Book of the week: The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash

(Random House, 357 pages, $27)

In the early morning of April 14, 1903, a nearly decapitated body was found stuffed into a wooden barrel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Six men were arrested in connection with the crime. One, Giuseppe Morello, a slim man with a broad mustache and a claw-like­ right hand, ran a counterfeiting ring that authorities already had been circling. But the Sicilian immigrant known as “the Clutch Hand” was cunning as well as ruthless: The murder earned him rivals’ fear but never cost him a prison sentence. By 1911, Morello had established himself as the American Mafia’s first “boss of all bosses.”

Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of Morello, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Mike Dash’s gripping, “first-rate” book about Morello’s rise and reign “proves conclusively” that our default assumptions about the history of organized crime in America are “simply wrong.” Prohibition-era bootlegging didn’t give the U.S. Mafia its start, nor did Sicilian capos dispatch to these shores the men who laid the organization’s foundation. Yes, Morello had been active in organized crime in his native Sicily, but only after arriving in this country did he choose to seek his fortune by exploiting fellow immigrants. Dash’s deeply researched account of this neglected chapter in organized crime’s history “seems likely to be the definitive work” on Mob origins “for years to come.”

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Dash is curiously silent about the alliances that Sicilian mobsters forged with Irish and Jewish gangs, said Clare Longrigg in the London Sunday Telegraph, but he doesn’t neglect law enforcement’s heroes. Tiny Joe Petrosino, one of the NYPD’s few Italian-speaking detectives, gave his life trying to prevent men like Morello from “ruining the reputation of Italians in general.” When Morello himself is eventually murdered during a Prohibition-era gang war, Dash nudges you “as close to the scene as possible” without getting “blood on your shoes,” said Lee Lamothe in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Worth reading” for style alone, The First Family is “a perfect example of literary historical nonfiction.”