News and notes relating to the American Mafia History website
The unpublished autobiography of turncoat New York Mafioso Joseph Valachi is an important primary source of information on American Mafia history. The document, which runs 1,201 pages, was written by Valachi while in federal custody in 1964. Used as source material for The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas, Valachi’s document has been available to the …
Edmond Valin’s recent addition to the Rat Trap section involves a New York mobster who relocated to the Windy City and deceived and betrayed the Chicago Outfit. See: “The Italian mobster who wasn’t.”
UPDATE (Oct. 25, 2020): The first 1,045 pages (and 1,078 pages in all) are available online. There are just 122 pages of Valachi’s text left to digitize and format. Part 1 – Complete, 313 pgs, numbered 1 thru 299*. Part 2 – Complete, 307 pgs, numbered 300 thru 599*. Part 3 – Complete, 300 pgs, …
With help from the fine people at Google, we have incorporated a search tool into the main entry page of the Mafiahistory.us website. The tool will search for relevant articles on Mafiahistory.us and related sites (including Writersofwrongs.com and Buffalomob.com). We hope that this will guide visitors to items of interest to them and prevent them …
Since the start of 2019, there have been many changes and additions at Mafiahistory.us. Here are the major developments: The planned April shutdown of the Google-Plus social network, where we hosted a longtime “community” on American Mafia history, prompted us to look into alternative methods of communicating with the 437 existing members of the community …
There have been a few updates and additions to Mafiahistory.us recently. These have included: – Detroit Bosses – new research, reorganized, reformatted. – Biographies for Frank Calabrese Sr of Chicago, Salvatore Giannola of Detroit, Antonino Giannola of Detroit, Vito Adamo of Detroit, Thomas Altamura of Florida, William Dara of Florida, Gus Alex of Chicago. – …
The latest article by Edmond Valin examines the FBI’s fairly abrupt adoption of the term “La Cosa Nostra” in the early 1960s to refer to traditional Sicilian-Italian organized crime. Valin digs through FBI records to turn up the earliest sources of the term and considers the reasons it may have been preferred by federal authorities …
[Update: The web hosting company did a recent repair. The old onewal.com links should now redirect to pages on the mafiahistory.us domain.] One of the results of a recent change in web hosting companies has been a fairly abrupt change in the use of the old onewal.com domain for this site. Some years ago, the …
Salvatore Lucania, widely known as Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, late in 1931 became the most powerful crime boss in the U.S. He personally commanded a sprawling New York-based Mafia organization, held one of seven seats on the Mafia’s ruling Commission and maintained valuable alliances with non-Italian racketeering organizations across the country. Less than five years after …
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