The Mayfair Mafia

This true crime history reveals the shocking career of the London mafia family that ran a thriving prostitution empire for decades. From the mid-1930s into the 1950s, one immigrant Italian family ran London’s thriving vice trade. The five Messina brothers imported prostitutes from the Continent on an industrial scale, acquiring British citizenship for the women by phony marriages. Taking 80% of these women’s earnings, the Messina family became fabulously wealthy, purchasing expensive properties, cars and influence. As this revealing and absorbing account describes, the brothers ruled with a ruthless combination of charm, blackmail and threats of disfigurement and death that were all too credible. It took a sensational Sunday newspaper exposé to get the authorities to put an end to their criminal reign. A series of dramatic arrests and trials followed, as one by one the brothers were imprisoned and deported for crimes including immoral earnings, attempted bribery and firearms offenses. Such was their fortune that numerous potential beneficiaries came forward, most recently in 2012. Dick Kirby, an author and former Metropolitan police officer, presents a vividly detailed and thoroughly researched narrative of the five Messina brothers in this revealing and riveting read.

WHO REALLY KILLED “CRAZY JOE” GALLO? AT LAST, THE TRUTH CAN BE TOLD. AND IT WASN’T FRANK “THE IRISHMAN” SHEERAN AS HE CLAIMED. This is the shocking and brutal story of Carmine DiBiase—aka Sonny Pinto—the elusive Mafia killer who went from small-time street punk to FBI’s Most Wanted list to Death Row—only to be released on the streets to kill and kill again . . . among those who died by his gun was Joey Gallo. “Sober, he was nothing, but drunk he would blow your head off.” That’s how Pete the Greek described Carmine “Sonny” DiBiase, the Colombo crime family hitman who’d been terrorizing Manhattan’s Little Italy since he was a kid. After beating and robbing a local tailor and doing time in reformatory, Sonny set up operations at The Mayfair Boys Civic and Social Club, an illegal poolroom where he shot and killed his best friend on Christmas day . . . A prime suspect of this and other crimes, Sonny went on the lam and off the grid for seven years. He then surrendered himself to police, was tried for murder and sentenced to death. But after a second trial, he walked away a free man—free to kill again. Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his President Street mob waged a deadly Mafia civil war with the Colombo crime family, and in particular, Carmine “the Snake” Persico. A contract was put out for Gallo and his gang. And on that fateful night of April 7, 1972, in a Little Italy restaurant, Gallo was assassinated . . . by Carmine “Sonny” DiBiasi.. This is the true story of who really whacked Crazy Joey Gallo on that fateful night of April 7, 1972.

Buzzie and the Bull chronicles a baseball year in the lives of two lifelong friends who couldn’t be more different: Buzzie Bavasi, the legendary general manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, and Al “the Bull” Ferrara, bon vivant, fountain of joy, and bench player. Their 1965 baseball journey encompassed a thrilling pennant race settled on the final day of the season, a city engulfed in flames, a perfect game, and a GM who extolled his friend the Bull as a hero in May and then banished him from the team to the depths of public purgatory in July. The partnership of these two characters—the general manager who valued fearlessness above all else and the crazy player who loved living on the edge—became the embodiment of champions who never choked in the clutch. Over seventeen years, Bavasi’s teams won eight pennants and four World Series titles. His approach deserves recognition it has never received, and his friendship with Ferrara illustrates the ground on which he staked his baseball career. The summer of 1965 proved Bavasi’s thesis that champions are built on players with one core characteristic: nerves of steel.

A former Scotland Yard detective examines real cases of murder in which accused criminals were convicted without a body found. Murders in any form, and the more gruesome the better, hold a morbid fascination to the British public but never more so than when the bodies of the victims are never found. Aside from the lack of closure for relatives and friends, this factor creates problems for police and prosecutors and has macabre appeal for the public. Muriel McKay, wife of a senior News of the World Executive was kidnapped in 1969. Although her body, believed to have been fed to pigs, was never found, the perpetrators were convicted. The same fate was suffered by the business partner of a Polish farmer. James Camb murdered a glamorous actress feeding her to sharks but this did not stop women flocking to see him in court. John Haigh confessed to disposing of his nine victims in acid. Again, his trial was a sell-out. Dick Kirby, former Scotland Yard detective turned best-selling crime writer has ‘unearthed’ a fascinating collection of disappearances such as the dismemberment of a gay man’s wife who had threatened to expose him in the 1950s. Later, when a woman’s head was discovered near his home, he confessed only to find that it dated from Roman times. These and numerous other cases make Missing, Presumed Murdered a riveting, if grisly, read.

It is little known today that, in January 1939, the IRA launched a bombing campaign, codenamed The S - or Sabotage - Plan on mainland England. With cynical self-justification, they announced that it was not their intention to harm human life but in just over a year, more than 300 explosive devices resulted in 10 deaths, 96 injuries and widespread devastation. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and many other towns and cities were targeted. On 25 August 1939, detectives in London defused three devices set to detonate that afternoon at 2.30 and arrested four terrorists. At the same time an identical bomb exploded in Coventry city centre killing five civilians and injuring 50, the highest body count of the campaign. Numerous arrests were made nationwide but ill-trained personnel and additional national security resulting from the threat of Nazi invasion caused the campaign to falter and fade away in early 1940. The author, a former detective, is well qualified to write this book, having spent 18 months in Northern Ireland combatting terrorism, for which he was commended by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Imbert, for displaying ‘courage, dedication and detective ability’.

Get the Summary of Marco Pierre White's The Devil in the Kitchen in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "The Devil in the Kitchen" is the autobiography of Marco Pierre White, a celebrated chef with a reputation for perfectionism and a fiery temperament. White's journey begins with his childhood in Leeds, marked by the loss of his mother and the influence of his chef father. His father's strict discipline and gambling habits, along with White's dyslexia and loneliness, shaped his resilience and outsider perspective...

Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which too place eighty years ago. In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right. McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime!

Mafialand is a revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller spanning much of the twentieth century, a page-turning chronicle of an elaborate Mafia plan to 'invade' Europe using 1960s London as a bridgehead. The capital city of the Swinging Sixties was also a world of gambling, guns and gangsters. Several veterans of the era are astonished that they survived it and some feel protected enough - now that most of the killers are themselves dead - to reveal to bestselling author Douglas Thompson the details and secrets of one of history's greatest criminal conspiracies, and of how world-champion boxer Freddie Mills really died. Mafialand (previously published as Shadowland) recounts events from the viewpoint of the pawns as well as the kingmakers. Brutal, terrifying and intrigue-packed, it is an account of the Mob's Machiavellian global manipulation of governments and officials. All the big players of Mob history are here, controlled by the gangster genius Meyer Lansky, but so are the hit men, the fixers, the hoodlums and the wiseguys.