By the time anyone realized what was happening, the Mafia had their hands on the throat of America's labor movement—and no one dared to say a word. The Union That…
By the early 1960s, Joseph Bonanno had it all. The suit. The smile. The swagger. They called him "Joe Bananas," a nickname he loathed—too fruity, too flippant for a man…
In the fog of American history, few faces peer back as defiantly—or as infamously—as that of Richard Milhous Nixon. The 37th President of the United States, once seen as a…
Louisiana has always had a taste for the gothic. Cypress swamps swallowing secrets, jazz spilling out of midnight clubs, politics marinated in corruption—this is a state that thrives in shadows.…
Max “Boo Boo” Hoff was no ordinary gangster. Born in South Philadelphia in the early 1890s to poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, Hoff abandoned school in favor of work at a cigar…
a Luciano, a Capone, or a Gambino. But if you trace the bloodlines of mob violence and the shady tendrils of America’s gambling underworld, his name keeps surfacing like a…
Cuba in the 1950s was a country suspended between paradise and ruin. Tourists from Miami, New York, and beyond descended on Havana for glitz, jazz, casinos, and women—many never realizing…
In the dim corners of smoky diners, dive bars, and truck stops across mid-century America, cigarette vending machines stood like sentinels—gleaming chrome boxes promising a moment of indulgence for spare…
There are weapons you see coming—bullets, indictments, rivals with knives. And then there are the quiet assassins, cloaked in morality and bureaucracy. For the American Mob, few laws were more…
They were hustlers, addicts, madams, ghosts in the neon: Florence “Cokey Flo” Brown, Nancy Presser (aka Genevieve Flesher), Mildred Harris, Thelma Jordan, and Joan Martin. For a few hot weeks…
Copyright © 2026 Crime and Cocktails Mafia History and Information