Exploited big-city operations in Philly & New York

known to me . . . I am not willing to be part of any three-ring circus, which will necessarily take place if I appear.”

Sinatra initially didn’t even realize he had been summoned; he was down in the Caribbean. Despite his objections, the singer wound up testifying for an hour — with his remarks kept under seal.

After Sinatra died in 1988, a commission member described him as evasive and uncooperative.

Jersey’s other favorite singer, Bruce Springsteen, makes an appearance related to his music rather than any mob ties.

Deitche mentions how Springsteen begins his song “Atlantic City” with this memorable couplet: “Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/Now they blew up his house too.”

The track from the 1982 “Nebraska” album was the Boss eulogizing a mob boss — although few made the connection to an organized crime hit one year earlier.

Philip (Chicken Man) Testa was the Philadelphia boss who was killed when a massive bomb exploded as he walked into his house. That round of bloodshed involved Mafiosi in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, where the mob had staked claims early on.

Going back, some of the hits seem almost genteel. Gunmen waited and only whacked the man they were assigned to kill. And the big boss had his hit men do the dirty work. Today those rules seem almost quaint.

Deitche reminds readers of Francesco Guarraci, boss of the famed DeCavalcante family, bursting into a pizzeria in 2009 to announce the joint now belonged to him. Customers left mid-slice. “That the boss of a Mafia family would be engaging in this kind of 1920s-style extortion indicates the sad state of the Mafia in the twenty-first century,” Deitche writes.

The government kept moving in and mobsters started turning on one another, with many going into the Witness Protection Program.

And though the New York/New Jersey syndicate is a shadow of its old self, “there are still wiseguys and wannabes working scams, extorting businesses, running gambling, selling drugs and branching out into white collar crime,” Deitche writes.

And so he leaves us with what anyone paying attention knows: The mob has nowhere near the power it did a century ago. But the appetites it feeds off are going nowhere.

Someone, some syndicate, will find a way outside of the law to meet those needs. And that doesn’t make the Mafia any less compelling.