Los Angeles Underworld
Los Angeles Underworld

Author: Avi Bash and J. Michael Niotta, PhD

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1467106380

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"From the blackhanders and bootleggers of the early 20th century to political corruption and the rise and eventual toppling of a Mafia family, the history of organized crime in Los Angeles visually chronicled within this work possesses the same level of intrigue, glamour, and murder as the films that made the City of Angels iconic. 'Los Angeles Underworld' showcases an extraordinary collection of rare and previously unpublished images pulled directly from family photo albums and top secret police files."--Back cover

Mickey Cohen
Mickey Cohen

Author: Tere Tereba

Publisher: ECW Press

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1770902031

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The sensational tell-all biography of Hollywood’s most infamous mob boss who dominated Los Angeles’s underworld—and headlines—from the 1940s to the 1970s. When Bugsy Siegel was murdered in 1947, his henchman Mickey Cohen took over his criminal enterprise in Los Angeles. As charismatic as he was ruthless, Cohen attained so much power up until his death in 1976 that he was a regular above-the-fold newspaper name, with more than one thousand front-pages in LA papers alone. His story is inextricably intertwined with the history of the city of angels. Mickey Cohen is a seductive tale of Hollywood true crime history with a wildly eccentric mob boss at its center. Biographer Tere Tereba delivers tales of high life, high drama, and highly placed politicians—among them Robert F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—as well as revelations about countless icons, including Shirley Temple, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, and even Rev. Billy Graham. Meticulously researched, this rich tapestry presents a complete look at the mid-twentieth century Los Angeles underworld. “The author does a superb job of tracing the ins and outs of Hollywood’s gang world in the 1940s and ’50s.” —The Wall Street Journal

A Bright and Guilty Place
A Bright and Guilty Place

Author: Richard Rayner

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1400033586

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Best Book of the Year The Los Angeles Times • The Washington Post Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir.

Hummingbird in Underworld
Hummingbird in Underworld

Author: Deborah Tobola

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1631525069

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At the age of forty-five, Deborah Tobola returns to her birthplace, San Luis Obispo, to work in the very prison her father worked in when he was a student at Cal Poly. But she’s not wearing a uniform as he did; she’s there to teach creative writing and manage the prison’s arts program—a dream job. As she creates a theatre program for prisoners, Tobola finds plenty of drama off the stage as well. Inside the razor wire she finds a world frozen in the ’50s, with no contact with the outside except by telephone; officers who think prisoners don’t deserve programs; bureaucrats who want to cut arts funding; and inmates who steal, or worse. But she loves engaging prisoners in the arts and helping them discover their voices: men like Opie, the gentleman robber; Razor, the roughneck who subscribes to The New Yorker; charismatic Green Eyes, who really has blue eyes; Doo Wop, a singer known for the desserts he creates from prison fare. Alternating between tales of creating drama in prison and Tobola’s own story, Hummingbird in Underworld takes readers on an unforgettable literary journey—one that is frank, funny, and fascinating.

Underworld Lit
Underworld Lit

Author: Srikanth Reddy

Publisher: Wave Books

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1950268217

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Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

American Tabloid
American Tabloid

Author: James Ellroy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2001-04-24

Total Pages: 589

ISBN-13: 037572737X

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The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . . James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

Blood Brothers
Blood Brothers

Author: B. Lintner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1137062940

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From pirates singing Ricky Martin to mob hits carried out with samurai swords, Bertil Lintner offers a fascinating look at organized crime in the Asia Pacific. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are an Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures - gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, oil smuggling - are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York, and Los Angeles. Making use of expertise gained from twenty years of living in Asia, Lintner exposes the role crime plays in the countries of the Far East. In Blood Brothers , he takes you inside the criminal fraternities of Asia, examining these networks and their past histories in order to answer one question: How are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalised mobsters?

The Great Los Angeles Swindle
The Great Los Angeles Swindle

Author: Jules Tygiel

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780520207738

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Here is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation--which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the country. The Great Los Angeles Swindle exposes the schemes of C. C. Julian and his Julian Petroleum Corporation, known familiarly to thousands of Los Angeles residents as Julian Pete, thanks to Julian's folksy weekly newspaper ads. The Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era and symbolized the failure of 20s boosterism and speculation. Here is a saga of the roaring twenties, with its glorification of business, its get-rich-quick mentality, and its paucity of government regulation--which bred speculation, corruption, and corporate chaos throughout the country. The Great Los Angeles Swindle exposes the schemes of C. C. Julian and his Julian Petroleum Corporation, known familiarly to thousands of Los Angeles residents as Julian Pete, thanks to Julian's folksy weekly newspaper ads. The Julian Pete swindle ranked with Teapot Dome as one of the great scandals of the era and symbolized the failure of 20s boosterism and speculation.

Mob Girl
Mob Girl

Author: Teresa Carpenter

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-12-13

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1501166123

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Missing Beauty comes a fascinating inside look at the mafia. Growing up among racketeers on the Lower East Side of New York City, Arlyne Brickman associated with mobsters. Drawn to the glamorous and flashy lifestyle, she was soon dating "wiseguys" and running errands for them; but after years as a mob girlfriend, Arlyne began to get in on the action herself—eventually becoming a police informant and major witness in the government's case against the Colombo crime family.

Breakshot
Breakshot

Author: Kenny Gallo

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-11-30

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1439195838

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Gallo made millions for New York's Colombo Mafia family before becoming an undercover FBI informant. In "Breakshot," he captures the American underworld in all its tawdry spectacle.