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...