ALL ABOUT ALBERT ANASTASIA

They called him the Lord High Executioner the operating head of Murder Inc., a man plausibly linked to dozens of killings and suspected of hundreds more. To his wife he was a hard-working dress manufacturer who never drank, never swore, and was home by nine.

On the morning of October 25, 1957, a thickset man of fifty-five hung up his hat in a barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel and settled into the fourth of twelve chairs, his back to the door. Two men in black gloves walked in from the lobby. He erupted out of the chair with a roar and lunged not at his killers, but at their reflections in the mirrors. Eleven people were in that room, and the chief of detectives came away saying he had never seen so many blind people in his life. To understand how a man dies like that and why half the underworld exhaled when he did you have to go back to a fishing town on a Calabrian cliff, where the sea lies at the bottom of two hundred and ten stone steps and the earth itself cannot be trusted.

ALL ABOUT ALBERT ANASTASIA is a fast, immersive, and richly detailed portrait of the underworld's most feared enforcer: the fifteen-year-old ship's deserter who learned the docks from underneath, the teenager who beat the electric chair because witnesses are mortal, the boss without whose approval nobody died in Brooklyn and the man the Church refused to bury in consecrated ground.

Inside, you'll discover:

-  Tropea, the Messina earthquake, and the boy they would one day call il terremoto

-  The Brooklyn shape-up: a machine he studied from underneath, then took

-  Sing Sing's death house at nineteen and the witnesses who stopped existing

-  Murder, Incorporated: the candy store, the ice picks, and the unwritten law of Albert's approval

-  Abe Reles, the canary who could sing but couldn't fly

-  Technical Sergeant Anastasio: the most hunted fugitive in Brooklyn, in a U.S. Army uniform

-  The Manganos, the crown, and the killing of Arnold Schuster over a television broadcast

-  Cuba, Genovese, Gambino and twenty minutes at Green-Wood under a stone with no birthday

Part of the ALL ABOUT collection: short, modern biographies for readers who want the full story of a remarkable life without reading 800 pages to get it.

One coffee. One sitting. One unforgettable life.