Thomas Hunt

  There's plenty of interesting reading in Informer's 2024 issue, The Treacherous World of Joseph Valachi   (shown in hardcover above - red bow not included).  The issue is available for online purchase in (easily wrapped) hardcover book, paperback book and magazine formats. (Electronic book and magazine editions are available too, but good luck getting a bow to stick to those.) Books are sold through Amazon:  https://amzn.to/3ZxMwR6 Magazines are sold through MagCloud: https://informer.magcloud.com Click here for more information.

Informer's November 2024 issue, The Treacherous World of Joseph Valachi , has been released and is now widely available in magazine, book and electronic formats. The issue focuses on Mafia informant Valachi, his time and place, and many of the individuals who played roles in his life. A rare primary source into American Mafia history of the Castellammarese War-era, Joseph Valachi also described early gangland of East Harlem and the Bronx, and provided a unique soldier-level view of New York-area organized crime from the days of Prohibition up to Apalachin. An early FBI informant, Valachi became the focus of a best-selling book and a popular movie, as well as televised Senate testimony and a lengthy autobiography. Despite this coverage, a great deal of the true Valachi story has remained untold. Now, 60 years after Valachi put pen to paper in an effort to bring his story to the attention of the public, a team of historians from around the globe is revealing long hidden asp...

Informer's October 2023 issue, Gangsters of New York's Lower East Side , is now available in seven formats (print and electronic magazine, hardcover and paperback book, Kindle and EPUB ebook, and audiobook). Contributors to the issue include historians Justin Cascio, Patrick Downey, Michael O'Haire, Steve Turner, Matt Ghiglieri. Visit Informer's website for more information. A dozen articles focus on aspects of Lower East Side gangland history:  End of the Whyos gang. Historic Photo: Bandits' Roost. John H. McGurk and Bowery's "Suicide Hall." The death and life of hoodlum/hero Monk Eastman. NYC's first Mafia boss? Italian gang chief with an Irish name: Paul Kelly. Sai Wing Mock and the New York "Tong Wars." Frank Lanza's New York firms may have been Mafia fronts. In search of "Johnny Spanish." Racketeering future was molded in young Meyer Lansky's neighborhood. "Death Avenue": Second Avenue, 1910-1924. 1964 n...

Through decades, Youngstown, Ohio, endured painful nicknames like those, due to the rackets, violence and corruption of organized crime in the region. In its November 2022 issue - just released yesterday - Informer addresses the history of organized crime in the Mahoning/Shenango valleys of northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Articles on the subject range from the earliest "Mafia" reports of the 1890s through the apparent dissolution of the Mob more than a century later. I spent much of the past two years coordinating "The Mob in Youngstown" issue. I had the pleasure of working on this massive project with extremely knowledgeable organized crime historians James Barber, Justin Cascio, Margaret Janco, Thom L. Jones, Michael A. Tona and Edmond Valin. There were some special challenges. The Youngstown-area underworld was unusually complex, as four Mafia organizations - those from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo - a non-Mafia Calabrian criminal soc...

Oct. 26, 2022 - Informer's November 2022 issue, The Mob in Youngstown , isn't scheduled for release until next week, but it is already available for preview and purchase through Amazon.com, Google Play Books and MagCloud. (With a total of seven different formats, coordinating availability by the scheduled release date required that the formats go live earlier for testing and online linking.)  Here's everything you need to know:  Some information about the issue is shown on Informer's website. Additional information, including summaries of all articles, will be posted there on October 30-31. The Mob in Youngstown issue is of course available in its traditional magazine and e-magazine (PDF) formats through the MagCloud service . Every Informer issue, since the first one released fourteen years ago, remains available for preview/purchase on MagCloud .  In recent years,  Informer page counts and production costs dramatically climbed, and we became concerned abou...

