I'm embarassed to admit I skipped past 5 families probably the only forumer who forgot to read it.

It's a biography of Joseph DiCarlo on the same level as any great historical novel because it's so in depth. You're not just getting bit and pieces of the mobster's criminal lives but their personal lives as well. So therefore you get a lot more info than you would find in most any other mob book. A good example of the attention to detail in this book is every pistol permit or every mobster and where they got it issued is included. There's also a ton of information on the Castellamarese war from primary sources, lots of info that wasn't even in the Valachi Papers. And in general it talks so much more about what really made the mobsters function rather than just who got murdered and when.

It is two parts. The first part begins when DiCarlo is born in Sicily and ends right after prohibition when the mob moves to gambling. The second book is the 30's to the 60's. I would definitely get the first one and see what you think. It's the best researched mob biography Ive read. There's 150 pages of citations and its telling of the Castellamarese war and the prohibition era was is second to none.

What I like best is it took the Buffalo mob, which no one has ever been so interested in, and made it interesting.