From true-crime legend T. J. English, the epic, behind-the-scenes saga of Los Muchachos, one of the most successful cocaine trafficking organizations in American history--a story of glitz, glamour, and organized crime set against 1980's Miami.

Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon.

A Cuban exile whose family escaped Fidel Castro's Cuba when he was eleven years old, Falcon, as a teenager, became active in the anti-Castro movement. He began smuggling cocaine into the U.S. as a way to raise money to buy arms for the Contras in Central America. This counter-revolutionary activity led directly to Willy's genesis as a narco. He and his partners built an extraordinary international organization from the ground up. Los Muchachos, the syndicate founded by Falcon, thrived as a major cocaine distribution network in the U.S. from the late 1970's into the early 1990's. At their height, Los Muchachos made more than a hundred million dollars a year. At the same time, Willy, his brother Tavy Falcon, and partner Sal Magluta became famous as championship powerboat racers.

Cocaine, used by everyone from A-list celebrities to lawyers and people in law enforcement, came to define an era, and for a time, Willy Falcon and those like him--major suppliers, of whom there were only a few--became stars in their own right. They were the deliverers of good times, at least until the downside of persistent cocaine use became apparent: delusions of grandeur, psychological addiction, financial ruin. Thus, the War on Drugs was born, and federal authorities came after Falcon and his crew with a vengeance. Willy found himself on the run, his marriage and family life in shambles, the halcyon days of boat races and lavish trips to Vegas and parties at the Mutiny night club seemingly a distant memory.

T. J. English has been granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of Los Muchachos, sitting down with Willy Falcon and his associates for many lengthy interviews, and revealing never-before-understood details about drug trafficking. A classic of true-crime writing from a master of the genre, The Last Kilo traces the rise and fall of a true cocaine empire--and the lives left in its wake.

Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike King Mike McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Featherstone, troubled Vietnam vet turned Westies gang leader; and James Whitey Bulger, the ruthless and untouchable Southie legend. Stretching from the earliest New York and New Orleans street wars through decades of bootlegging scams, union strikes, gang wars, and FBI investigations, Paddy Whacked is a riveting tour de force that restores the Irish American gangster to his rightful preeminent place in our criminal history -- and penetrates to the heart of the American experience.

Throughout the late eighties and nineties, a gang of young Asian refugees cut a bloody swath through New York's Chinatown. They were the lost children of the Vietnam War, severed from their families by violence and cast adrift in a strange land. Banding together under the leadership of a megalomaniacal young psychopath, David Thai, they took their name from a slogan they had seen on helicopters and the helmets of U.S. soldiers: Born to Kill. For a decade their empire was unassailable, built on a foundation of fear, ruthlessness, and unimaginable brutality--until one courageous gang brother helped bring it down from the inside.

In modern-day Havana, the remnants of the glamorous past are everywhere--old hotel-casinos, vintage American cars & flickering neon signs speak of a bygone era that is widely familiar & often romanticized, but little understood. In Havana Nocturne, T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution & international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana & the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky & Charles Lucky Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government & in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion.

Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels & casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women & gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara & others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government & its foreign partners--an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory.

Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana--including interviews with the era's key survivors--Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob--featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr & Albert Anastasia--& Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana--& how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the revolution.

In modern-day Havana, the remnants of the glamorous past are everywhere--the old hotel-casinos, vintage American cars, and flickering neon signs speak of a bygone era that is widely familiar and often romanticized, but little understood. In Havana Nocturne, T. J. English offers a riveting, multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution, and international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana and the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 1950s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky and Charles Lucky Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the American Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government and in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion.

Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels and casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women, and gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government and its foreign partners--an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory.

Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana--including interviews with the era's key survivors--Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob--featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr. and Albert Anastasia--and Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana--and how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the Cuban Revolution.

T.J. English has the mastered the hybrid narrative art form of social history and underworld thriller. The Savage City is a truly gripping read filled with unexpected twists and turns.
--Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge

In The Savage City, T.J. English, author of the New York Times bestselling blockbuster Havana Nocturne, takes readers back to a frightening place in a dark time of violence and urban chaos: New York City in the 1960s and early '70s. As he did in his acclaimed true crime masterwork, The Westies, English focuses on the rot on the Big Apple in this stunning tale of race, murder, and a generation on the edge--as he interweaves the real-life sagas of a corrupt cop, a militant Black Panther, and an innocent young African American man framed by the NYPD for a series of crimes, including a brutal and sensational double murder.

