Somewhere in the south suburbs of Chicago, a man dies. No headline in the Tribune, no segment on the evening news, no federal prosecutor standing in front of cameras calling it a significant moment in the history of organized crime in this city. No Wikipedia page, no documentary crew. And yes, I recognize the…
His name was Sam Mahadi. He was also known as King Solomon. He was one of the senior leaders of one of Chicago’s most significant street organizations through the worst decade it ever faced. And for much of that decade, the only one still standing and almost no one outside those walls knows…
May 11th, 1980. 1:20 in the afternoon, Rockaway Boulevard, Queens, New York. Henry Hill was sweating through his shirt, swerving his Pontiac between lanes, eyes locked on the rearview mirror. He saw it again, the helicopter. Same one as that morning, same one as the day before. Blue stripe on the tail,…
April 1980, Castro opens the port. Anyone who wants to leave, leave. But not everyone on those boats chose to be there. Prison releases, psychiatric discharges. People the Cuban government considered problems loaded up and pointed north. 125,000 Cubans arrived in Florida in 6 months. The Carter administration called it a crisis….
They called her a cocktail waitress, a woman in a short skirt carrying drinks to gamblers who never looked at her face. For nearly a decade, she walked across the most watched floor in America, past surveillance cameras, past pit bosses, past security guards with earpieces and sharp eyes. And she walked…
February 15th, 1978. Atlantic City, New Jersey. A cold night, snow on the ground. The Flamingo Motel cocktail lounge on Pacific Avenue, a few blocks from the ocean. Edwin Hellfont, 51 years old, was seated at his regular table with his wife Marci and his business partner Leon Stricks. He was a…
December 18th, 1978. 6:17 in the morning, Ozone Park, Queens. Parnell Stacks Edwards was sitting at his kitchen table when Tommy DeSimone walked through the door and fired six shots, five of them into Stacks’s face and chest, killing him instantly at 28 years old. Goodfellas turned that moment into a punchline,…
In the mafia, the deadliest men were never the ones on magazine covers. They were the ghosts, the specialists working in quiet rooms and empty streets. Tommy Peter, the martial artist who turned killing into precision. Joseph Mad Dog Sullivan, the only man to escape Attica and keep working as a hitter….
It started with a man in a bathrobe. For years, residents of Greenwich Village saw him wandering the streets in slippers, mumbling to himself, sometimes guided by relatives who held him by the arm. To most people, he looked like a confused old man. But behind that performance was Vincent Chin Gagante,…
There is a black Ford van sitting in front of a fire hydrant on a residential street in Brooklyn. It is December 13th, 1978, two days after the biggest cash robbery in American history. The man who was supposed to drive this van to a New Jersey junkyard and watch it get…
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