Nonfiction review: The First Family

NONFICTION
The Sopranos" and "The Godfather" may have domesticated the Mafia's image. They looked like people we know, and we understood their problems with family -- their own, that is.

But as historian and journalist Mike Dash vividly describes in "The First Family," the Mafia were not exactly pillars of the PTA. Instead, they terrorized neighborhoods, extorted millions and ruthlessly murdered opponents.

They were not to be admired, and Dash, in this informative history, meticulously details how they operated and to what lengths they would go to eliminate enemies.

Joseph Petrosino, one of the few New York detectives who spoke Italian, had successful arrested Mafia members, but when he traveled to Italy to liaise with the Italian police, he was murdered in Palermo by the local Mafia.

Petrosino is one of the many memorable figures Dash introduces, as he begins with a famous murder, the Barrel Mystery of 1903, in which the victim was found with numerous wounds carved into his face before being stuffed into a sugar barrel. The motive was revenge, and Giuseppe Morello, "The Clutch Hand," was suspected.

Morello, the head of the New York Mafia, was born in Corleone, Sicily, and arrived in New York in 1892, "maimed, implacable, and ruthless." Rarely seen in public, he was hard to implicate in the crimes he master-minded. Dash traces the Mafia's beginnings in the impoverished Sicily of the mid-1800s and then describes how Morello and countless Sicilians moved to America in the late 1800s. There, they embarked on the criminal enterprises that made them notorious.

Many, like Morello, began counterfeiting money, and one of the more heartening stories in the history is that of William Flynn, chief Secret Service agent in New York, who painstakingly assembled evidence over the years of Mafia counterfeiting activity and eventually obtained convictions.

What really made the Mafia wealthy, though, was Prohibition. As Dash writes, "An entire industry had been gifted by the government to gangsters." Prohibition not only enriched them but also created notorious mobsters such as Al Capone, whose enormous stake in the supply of alcohol made him influential from the Midwest to Manhattan.

Today, the Mafia descendants of the most enduring racket, the vegetable racket, still take "a cut on every artichoke sold in the five boroughs" of New York, Dash writes. A riveting real crime story with a cast of colorful, if violent men and women, "The First Family" enlightens as well as disturbs.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.