Sixteen stories of true crime from America's foremost authority on the underworld
James Whitey Bulger is the last of the old-fashioned gangsters. As a polished, sophisticated psychopath--who also happened to be a secret FBI informant--his reign of power in Boston lasted for more than twenty years. When he went on the lam in 1995, the kingpin's legend grew to rival that of Al Capone. Captured after sixteen years in hiding, he now sits in a maximum security prison awaiting trial on racketeering charges and nineteen counts of murder. T. J. English has been writing about men like Bulger for more than two decades. And this collection, culled from his career in journalism and supported by new material, shows English at his best. In addition to the numerous pieces about Whitey, he reports stories about gangsters and organized crime from New York City to Jamaica to Hong Kong and Mexico. Be they about old school mobsters, corrupt federal agents, or modern-day narcotraficantes wreaking havoc on the US-Mexico border, English tells these stories with depth and insight. Combining first-rate reporting and the storytelling technique of a novelist, English takes his readers on a bloody but fascinating journey to the dark side of the American Dream.

From T. J. English, the New York Times bestselling author of The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob is the true account of the vicious gang that ruled Hell's Kitchen from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Starting with a partnership between two sadistic thugs, Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone, the gang rose out of the inferno of Hell's Kitchen, a decaying tenderloin slice of New York City's West Side. They became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime, excelling in extortion, numbers running, loan sharking, and drug peddling. Upping the ante on depravity, their specialty was execution by dismemberment. Though never numbering more than a dozen members, their reign lasted for almost twenty years--until their own violent natures got the best of them, precipitating a downfall that would become as infamous as their ascension into the annals of crime.

This revised and updated chronicle of the Westies served as the basis of the crime film State of Grace, starring Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and Gary Oldman.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Westies and Paddy Whacked offers a front-row seat at the trial of Whitey Bulger, and an intimate view of the world of organized crime--and law enforcement--that made him the defining Irish American gangster.

For sixteen years, Whitey Bulger eluded the long reach of the law. For decades one of the most dangerous men in America, Bulger--the brother of influential Massachusetts senator Billy Bulger--was often romanticized as a Robin Hood-like thief and protector. While he was functioning as the de facto mob boss of New England, Bulger was also serving as a Top Echelon informant for the FBI, covertly feeding local prosecutors information about other mob figures--while using their cover to cleverly eliminate his rivals, reinforce his own power, and protect himself from prosecution. Then, in 2011, he was arrested in southern California and returned to Boston, where he was tried and convicted of racketeering and murder.

Our greatest chronicler of the Irish mob in America, T. J. English covered the trial at close range--by day in the courtroom, but also, on nights and weekends, interviewing Bulger's associates as well as lawyers, former federal agents, and even members of the jury in the backyards and barrooms of Whitey's world. In Where the Bodies Were Buried, he offers a startlingly revisionist account of Bulger's story--and of the decades-long culture of collusion between the Feds and the Irish and Italian mob factions that have ruled New England since the 1970s, when a fateful deal left the FBI fatally compromised. English offers an authoritative look at Bulger's own understanding of his relationship with the FBI and his alleged immunity deal, and illuminates how gangsterism, politics, and law enforcement have continued to be intertwined in Boston.

As complex, harrowing, and human as a Scorsese film, Where the Bodies Were Buried is the last word on a reign of terror that many feared would never end.

A mob saga that has it all--brotherhood and betrayal, swaggering power and glittering success, and a Godfather whose reach seems utterly unrivaled. What a relentless, irresistible read. -- Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of The Force

A fascinating, cinematic, multigenerational history of the Cuban mob in the US from America's top chronicler of organized crime and New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne.

By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as the Corporation, the Cuban mob's power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida's exile community--those who had been chased from the island by Castro's revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.

An epic story of gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. T. J. English interweaves the voices of insiders speaking openly for the first time with a trove of investigative material he has gathered over many decades to tell the story of this successful criminal enterprise, setting it against the larger backdrop of revolution, exile, and ethnicity that makes it one of the great American gangster stories that has been overlooked--until now.

