Secret Societies

Born in Sicily, Giuseppe Morello (1867–1930) emigrated to the United States in the 1890s and soon established a gang that would eventually become the Morello crime family, the precursor to the oldest of the Five Families in New York. Through the rise and fall of this first Mafia boss and his brother-in-law, Ignazio Lupo, this book examines in riveting detail the early evolution of the Sicilian-American criminal network, from the “Black Hand” to Prohibition. Photographs, documents, and contemporary articles show how in this period the hierarchies of crime families in America were established and reinforced while they gained new recruits and resources and spread across the country.