The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia [Hardcover]

Mike Dash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2009

Before the notorious Five Families who dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half century, there was the one-fingered criminal genius Giuseppe Morello–known as “The Clutch Hand”–and his lethal coterie of associates. In The First Family, historian, journalist, and New York Times bestselling author Mike Dash brings to life this little-known story, following the rise of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the lawless villages of Sicily to the streets of Little Italy. Using an impressive array of primary sources–hitherto untapped Secret Service archives, prison records, trial transcripts, and interviews with surviving family members–this is the first Mafia history that applies scholarly rigor to the story of the Morello syndicate and the birth of organized crime on these shores.

Progressing from small-time scams to counterfeiting rings to even bigger criminal enterprises, Giuseppe Morello exerted ruthless control of Italian neighborhoods in New York, and through adroit coordination with other Sicilian crime families, his Clutch Hand soon reached far beyond the Hudson River.

The men who battled Morello’s crews were themselves colorful and legendary figures, including William Flynn, a fearless Secret Service agent, and Lieutenant Detective Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino of the New York Police Department’s elite Italian Squad, whose pursuit of the brutal gangs ultimately cost him his life.

Combining first-rate scholarship and pulse-quickening action, and set amid rustic Sicilian landscapes and the streets of old New York, The First Family is a groundbreaking account of the crucial period when the American criminal underworld exploded with violent fury across the nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Decades before the Five Families emerged and more than half a century before Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather, Giuseppe Morello and his family controlled all manner of crime in New York City. Bestselling historian Dash (Satan's Circus; Tulipomania) presents an enthralling account of this little-known boss of bosses, dubbed the Clutch Hand because of his deformed arm. Arriving with his family from Corleone, Sicily, in 1892, Morello soon set up a successful operation counterfeiting American and Canadian bills. His empire expanded to include extorting local businesses, insurance scams and kidnappings. The Mafia—a term that Dash underscores was used by outsiders, not members—was in its infancy when Morello came to America, but by the time he was gunned down in 1930, families had cropped up in all five boroughs and in cities across the country. Dash depicts the balance between loyalty and betrayal as an ever-changing dance and nimbly catalogues the endless gruesome murders committed in the name of revenge and honor. Readers may think they know the mob, but Morello's ruthless rule makes even the fictional Tony Soprano look tame. Maps. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

While most Americans can name two or three famous Mafiosi, few have ever heard of Giuseppe Morella. Dash's vivid, fascinating account of his life and times may change that. Dash combed through century-old newspaper articles, police files, and court transcripts, and his extensive research shows on every page and sets the record straight on pre-Prohibition mob operations. The narrative brims with anecdotes and little-known facts, and Dash's animated, eloquent prose results in a convincing and powerful story. However, Dash doesn't soften the edges of this gritty, violent era: a few critics complained that the book was, at times, too gory. The First Family is nevertheless a valuable contribution to our understanding of this uniquely American institution.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Random House (August 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400067227
• ISBN-13: 978-1400067220
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #354,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mike Dash, the author of Tulipomania, Batavia's Graveyard, Thug, Satan's Circus and now The First Family, was born, in 1963, just outside London, and educated at Gatow School, Berlin, Wells Cathedral School, Somerset, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history and ran the Cambridge student magazine. From there he moved on to King's College, London, where in 1990 he completed an unusually obscure PhD thesis describing British submarine policy between the Crimean and the First World Wars.

Dash's first job, for which he was thoroughly unqualified, was compiling about a quarter of the entries for Harrap's Dictionary of Business and Finance (1988), a volume that he researched via clandestine meetings in a London Spud-U-Like with a college friend who had gone into banking. From there, he began a six-year career in journalism book-ended by stints as a gossip columnist for Fashion Weekly and a section editor at UK Press Gazette, the journalists' newspaper.

While still at UKPG, Dash took a phone call from John Brown, the maverick publisher of Viz, who asked him to suggest the names of some possible magazine publishers with an editorial background and some knowledge of the newstrade, Unsurprisingly nominating himself, Dash found himself hired to take over the eccentric portfolio of Viz Comic and Gardens Illustrated.

Dash's first book, The Limit (1995), was published by BBC Books and his second, Borderlands (1997) by Heinemann. He has since written five works of historical non fiction, all of them acclaimed for combining detailed original research with a compelling narrative style.

