This book traces the Mafia's beginnings from an underground patriotic society which sprang up six hundred years ago in Sicily, through the group of Italian immigrants
- the Black Hand
- who savagely tore control of New York's waterfronts away from Irish racketeers, to the Mob which went on to run organised crime throughout Italy & America.
Drawing on previously unavailable information & nearly two decades of research, William Balsamo
- great-nephew of the first godfather
- & George Carpozi Jr. trace the Black Hand's coalescence into an organisation whose insidious influence reached across the Atlantic & into a presidential administration. & they go behind the headlines to reveal with chilling clarity the true extent of the Mafia's influence today.