Michael Benson

World War II began at Hollywood and Vine. From the moment Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, there was no American city he wanted to rule more than Los Angeles. Control the moviemaking capital of the world and Hitler could control the message that came out of it: As clear as black and white...

In the 1970s, Joe DeLamielleure led a Buffalo Bills offensive line affectionately called the Electric Company, because they turned the power up....

It was one of the biggest crime stories of the decade-two deadly killers, desperate and on the run. After months of planning, Ricky Matt and David Sweat cut, chopped, coerced, and connived their way out of a maximum-security prison in the wilderness of upstate New York and managed to elude...

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on...

He was one of the four Mafia leaders who inspired Mario Puzo's The Godfather—and perhaps, next to Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mob boss of them all. Born into a mafioso family in Sicily, Carlo Gambino came to America illegally as a stowaway in 1921. Jumping ship in Virginia, he joined his...

For more than a hundred years, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn was Ground Zero for organized crime. Whoever controlled the piers controlled everything. From the infamous Irish gang known as The White Hand at the turn of the century, to the notorious Italian Gallo brothers who ran President...

Umberto "Albert" Anastasia was born in Italy at the turn of the century. Five decades later, he would be gunned down in a barber shop in New York City. What happened in the years in between - and why every crime family had reason to want him dead - is one of the most brutal and fascinating...

"Mommy...won't be with us anymore." That's what attorney Kevin C. Bryant, 45, told his two young sons in the spring of 2003. At the time, blond, pretty, 26-year-old Tabatha Bryant was alive and well in an upscale suburb of Rochester, New York. But that was about to change - because Bryant knew...

Who really killed "Crazy Joe" Gallo? It wasn't Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran as he claimed. "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...

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Camillo Carmine Galante was raised in Manhattan's Little Italy and by all accounts born bad. By fifteen he was terrorizing the streets of New York's Lower East Side, scoring high marks for the "errands" he was running for his La Cosa Nostra elders. When he turned...