Having written his first three books while still with John Brown Publishing, Dash has been a full-time writer since 2001. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

'History doesn't get much more readable.'
New York Daily News

'Dash writes with unabashedly cinematic flair, backed by meticulous research.'
New York Times

'Dash captures the reader with narrative based on dogged research, more richly evocative of character and place than any fiction, and so well written he is impossible to put down.'
The Australian

'An indefatigable researcher with a prodigious descriptive flair.'
Sunday Telegraph

'Dash writes the best kind of history: detailed, imaginative storytelling founded on vast knowledge.'
Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget what you THINK you know about the Mob and read this instead!, July 2, 2009

By 

Todd Bartholomew (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

"The First Family" wasn't what I expected it to be, and that's a good thing. Rather than being yet another drop in an endless sea of books on the mob, Mike Dash's book manages to add some fresh elements to a hoary genre. Dash seeks follow Giuseppe Morello from Italy to America where he establishes his illegitimate businesses. Incorporating genealogical and historical research into the mix, Dash follows Morello and at the same time traces the origins and the rise of the Mafia in America. While most writers focus on the heyday of the Mafia in the 1920s and beyond, Dash seeks to hearken further back to tell the story in greater detail than others have attempted. Dash's combination of being a historian and a journalist makes him a formidable writer as he has not only the flair for writing, but never fails to document his sources. Best of all Dash strikes a balance between writing a book targeted for the mass market that still manages to satisfy the need for documentation.

Most people familiar with the mob have likely never heard or read of Morello as he predates the Five Families by a couple of decades. Dash recounts how Morello scratched and clawed his way to success in New York City through an array of illegitimate businesses by the time he was gunned down in 1930. By the time of his demise a number of families had come to replicate his method of operations not just in New York City, but throughout the nation and beyond, becoming the template for how to organize and operate effectively. More importantly Dash strips away the layers of rumor, hearsay, innuendo, and recycled errors that so many other writers take as gospel regarding the Mafia and seeks the straight up truth. Dash seeks the truth from the most reliable public records and then sets about building the story from there; the result is a captivating, direct, and honest story that is truly stranger than fiction. Set aside what you THINK you know about the Mafia and read this instead!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historically Sensational, July 15, 2009

By 

David Edmiston "Dave" (So Cal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

When I sat down to begin reading The First Family, I assumed I would be reading sensationalized accounts of mob antics. That's not necessarily a bad thing--I'm as big a fan of GoodFellas as the next guy. So I queued up my playlist of Louis Prima and Dean Martin and settled in for a an oversized serving of salacious details.

Wrong

Or at least half wrong

The details are there all right, but the sensationalism is completely absent. This was the biggest literary shocker I've had this year and truly a pleasant surprise. Mike Dash took an approach that was totally unexpected and is brilliant in its simplicity. Instead of amassing a compilation of so-called eye witness accounts--apocryphal accounts that inevitably change with each generation's retelling--he scoured the wealth of official material from those early days to create an actual historical account. By examining the police reports, courtroom testimonies, immigration documents, and family letters he was able to create a historically legitimate account of the early days of the mafia. Why didn't anyone think of that before?

Maybe it's the perspective of a foreigner that made The First Family possible. As a British writer, Dash writes with the sometimes objective and sometimes awestruck viewpoint of an outsider who is neither American nor Sicilian. On some of the pages, you can almost hear the incredulous tone of a writer telling us "can you believe this stuff?" That is truly his gift, because Dash wove the gray facts from the countless historical sources into a shockingly colorful story. Yes, the details seemed a little extensive at times, but the level of detail made sense in later chapters when the full account of the Mafia's birth in Sicily explained the mysterious growth of the Mafia in the U.S.

I was surprised by the fact that so many news accounts of early Mafia activity in the late 1800s and early 1900s were nothing more than people seeing the ghosts of things that weren't really there. Although the so-called "Black Hand" letters of those days were the product of the high numbers of desperate thugs, there was no "organized crime" at that time. But sadly, with Guiseppe Morello's rise to power in America, the prophecy fulfilled itself and the stories came true.

I give high praise to Mike Dash and I thank him for faithfully telling the story of an ugly part of our American history. I only wish it were fiction.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What a difference real research makes, August 20, 2009

By 

T. Kunikov (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

The majority of what we often hear in regards to the Mafia is hearsay and anecdotal. Few authors have the time, inclination, or desire to do the relevant research when presented with diverging accounts or stories simply too good to be true. The author of "The First family", however, took it upon himself to do the research before putting anything to print. In doing so an entirely new narrative of how the Mafia began in America is developed. All the same, the book is rather short, considering all the research the author purports to have done. Granted, much of what he goes over for the 1920s is simply not well known, the prohibition era gave the mob/mafia practically free run to make money, sell alcohol, and expand their 'business' enterprises. The mafia, unlike the Secret Service or the police, did not keep financial or historical records of their activities. And it seems that during the 1920s the police, and other agencies, simply let the mob do as they wish. Either that or the author failed to unearth the relevant sources for this time period. Even so, testimony and 'memoir' materials survive - although undoubtedly plagued by self-interest and bias. This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction and goes far to show how flawed and lacking journalistic accounts were/are when compared to a study based on historical research, even if the 'research' is limited to mainly one side (specifically, the materials used from law enforcement agencies play a large role in this text and can probably be accepted to a larger degree as 'truthful' when compared to mob/mafia accounts/rumors).