The Mafia Encyclopedia: From Accardo to Zwillman

Written by a veteran crime reporter, this "Who's Who" of crime gives readers the full flavor and substance of Mafia culture, customs, and characters presented in more than 400 entries, more than ninety black-and-white photographs, twelve new to this edition.

The Mafia Encyclopedia includes biographical entries of both well- and lesser-known wiseguys, their criminal specialties, career highlights, friends and enemies, eccentricities, and frequently dramatic demises.

The book traces the great Mafia dynasties up to and including the current heirs apparent. The second edition includes fifty-six new entries as well as updates on John Gotti and John Gotti, Jr.; Sammy "The Bull" Gravano; Vinnie "The Chin" Gigante; Jimmy Coonan of Westies fame; Donnie Brasco; and many more.

Since former crime reporter Sifakis's excellent Mafia Encyclopedia was first published in 1987, mob bosses John Gotti and Vinny "the Chin" Gigante have gone to jail and informer Sammy "the Bull" Gravano has reached the best sellers lists. Such Mafia shakeups have necessitated this extensive revision, which now boasts nearly 450 discerning entries covering the whole mobster universe from "Making Your Bones" to money laundering and the "Buckwheats" (painful murder methods); loansharking and the "Concrete scam"; favorite Mafia social clubs, restaurants, and burial grounds; and even an entry on Midnight Rose's, the Brooklyn candy store where so many of Murder, Inc.'s killings were planned. Sifakis's prose is free of the typical platitudes about "honor" or "blood oaths." He points out that the most important Mafia figure was not Al Capone but Lucky Luciano, who, along with Meyer Lansky, "Americanized" and transformed the Prohibition-era booze rackets into "a national crime syndicate, a network of multi-ethnic gangs...which has bled Americans of incalculable billions over the years." Sifakis relishes the Mafia's vivid folklore without subscribing to it. The infamous score-evening slaughter of 1931 called the "Night of the Sicilian Vespers," in which dozens of Luciano's enemies were said to have been simultaneously eliminated nationwide, turns out to be mythology. And while Chicago and Vegas mobster John Roselli was probably not the JFK hitman (as alleged in Bill Bonanno's Bound by Honor, LJ 3/15/99, his accomplishments did include taking $400,000 from Phil Silvers, Zeppo Marx, and others in a famous rigged card game. For all crime collections. Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Library Journal Reviews