"Borgata is a detailed work that covers major events in American mafia history. The author produces some highly entertaining insights thanks to his background."
Borgata
Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia
Description
A riveting history of the Mafia from 1860s Sicily to 1960s America—as narrated by a former heist expert and Gambino family mobster.
The mafia has long held a powerful sway over our collective cultural imagination. But how many of us truly understand how a clandestine Sicilian criminal organization came to exert its influence over nearly every level of American society?
In Borgata: Rise of Empire, former mobster Louis Ferrante pulls back the curtain on the criminal organization that transformed America. From the potent political cauldron of nineteenth-century Sicily to New Orleans, New York and the gangster paradise of Las Vegas, Ferrante traces the social, economic, and political forces that powered the mafia’s unstoppable rise.
Ferrante’s vivid portrayal of early American mobsters—Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky—fills in crucial gaps of the mafia narrative to deliver the most comprehensive account yet of the world’s most famous criminal fraternity.
Borgata: Rise of Empire—the first in a three-volume epic history—is a groundbreaking achievement from a man who has seen it all from the inside. In this masterful accomplishment, Ferrante takes the reader from the mafia’s inauspicious beginnings to the height of their power as the most influential criminal network in the country.
Reviews
"Pacey, detailed, and gripping. Rise of Empire...resembles John Julius Norwich's trilogy on the Byzantine Empire...Ferrante is a Plutarch of the underworld."
"He may be a loss to the criminal fraternity, he is most certainly an asset to the literary world."
“Former mobster Ferrante supplies a fascinating inside look at the history of the Mafia. Ferrante’s familiarity with Mafia customs gives flesh and immediacy to what could otherwise be a rote historical tome, but he doesn’t draw his authority from affiliation alone: this is a well-researched history in its own right. True crime fans will be captivated.”
