Informer: The History of American Crime and Law Enforcement - October 2021: The Mafia in California
About this ebook
California-related articles include:
- Trail of blood: Mafia murder of Barnett Baff linked Corleone, East Harlem and the ghettos of Los Angeles;
- Sam Streva and the 'San Pedro gang';
- Was DeJohn a victim of Cheese War?
- Golden State often unfriendly to transplanted mobsters;
- San Francisco boss Lanza held key role with Colorado's Mafia;
- New Orleans connection to San Francisco Mafia.
Other articles in this issue:
- Reinhold Engel: Forgotten leader of a big-time robbery gang;
- Another, other Gentile family;
- Police rarely appear on U.S. postage;
- New York revolutions in policing and crime.
About the author
Thomas Hunt is an editor, researcher and crime history author. He has been the editor/publisher of the Informer journal and publisher of organized crime history sites including mafiahistory.us and buffalomob.com. He is coauthor of Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia (2007, 2010) and DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime (2013). He is the author of Wrongly Executed: The Long-Forgotten Context of Charles Sberna's 1939 Electrocution (2016). He contributed an American Mafia history to Mafia: The Necessary Reference to Organized Crime (2009).
The great-grandson of late Los Angeles crime boss Jack Dragna, Dr. J. Michael Niotta writes and lectures about southern California organized crime history. He is the author of The Los Angeles Sugar Ring (2017), The Fight Abroad and the Fear Back Home (2019), and Los Angeles Underworld (2021). His fourth book, a look at the history of southern California's gambling ships, is expected in 2022. He is an Iraqi Freedom veteran with twenty years of military service.
Justin Cascio uses genealogy to tell the history of the Mafia, focusing on transplantation and organization along kinship lines. His meticulously researched nonfiction has appeared in Informer, on The Mob Museum website, and at his own mafiagenealogy.com. His one-place study of Corleone, Sicily, has produced tens of thousands of public profiles on Wikitree, documenting the lives of hundreds of Mafia associates and their families. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/mafiagenealogy.
Michael O’Haire is a software engineer, family historian and author, living in Smithtown, New York, with his wife and two children. He is completing research for an upcoming book on the life of his ancestors and their relationship with the early Colorado Mafia. He can be reached at ohaire@hotmail.com.
Lennert van ’t Riet has been researching the American Mafia as a hobby for almost three decades and has developed a special interest in the mob of northern California. He has been a regular contributor of articles to Informer. Living in the Netherlands, he is part-owner of a signmaking company.
Jeffery S. King is the author of The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd (1998), The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang (2005), One of the Most Troublesome Robbery Gangs (2020) and other books. A resident of Washington, D.C., King is a former reference librarian for the D.C. Public Library and for the U.S. Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland. He is a longtime contributor of articles to Informer.