Drawing on the detailed reporting and impressive volume of evidence that drive his bestselling works, English offers a riveting, in-depth look at this powerful and sordid crime organization and its hold in the US.

A mediados de los ochenta, el submundo criminal de los Estados Unidos se convirtió en un políglota étnico. Una de las organizaciones ilícitas más poderosas era ni más ni menos que la mafia cubana. Conocida en ambos lados de la ley como La corporación, el poder de la mafia cubana venía de una cultura criminal enraizada en la comunidad de exiliados del sur de la Florida --aquellos que fueron expulsados de la isla por la revolución de Castro y que planeaban derrocar al dictador marxista y recuperar el país.

Historia épica de gánsteres, drogas, violencia, sexo y asesinatos callejeros, La corporación (The Corporation) revela cómo una generación entera de exiliados políticos, refugiados, estafadores, policías corruptos, sicarios, y sus esposas y novias se vio enredada en una saga americana de desesperación y construcción de imperios. T. J. English interconecta las voces de infiltrados, que por primera vez hablan abiertamente, con una mina de material investigativo que ha reunido durante décadas para contar la historia de esta exitosa empresa criminal, y lo contrasta con el trasfondo de la revolución, el exilio y la etnicidad, haciendo de esta una de las grandes historias americanas de gánsteres que han sido ignoradas --hasta hoy.

Basándose en informes detallados y en una impresionante cantidad de evidencia que guían sus exitosos trabajos, English ofrece una mirada cautivadora y exhaustiva a esta poderosa y sórdida organización criminal y su influencia en los Estados Unidos.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A mob saga that has it all--brotherhood and betrayal, swaggering power and glittering success, and a Godfather whose reach seems utterly unrivaled. What a relentless, irresistible read. -- Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of The Force

A fascinating, cinematic, multigenerational history of the Cuban mob in the US from America's top chronicler of organized crime and New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne.

By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as the Corporation, the Cuban mob's power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida's exile community--those who had been chased from the island by Castro's revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.

An epic story of gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. T. J. English interweaves the voices of insiders speaking openly for the first time with a trove of investigative material he has gathered over many decades to tell the story of this successful criminal enterprise, setting it against the larger backdrop of revolution, exile, and ethnicity that makes it one of the great American gangster stories that has been overlooked--until now.

Drawing on the detailed reporting and impressive volume of evidence that drive his bestselling works, English offers a riveting, in-depth look at this powerful and sordid crime organization and its hold in the US.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Westies and Paddy Whacked offers a front-row seat at the trial of Whitey Bulger, and an intimate view of the world of organized crime--and law enforcement--that made him the defining Irish American gangster.

For sixteen years, Whitey Bulger eluded the long reach of the law. For decades one of the most dangerous men in America, Bulger--the brother of influential Massachusetts senator Billy Bulger--was often romanticized as a Robin Hood-like thief and protector. While he was functioning as the de facto mob boss of New England, Bulger was also serving as a Top Echelon informant for the FBI, covertly feeding local prosecutors information about other mob figures--while using their cover to cleverly eliminate his rivals, reinforce his own power, and protect himself from prosecution. Then, in 2011, he was arrested in southern California and returned to Boston, where he was tried and convicted of racketeering and murder.

Our greatest chronicler of the Irish mob in America, T. J. English covered the trial at close range--by day in the courtroom, but also, on nights and weekends, interviewing Bulger's associates as well as lawyers, former federal agents, and even members of the jury in the backyards and barrooms of Whitey's world. In Where the Bodies Were Buried, he offers a startlingly revisionist account of Bulger's story--and of the decades-long culture of collusion between the Feds and the Irish and Italian mob factions that have ruled New England since the 1970s, when a fateful deal left the FBI fatally compromised. English offers an authoritative look at Bulger's own understanding of his relationship with the FBI and his alleged immunity deal, and illuminates how gangsterism, politics, and law enforcement have continued to be intertwined in Boston.

As complex, harrowing, and human as a Scorsese film, Where the Bodies Were Buried is the last word on a reign of terror that many feared would never end.