Thomas Hunt

 ... will find this the sort of thing they like." I attended a showing of Violent Night yesterday at the Majestic 10 Cinemas in Williston, VT (after a nice, quick meal at Bliss Bee). The movie is, well, not for everyone.  If you feel a solemn reverence for Christmas, you're not likely to enjoy it. From the early moment in which a woman marveling at a flying, reindeer-drawn sleigh is splattered by a downpour of drunk-Santa vomit, it is clear that this not a traditional holiday flick. There are some heartwarming, sensitive moments - plenty of them (mostly involving John McClane-like walkie-talkie communication between Santa and young Trudy Lightstone) - but the movie is basically a comedy bloodbath (set to an up-beat holiday soundtrack). A disillusioned Santa regains his holiday spirit as he dispenses brutal, gory justice upon a gang of very naughty home-invading thieves and saves a not-entirely-nice (except for certain members) family from an apparently deserved punishment. Th...

I don't think I will ever again be able to listen to a wine description without laughing out loud. (Honestly, this was already a tough thing for me.) The Menu deliciously mocks pretentious cuisine, faddish "deconstructed" edibles and food journalism, while drawing a horror story out of kitchen enslavement to critics (and to much of the rest of restaurant-going society). I left the theater smiling, thinking and craving a double-cheeseburger.

Leaving the Twits behind. If you'd like to follow me on social media, give Mastodon a try.

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 ...