Updates done to the organized crime history website
Tura Satana first earned notice for the physicality of her “tassel act” on the burlesque circuit in the 1950s. In the next decade, she became better known for her on-screen performance in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! In later years, she was open with the press about various intimate relationships, but she never revealed one relationship …
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.”
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 …
The FBI makes every effort to hide the identities of its confidential underworld informants, even long after the informants have passed away. Unlike the famous Joe Valachi and other Bureau cooperating witnesses, who exchange public testimony for government protection, confidential informants continue in their dangerous underworld roles while secretly feeding information to investigators. In reports, …
The website recently added a collection of articles by writer (and history detective) Edmond Valin. Based in the Toronto area, Valin’s specialty is deducing the identities of confidential underworld informants through clues left in government documents, such as FBI files, and other sources. We are calling the article collection, “Rat Trap.” At the moment, there …
I’m very pleased to announce that Edmond Valin has provided the American Mafia history website with a short article discussing a 1960s-era informer within the Bonanno Crime Family of New York. That informer provided law enforcement with a good deal of background information on crime family members during the period of the so-called “Banana War.” …
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