KCPolski

The author, Mr. Ouseley, may have had a long career investigating organized crime, but that does not mean he is a competent author. This book seriously suffers in its lack of editing. The first, most obvious problem, is in typographical errors. Names spelled different ways within a single paragraph, missing punctuation, poor grammar, etc., plague this book from beginning to end.

The second, and probably more important, area where an editor was needed was the content. Perhaps it is because he has such an intimate knowledge of organized crime, but the amount of information he dumps on the reader muddies the waters. He would have been better off picking the facts of a particular story-line in a given chapter, and left the smaller, tangential details out. Sometimes those tangents, though interesting, really didn't affect the particular topic in a significant way.

Even though the book is poorly written, I believe he gets one very important point across. Making a living through organized crime almost always leads to an early death.

I would recommend The Mafia and the Machine, by Frank Hayde over this book. I felt he did a much better job.