Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author Anthony M.
DeStefano presents the definitive book on Vito Genovese, the namesake of
a crime family which still considered one of the most viable and
dangerous in the
U.S. today. From enforcer to Godfather, Vito Genovese rose through the
ranks of La Cosa Nostra to head of one of the wealthiest and most
dangerous crime families in American history.
Vito Genovese ran rackets as a member of Giuseppe Joe the Boss
Masseria's gang in New York City before joining forces with Lucky
Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel as bootleggers
during Prohibition. As a soldier in the Castellammarese War, he helped
orchestrate Masseria's death on behalf of Brooklyn crime lord Salvatore
Maranzano, consolidating his position and power before ensuring
Maranzano, too, was knocked off. For the next three decades, Vito
Genovese--shrewd, merciless, and utterly savage--killed countless
gangsters in his bid to become the capo di tutti i capi--boss of
bosses--in the American Mafia. Genovese would betray some of the mafia's
most notorious bosses, including Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello, to
eventually seize control of the Luciano crime family, one that still
bears the Genovese name today.
In The Deadly Don, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony M.
DeStefano presents the rise and fall of Vito Genovese in this first
comprehensive biography of the legendary mafioso--from his childhood in
Naples, Italy, and the beginnings of his bullet-ridden criminal career
on lower Manhattan's mean streets, through his self-exile in the
mid-1930s back to his homeland where he ran a black market operation
under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, and his return to New York
where Genovese
made a fortune as the head of an illegal narcotics empire. DeStefano
reveals the important and terrifying role Genovese played in the
creation of the Mafia, detailing his bloody and ruthless lifetime of
crime that would put him behind bars for his last fifteen years--and
securing his infamous place in the history of organized crime.
