I read "Five Families" several months ago, and I found it to be one of the most informative books on the Mob. Absolutely indespensible.
Raab covered the Mob for the NY Times for many years. He starts with a fairly short history of the Five Families that many here will be familiar with. His history doesn't add much. But he absolutely excels in his accounts of the families from about 1970 to the present. Those were the years that he covered the Mob, and his exhaustively detailed accounts for the first time helped me to follow and make sense of the endless machinations and personnel changes in the families. He also explains the workings of many of the multi-family rackets (like the "Cement Club" and the waterfront operations) that yielded billions. Raab also, for the first time, presents a cogent explanation of how the RICO Act and its wiretapping provisions work; and how law enforcement, after a long learning curve, used RICO so effectively.
A challenging but highly rewarding read.