ALL ABOUT LUCKY LUCIANO

He took the chaos of the old Sicilian gangs and rebuilt it into something that looked like a modern corporation a board of directors for the American underworld. They called him Lucky.

In January 1962, in an airport terminal in Naples, a small, iron-haired man waiting to meet a Hollywood producer clutched his chest and died on the asphalt, exiled from the only city he ever loved. Sixteen years earlier the United States had deported him; now it would let him come home only in a box. To understand how a sulphur miner's son who couldn't speak English at nine reorganized American crime and was condemned, recruited by the Navy in wartime, and betrayed by his own creation you have to go back to a brimstone town in the middle of Sicily.

ALL ABOUT LUCKY LUCIANO is a fast, immersive, and richly detailed portrait of the architect of the modern Mafia: the Lower East Side schoolboy who ran a protection racket in miniature, the visionary who put Italians and Jews at the same table, the boss who murdered his way to the top and then outlawed the very wars that made him.

Inside, you'll discover:

- The sulphur, the humiliation of school, and the founding friendship with Meyer Lansky

- Prohibition as a business school and the cohort that graduated with him

- The Castellammarese War: the two surgical betrayals of Masseria and Maranzano

- The birth of the Commission and the Syndicate that ruled American crime for decades

- Thomas Dewey, the vice trial, and the wartime deal that freed him

- Deportation, the film that may have killed him, and a death no one would believe

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.