The Genovese: How Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello Built New York's Most Powerful Crime Family (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798191267159)

On the tenth of September, 1931, four hitmen walked into an office near Grand Central Station and shot Salvatore Maranzano, the self proclaimed boss of bosses of New York's underworld. The man who ordered that killing chose not to claim the throne for himself. Instead, he built something far more lasting.

The Genovese tells the story of how three immigrant boys, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello, rose from the poverty of Sicilian and Italian tenements to construct the most powerful criminal organization America has ever produced. It begins in the crowded streets of early twentieth century New York, follows the bootlegging fortunes that Prohibition made possible, and traces the creation of the Commission, a structure of shared criminal governance that would outlast every one of its founders and shape organized crime in America for the better part of a century.

This is not simply a story of violence, though violence runs through every chapter. It is the story of a rivalry between two ambitious men, Genovese and Costello, that ended in a bullet grazing a skull outside a Manhattan apartment building. It is the story of Joseph Valachi, a frightened prisoner whose testimony before Congress shattered decades of secrecy and changed how the American public understood the Mafia forever. It is the story of Vincent Gigante, a boss who spent nearly thirty years wandering his own neighborhood in a bathrobe, convincing judges and psychiatrists that he was too unstable to prosecute, while secretly running one of the most sophisticated criminal enterprises in the country. And it is the story of an organization that, even after a century of federal prosecution, informants, and decline, resurfaced in 2025 at the center of a national sports betting scandal that reached into the NBA itself.

Readers who pick up this book will come away with a genuine understanding of how organized crime actually took root and evolved in America, not through myth or Hollywood shorthand, but through the documented rise, reign, and decline of the family that came to define it. You will meet the men who built an empire on cooperation rather than conquest, watch that empire nearly tear itself apart from within, and follow it as it adapted, again and again, to survive threats its founders never could have imagined. Along the way, this book offers real insight into the historical forces, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the RICO Act, that shaped not just one crime family but the broader landscape of twentieth century America.

Written for readers with little or no prior knowledge of the subject, The Genovese unfolds as a single continuous narrative rather than a collection of disconnected facts, introducing every figure, every place, and every historical development in the order needed to understand it. If you have ever wondered how the Mafia in America actually came to be, who built it, and why one family in particular came to define it for a hundred years, this book offers that story from beginning to end.