90 books like The Westies

This work came out in the Roaring Twenties, but the gangsters of that decade had nothing on the 19th-century outfits like the Dead Rabbits and the Gas House Gang.

When the dive bars have names like the Tub of Blood and they’re kept in business by the likes of Razor Riley, One-Lung Curran, and Stumpy Malarkey, you can’t go wrong. But to me the most compelling part was Asbury’s account of New York’s horrendous Civil War draft riots.

The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania were born in opposition to that same draft, after a Protestant Republican allied with the coal industry used conscription to try to rid the coal fields of Irish Catholic Democrats and mine labor activists before a crucial election. 

This forgotten masterpiece of a memoir by a prosecutor who took on corruption on the docks of New York came out in 1956, two years after that Marlon Brando classic, On the Waterfront.

William Keating, a hard-nosed, relentless, and incorruptible crime-fighter, gives an inside look at the reign of terror imposed on honest, hard-working longshoremen by the gangsters who ran their union.

Keating was by no means anti-labor – at the start of Chapter 2, he mentions that his father was an official in the United Mine Workers, and that his great-grandfather was a prominent Molly Maguire in the hard-coal fields of Pennsylvania. That earned points with me – I come from a long line of Irish American coal miners in that area. 

Murder, gunrunning, drug-dealing, extortion, informers – it’s all there, but it pales in comparison to the tale of how Whitey Bulger, Boston’s pre-eminent Irish gangster, managed to turn an F.B.I. agent from his old neighborhood into a willing ally in the city’s mob wars.

To me, the most fascinating part was the bang-up job that the authors, two Boston Globe reporters, do in chronicling how the Massachusetts State Police were long frustrated in bringing the crime lord to justice because he was being protected from on high.

I loved this one, because I have a buddy who is a retired Massachusetts state cop, and we’d talk about Whitey Bulger on summer vacations, sitting on the beach.

In 1993, a gang of thieves got away with $7 million in a heist at a Brink’s depot in Rochester, N.Y – and the bulk of it has never been recovered.

The cast of characters includes a former I.R.A. man who’d done prison time in Northern Ireland, an activist priest, an ex-cop who became a suspect, and a charismatic prizefighter whose dismembered body was found in Lake Ontario.

I liked this because at the center of it all is the lingering question of whether the missing money ended up with the Irish Republican Army. 

The history of organized crime is often subject to exaggeration and outright myth, in part because some of the source material, such as old newspapers, tends to be sensationalized.

For readers who prize accuracy, this scholarly account is the go-to choice. Author David Critchley filled the void in what’s been written about the formative years of the American Mafia, straightening out what was previously known from hyped-up news coverage.

Everything he writes is documented and so specific: a wealth of period photos, and information from a wealth of sources, including court documents and many other government records, such as birth certificates and passport records.

I usually find the informants more interesting to read about than the diehard gangsters because they’re the people in the middle, squeezed from all sides. This fluid account, by two of New York’s best reporters, is a personal favorite. It’s a smoothly told narrative that avoids romanticizing the mob. 

The Godfather portrays the classic conflict between loyalty to a family and the desire to escape it for a better life.

Michael is a former marine who wants to stay out of the crime business and have a normal relationship with his girlfriend. But family loyalty trumps principle when his father is attacked, his brother killed, and his wife in Italy murdered. It wonderfully shows his slow fall to unfeeling coldness as the price for avenging his family and protecting their empire.

The book has great and colorful characters, especially Don Corleone. He is fascinating because he offsets his violence with principle and a love for his family.

A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself sounds like a self-help book but is actually a comic thriller/touching character study set in the world of the New York mob. Rena, the widow of a wise guy, lives a quiet life in the Bronx until the day she cracks a would-be suitor over the head with an ashtray and steals his vintage Impala. It’s a mob caper, an elderly gals wild road trip, and a Grandmother and granddaughter reunion story all in one. Big fun.

Manhattan Beach is less experimental and more conventional than Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Candy House, but it is every bit as moving, rich, and textured as those justly celebrated novels, and it contains one of the most touching father/daughter relationships that I've ever encountered in fiction.

A historical novel set in Depression and World War II-era New York City, Manhattan Beach begins with almost 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her rakish father, Eddie, on a mission to a wealthy gangster. A few years later, Eddie disappears after abruptly walking out on his family with no warning or explanation.

Has he been killed? Is he in hiding?  Why did he abandon a family he ostensibly loved? Plucky, brave Anna devotes herself to the search for her missing father with the ingenuity and zeal of the detectives she reads about in fiction.

I reviewed Manhattan Beach for… show more.

In 1951, Sydney Taylor invented the memorable Brenners—papa, mama, five sisters, and baby brother—a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York. Taylor’s words and Helen John’s illustrations in this book, the first in a series, set the scene. A calendar in the parlor announced that it was 1912. Tenements lined city streets. When I read these novels as a child, I did not yet know that they were closely based on Taylor’s own life. When the entire series was republished in 2014, I quipped: I became a Jewish historian because of these books.