Information about Thomas Hunt, author of 'Wrongly Executed? The Long-Forgotten Context of Charles Sberna's 1939 Electrocution.'
Building upon a lifelong interest in organized crime, Thomas Hunt began actively researching and writing about the subject in 2002. Since that time, he has maintained and expanded a popular website on the history of the American Mafia (mafiahistory.us).
Hunt coauthored (with Martha Macheca Sheldon) Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia, released in 2007. The book was silver medalist in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Hunt launched a crime history journal, Informer, in the fall of 2008. He has served as editor and publisher of the journal since that time. In 2009, his history of the U.S. Mafia was included in Mafia: The Necessary Reference to Organized Crime, published by Millennium House. A revised second edition of Deep Water was published the following year. Hunt coauthored (with Michael A. Tona) the two-volume DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, released in 2013.
Hunt has contributed crime history articles to On the Spot Journal, Tampa Mafia Magazine and Cigar City Magazine, in addition to his own Informer. He has provided research and/or editing assistance to the book projects of a number of other authors, including C. Alexander Hortis (The Mob and the City), Christian Cipollini (Lucky Luciano), Gavin Schmitt (The Milwaukee Mafia), William J. Helmer and Rick Mattix (The Complete Public Enemy Almanac), and Patrick Downey (Legs Diamond: Gangster).
Online, Hunt moderates Mafia discussion groups on the Yahoo! and Google+ online services and can be reached on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Goodreads and LinkedIn.
Born in the Bronx, New York, and a longtime resident of western Connecticut, he currently resides in central Vermont with his wife Anna and their three children. He holds a bachelor's degree in History and Journalism from Charter Oak State College in Connecticut. He worked for many years in community journalism positions in Fairfield and Litchfield Counties in Connecticut and in Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess Counties in New York.
The story of Charles Sberna first came to Hunt's attention during research into capital punishment errors. Archived newspaper columns by Walter Winchell revealed a story worthy of retelling. Conversations with publisher Rick Mattix relating to the startup of the On the Spot Journal led Hunt to assemble an article on the Sberna case for the journal's December 2006 issue. The article noted the relation by marriage of Charles Sberna and the Morello-Lupo-Terranova clan, which had been a major influence in early New York organized crime. Sberna's own family background was unknown until some time later, when research into Amedeo Polignani of the NYPD shed light on Giuseppe Sberna's involvement in the anarchist-terrorist bombings of the 1910s. The decision to fully explore the Sberna case soon followed.
