and their convictions and exoneration.