After reading Michael Cannell’s A Brotherhood Betrayed, I had an itch to scratch for mob books. I read a few others but all roads led to me finally tackling Selwyn Raab’s massive tome on New York’s famous five families.
Let’s just say the itch has been scratched…raw.
This is as good of a book as could reasonably be expected, considering its ambitious and unwieldy goal of writing a narrative about all five New York mafia families. Having read a lot of mob origin stories lately, I’m glad Raab kind of glosses over the foundations of the New York mafia dating back to the Castelamarrese War and gets to the good stuff: how these families evolved and devolved into the mess they are now.
Bootlegging made the mob what it is but it seems like construction, loansharking and gambling are the running threads that keep it as big business to this day. While the mafia doesn’t have the outsized impact it used to have in New York City, it’s ties still run strong and Raab does a great job explaining why. Family-by-family, each important figure gets the treatment. Think of this less as a running linear tale and more of a pastiche as to the different moments that impacted each family, all of which had their moments at the top and the bottom.
The book misses out on greatness by this shaky structure. You’d get invested in one timeline and then Raab moves to another. I wonder if it would have made more sense for him to write the story as a collective from the 50s on rather than divert from one family to the next.
Still, this is the essential book not just on the New York mafia but the mafia in America. All roads lead to it and it is a must read for those who have interest in the subject.