Long before Brooklyn was known as the world's hippest neighborhood, it was the deadliest - the seedy, dangerous underbelly of New York City, where mobsters and gangs could commit murder and dump dead bodies without getting caught. This is the real, gritty history the New York mobs in Red Hook, Brooklynâwhere the streets ran red with bloodâby a Mafia survivor who grew up there . . .
Before Brooklyn's peninsula, known as Red Hook, became known for its arts and cultural scene, industrial chic, and luxury yachts, it was a dirty pocket of danger. The Dutch named it "Roode Hoek" for its red clay cliffs jutting into New York Bay. For centuries, its location was the perfect combination of physical isolation and waterfront vice that created a cocktail of despair, anger, and violence. And then the Mob moved inâŚ
For more than a hundred years, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn was Ground Zero for organized crime. Whoever controlled the piers controlled everything. From the infamous Irish gang known as The White Hand at the turn of the century, to the notorious Italian Gallo brothers who ran President Streetâand everything elseâgenerations later, the blood-soaked history of Red Hook is the story of American crime at its most powerful, corrupt, and coldly efficient.
With wit, street lingo, and an insider's view, Red Hook sweeps from its Irish Mob to Prohibition's ruthless bootleggers, from its infamously polluted waterfront to marauding gangs of juvenile delinquents, drunken longshoremen, vacant lots, rotting tenement buildings, and packs of feral dogs. The perfect setting for corruption and crime, the authors closely examine the peninsula's takeover by Italian tough guys who held onto power at the piers for a hundred years, littering the neighborhood with gunfire and dead bodies.
It's all here: the brutal mob hits, bullet storms, and backstabbings of the most colorful cutthroats to ever terrorize the streets. A rogue's gallery of killers with nicknames like "The Mad Hatter," "The Executioner," "Wild Bill," and "Peg Leg." The Brooklyn bar fight that gave Al "Scarface" Capone his legendary scars. The godfather of America's first Sicilian crime family whose gruesomely mangled hand could scare men half to death. And, to bring it all home, the author's own eyewitness account of multiple shootings growing up as the son of a Mafia bodyguard.
Packed with jaw-dropping stories of public violence and personal vengeance, vivid insights into the Mafia's way of life, and shocking portraits of America's most wanted crime families, Red Hook is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the history of organized crime in America.