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Underworld Empire tells
the story of the most infamous, successful, and misunderstood criminal
cartel in history. It explains how the ignorant Catholic peasants of
Sicily, Calabria, and Naples crossed the Atlantic Ocean in abject poverty
and within a couple generations came to dominate a poisonously hostile
Protestant nation through guile, graft, and conspiratorial terror. From
its birth as a cop-killing street gang in the slums of
1870's New Orleans to its heyday as a nationwide multiethnic
syndicate of criminal robber barons, Underworld Empire will follow the development of the
American Mafia through impressionistic profiles of the brilliant,
iron-willed, cliché-busting gangsters who crafted a politically
untouchable shadow empire, as well as the bloodthirsty psychos and hapless
incompetents who caused its downfall. |
