Thomas Hunt

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...

The 1000-plus page memoirs of Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi are valuable source material for organized crime historians. The manuscript, entitled "The Real Thing - Second Government: The Expose and Inside Doings of Cosa Nostra," is one of just three authoritative inside sources on the Mafia during the period of the 1930-31 Castellammarese War (the others are published autobiographies, Vita di Capomafia by Nick Gentile and A Man of Honor by Joseph Bonanno). The Valachi memoirs were consulted and quoted by author Peter Maas for his 1968 book, The Valachi Papers , which grew into a 1972 Charles Bronson motion picture . Until now, these Joseph Valachi papers could only be accessed through the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. I have been working to change that. I first published a couple hundred pages of the manuscript on the mafiahistory.us website some years ago. The pages were acquired through the assistance of another Mafia historian, who requested anonym...