Mafia is a treasure trove of information about wiseguys who operated during the golden age of the mob. A MUST for mob buffs. A phone book-sized directory of mug shots and minutiae on more than 800 wiseguys that was compiled in the early 1960s by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. 

The book is said to be a reprint of an actual top secret dossier that the agency put together. Each gangster in the “just the facts” book – it’s #31 of 50 copies that were produced – is relegated to a single page that lists his nicknames, haunts, associates, criminal and business interests in a brusque but colorful report. 

Joe Batters Accardo, a "former member of the old Capone mob ...claims to be a salesman for Premium Beer Sales Inc., 2555 W. Armitage Ave., Chicago, Ill.” Another Chicago wiseguy, Leonard Calamia, “frequents the Poodle Dog Restaurant at 1121 Polk Street …when in San Francisco.” 

Francisco Castiglia, a.k.a. Frank Costello, “resides 115 Central Park West” and “frequents Biltmore and Waldorf Astoria hotels.” Richie The Boot Boiardo has “bullet scar on left cheek” and “frequents Newark, N.Y.C., & gambling houses in Havana.” 

The BNDD database includes one-page reports on virtually all the gangsters you’d expect to see, and countless more you wouldn’t. There’s one on Luigi Fratto, of Des Moines, “the most influential member of the Mafia in the state of Iowa,” and other reports about Benny (The Blimp) Barone, the Mafia leader of Omaha, Nebraska, and his crew of four Omaha-born and raised Biase brothers, Anthony, Louis, Bernard and Samuel.

Mafia lists for $35. Amazon's got it for $23.07

In Notorious New Jersey: 100 True Tales of Murders and Mobsters, Scandals and Scoundrels, author Jon Blackwell makes a decent case that, when it comes to powerful gangsters and mob rubouts, New Jersey mobsters often rise to the level – or sink to the same depths – as their Big Apple cousins across the Hudson River. 

Until a heroin dealing conviction sent him to die in prison, Vito Genovese lived in splendor in the Garden State. So did Richie The Boot Boiardo, whose 17-acre estate was adorned with a statue of The Boot astride a white horse. Blackwell recounts the murders of beer baron gangster Dutch Schultz and Genovese underboss Willie Moretti and the bugged conversations that made mob boss Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante a household name decades before Tony Soprano arrived on the scene. 

All told, 17 of Blackwell’s 100 true crime stories involved gangsters, including transplanted New York mobster Giuseppe (Joe Adonis) Doto, who when asked why he re-located to the Garden State by a Senate Committee, said: “I liked the climate better.”

Notorious New Jersey lists for $18.95. It's $12.89 at Amazon.

Tears & Tiers: The Life and Times of Joseph "Mad Dog" Sullivan, The Only Man To Escape From Attica, is a scary, disturbing book about Sullivan, a convicted bank robber, mob hitman and escape artist. Sullivan, 68, has spent about 45 years of his life in prison, and is serving a life sentence.

It is also a compelling, and touching read.

In the last paragraph of the preface, the author, his wife, Gail Sullivan, probably says it best: “The story isn’t always pretty but I believe it’s an important and interesting story that should be told. Just as importantly, no one will be hurt in its telling. This is a step into the life of the man I married, the man that I love with all of my heart, the man that gave me two fine sons that we both are very proud of, the man who law enforcement speculates might have murdered as many as thirty people.”

Tears & Tiers is $15 at Amazon.      

               The Mafia Cops

Gang Land readers interested in learning more details about the scandalous Mafia Cops saga of murderous ex-detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa have two other books to choose from.

The Brotherhoods, The True Story Of Two Cops Who Murdered For The Mafia is a 509-page hardcover book co-authored by Willam Oldham, a retired NYPD detective who began investigating the murderous duo as a criminal investigator for the feds, and writer Guy Lawson. Amazon has it for $20.08, more than eight bucks off the list price.

Mob Cops, The Shocking Rise and Fall of New York’s “Mafia Cops,” is a 386-page soft cover publication written by Daily News reporter Greg B. Smith, who previously authored “Made Men, The True Rise-and-Fall Story of a New Jersey Mob Family. $7.99 at Amazon.

Oldham and Lawson begin their account with the arrest last year of Eppolito and Caracappa in Las Vegas. Smith starts his narrative in 1969 on a young Burt Kaplan, who would become the star witness against the rogue cops, as the budding gangster drives to Connecticut to dump the body of a murder victim whose name he never learned.

Both books are current. They end with the convictions of both men for eight murders that were overturned by trial Judge Jack Weinstein, and with the ex-detectives jailed without bail as they wait for a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on the government's appeal of Weinstein's ruling.