Organized crime in the Youngstown, Ohio, area (including much of northeastern Ohio and nearby western Pennsylvania) will be the focus of Informer's next issue.  Articles for the issue will be accepted through September 1, 2022. Advertising will be accepted through September 30, 2022. The scheduled release date is November 1, 2022. The issue will be a lengthy one, with more than a dozen feature articles covering more than a century of the region's organized crime history. We expect to release it in the usual magazine and e-magazine (PDF) formats, in addition to e-book (Kindle, EPUB), softcover print book and hardcover print book formats.

Mafiosi of the West Coast Our look at mobsters who set up shop on America's West Coast begins with excerpts from a fact-based crime noir by J. Michael Niotta PhD. These excerpts relate to the escape to California of New York gangsters - a young Jack Dragna and his cousin Ben Rizzotto - implicated in the 1914 murder of wealthy Manhattan poultryman Barnett Baff ( PREVIEW ). This is Dr. Niotta's first article in Informer . A brief biography of Baff is provided as a sidebar. Dragna and Rizzotto also make appearances in Justin Cascio's study of the legendary “San Pedro Gang” and Corleone Mafia transplant Sam Streva ( PREVIEW ). The San Francisco gangland murder of Nick DeJohn, found stuffed into the trunk of his car in 1947, and that killing's possible relationship with Chicago's so-called “Cheese War” are considered by Thomas Hunt ( PREVIEW ). The article is accompanied by a sidebar story on early Chicago shootings linked with the DeJohn family and by a collection ...

This Informer special issue (No. 30) focuses on Nicola "Nick" Gentile, underworld leader in U.S. and Sicily, who published an Italian-language tell-all autobiography in 1963. The issue is available as a 214-page printed and bound magazine , a 382-page paperback book and in PDF and Kindle e-book formats. (Searchable PDF and EPUB e-book formats should be available soon.) Informer strives to bring Gentile's entire life story to the English-language reader. Building on extensive original research by a team of Mafia history experts and on U.S. government documents designed to extract meaning from the memoirs, this issue attempts to balance Gentile's obviously self-serving and self-aggrandizing autobiographical work with verifiable history, to correct his misinformation and to fill in the wide gaps left in his personal account. Informer closely examines a number of aspects of Gentile's life, such as the launch of his underworld career in the Kansas City area; r...

(UPDATE: Following publication, it was learned that the discovered photograph, labeled as Maranzano by an Italian periodical, was actually NOT the Mafia boss but a German serial killer.) Print and electronic journal editions can be previewed and purchased through MagCloud Kindle e-book edition can be ordered through Amazon.

A long lost photograph of Salvatore Maranzano is discovered. Informer: The History of American Crime and Law Enforcement marks the occasion by dedicating an entire issue to the one-time American Mafia boss of bosses. (UPDATE: Following publication, it was learned that the photograph, labeled as Maranzano by an Italian periodical, was actually NOT the Mafia boss but a German serial killer.) The August 2019 special issue, with articles by Thomas Hunt, Lennert van`t Riet, David Critchley and Richard N. Warner, is available now in print and electronic editions (magazine format) and in an e-book edition (Amazon Kindle format). Visit Informer's website for more information .

The August 2019 issue of Informer will deal exclusively with Prohibition Era Mafia boss of bosses Salvatore Maranzano - life, career, assassination and post-assassination aftermath. We plan to reveal EVERYTHING about the Mafia boss! (Well..., everything we currently know.) Through articles (by organized crime historians Lennert van`t Riet, David Critchley, Richard N. Warner and Thomas Hunt), photos and maps, Informer will tackle many questions about Maranzano, including: Who was Salvatore Maranzano? What did he look like? (And what did he certainly NOT look like?) What does a recent discovery tell us about him? What was said about him by those who knew him in life? Where were the locations significant to his life and career? When did Maranzano-related events occur? Why was he important in U.S. Mafia history? How has he been portrayed by Hollywood? What do we know of Maranzano's life in Sicily? Was there really a post-Maranzano Mafia purge? The official releas...