Thomas Hunt

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...

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...