Bringing Down the Mob: The War Against the American Mafia
Reppetto, who served as a commander of detectives with the Chicago police and was president of New York City's Citizens Crime Commission for more than 20 years, is one of the rare commentators on the contemporary Mafia who has been able to view the Mob's power grabs and struggles from the inside. This account follows his acclaimedAmerican Mafia: A History of Its Rise toPower (2003). Whereas that book (ending in the early 1950s) focused on the many strands of organized crime coalescing into a multifaceted force that functioned almost as an independent state within the U.S., this volume traces the decline of the Mafia from the Apalachin raid of top-level mobsters meeting in New York through Robert Kennedy's Mafia-busting campaign, and on to the planting in a cornfield of Chicago mobster Tony Spilotro, and the incarceration of New York crime boss John Gotti. Reppetto concludes this exhaustive and fascinating study with an analysis of the scattered state of the Mafia today.Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved