Peter Maas

Peter Maas was an American journalist and author. He was born in New York City and attended Duke University.

He was the biographer of Frank Serpico, a New York City Police officer who testified against police corruption. He is also the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Underboss, about the life and times of Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.

His other notable bestsellers include The Valachi Papers, Manhunt, and In a Child's Name, recipient of the 1991 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book. The Valachi Papers, which told the story of Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi, is widely considered to be a seminal work, as it spawned an entire genre of books written by or about former Mafiosi.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goo

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Nicholas Pileggi

Nicholas Pileggi is best known for writing the book Wiseguy, which he adapted into the movie Goodfellas, and for writing the book and screenplay Casino. The movie versions of both were co-written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Pileggi also wrote the screenplay for the 1996 film City Hall. He began his career as a journalist and had a profound interest in the Mafia. This is where he developed his intuition to author books such as Wiseguy and Casino. He is also the author of the book Blye: Private Eye.
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Joseph Bonanno

Joseph Charles Bonanno, sometimes referred to as Joe Bananas, was an Italian-American crime boss of the Bonanno crime family, which he ran from 1931 to 1968.

Bonanno was born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, where his father was also involved in organized crime. At the age of three, Bonanno immigrated to New York City with his family, where he lived for about 10 years before he moved back to Italy. He later slipped back into the United States in 1924, by stowing away on a Cuban fishing boat bound for Tampa, Florida. After the Castellammarese War, during which Salvatore Maranzano was murdered in 1931, Bonanno reorganized most of the crime family as the Bonanno family. At age 26, Bonanno became one of the youngest-ever bosses of a crime fam
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Selwyn Raab

Selwyn Raab was an American journalist, author and investigative reporter for The New York Times. He wrote extensively about the American Mafia and criminal justice issues.
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Philip Carlo

Philip Carlo was the author of The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, his New York Times bestselling book about Richard “Ice Man” Kuklinski, murderer of 200 people and a favorite among all seven of the East Coast crime families. He was also the author of Gaspipe, The Butcher, and The Night Stalker, which chronicles the brutal career of serial killer Richard Ramirez. Carlo grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, amidst the world’s highest concentration of Mafia members. When he was 16, Carlo was shot in the head in a gang war, and while recuperating, he read voraciously, discovering the magic of books for the first time. His intimate knowledge of Mafia culture—their walk and their talk—helped Carlo become a successful crime writer. H
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Deirdre Bair

Deirdre Bair received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by The New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Saul Steinberg were both New York Times Notable Books.
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Anthony M. DeStefano

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for the past twenty years for Newsday in New York City, specializing in criminal justice and legal affairs. He is the author of The Last Godfather, King of the Godfathers, Mob Killer,The War on Human Trafficking, and Gangland New York, among others. He has appeared on Biography Channel programs as an expert on organized crime and he also speaks at academic conferences about crime and human trafficking.

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Karen Gravano

Karen Gravano was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is one of the stars of the VH1 reality TV show Mob Wives, which is about the day-to-day struggles family members are faced with after a loved one is sent to prison. She is also producing a movie based on her family's story, and developing a scripted television series about her wild days living in New York City. Outside of the entertainment business, Karen is putting her experience as an aesthetician and her love for skin care into developing her own line of products.
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John G. Fuller

John Grant Fuller, Jr. (1913 - 1990) was a New England-based American author of several non-fiction books and newspaper articles, mainly focusing on the theme of extra-terrestrials and the supernatural. For many years he wrote a regular column for the Saturday Review magazine, called "Trade Winds". His three most famous books were The Ghost of Flight 401, Incident at Exeter, and The Interrupted Journey.
The Ghost of Flight 401 was based on the tragic Eastern Air Lines airplane crash in December 1972, and the alleged supernatural events which followed; it was eventually turned into a popular 1978 made-for-television movie.
Incident at Exeter concerned a series of well-publicized UFO sightings in and around the town of Exeter, New Hampshire in
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Joseph Bonanno

Joseph Charles Bonanno, sometimes referred to as Joe Bananas, was an Italian-American crime boss of the Bonanno crime family, which he ran from 1931 to 1968.

Bonanno was born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, where his father was also involved in organized crime. At the age of three, Bonanno immigrated to New York City with his family, where he lived for about 10 years before he moved back to Italy. He later slipped back into the United States in 1924, by stowing away on a Cuban fishing boat bound for Tampa, Florida. After the Castellammarese War, during which Salvatore Maranzano was murdered in 1931, Bonanno reorganized most of the crime family as the Bonanno family. At age 26, Bonanno became one of the youngest-ever bosses of a crime fam
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Selwyn Raab

Selwyn Raab was an American journalist, author and investigative reporter for The New York Times. He wrote extensively about the American Mafia and criminal justice issues.
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Philip Carlo

Philip Carlo was the author of The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, his New York Times bestselling book about Richard “Ice Man” Kuklinski, murderer of 200 people and a favorite among all seven of the East Coast crime families. He was also the author of Gaspipe, The Butcher, and The Night Stalker, which chronicles the brutal career of serial killer Richard Ramirez. Carlo grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, amidst the world’s highest concentration of Mafia members. When he was 16, Carlo was shot in the head in a gang war, and while recuperating, he read voraciously, discovering the magic of books for the first time. His intimate knowledge of Mafia culture—their walk and their talk—helped Carlo become a successful crime writer. H
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Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of nine books, including THE WORST HARD TIME, which won the National Book Award. His latest book, A PILGRIMAGE TO ETERNITY, is a personal story, a journey over an ancient trail, and a history of Christianity. He also writes a biweekly opinion column for The New York Times. HIs book on the photographer Edward Curtis, SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER, won the Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction. His Irish-American book, THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN, was a New York Times bestseller. A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Seattle.
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Betty Mahmoody

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Mario Puzo

Puzo was born in a poor family of Neapolitan immigrants living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to his poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. In 1950, his first short story, The Last Christmas, was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.

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Michael Parker

Brought up in London. Attended Sir Walter St. John's Grammar School for boys in Battersea until the family moved to Portsmouth in 1954. Continued education at Southern Grammar. Left school with no qualifications and started work as a Junior deigner at Twilfits (Corset/Brassiere manufacturer). Left after one year and joined the Merhcant Navy as a Steward. Two years later married Pat, my teenage sweetheart and went to work on a building site. Three months later I joined the RAF as an electrician. Left 16 years later on a redundancy package and worked in a food factory for a couple of years. Left and worked in the Middle East for a year. Then back to another food manufacturer (Mars) for 17 years until early retirement in 1996. Moved out to Spa
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Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005) was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and firearms), his libertarian views, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He committed suicide in 2005.
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Vladimir Nabokov

Russian: Владимир Набоков .

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.

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James Patterson

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JIMMY Patterson Books
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James Patterson is the most popular storyteller of our time and the creator of such unforgettable characters and series as Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Jane Smith, and Maximum Ride. He has coauthored #1 bestselling novels with Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton, and Michael Crichton, as well as collaborated on #1 bestselling nonfiction, including The Idaho Four, Walk in My Combat Boots, and Filthy Rich. Patterson has told the story of his own life in the #1 bestselling autobiography James Patterson by James Patterson. He is the recipient of an Edgar Award, ten Emmy Awards, the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and the National Humanities Medal.
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Jack London

John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.

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Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against A
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Karen Gravano

Karen Gravano was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is one of the stars of the VH1 reality TV show Mob Wives, which is about the day-to-day struggles family members are faced with after a loved one is sent to prison. She is also producing a movie based on her family's story, and developing a scripted television series about her wild days living in New York City. Outside of the entertainment business, Karen is putting her experience as an aesthetician and her love for skin care into developing her own line of products.
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John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin was a white American journalist who is best known for his account, Black Like Me, in which he details the experience of darkening his skin and traveling as a black man through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in 1959. (The racism that he encountered was so disturbing that he cut short the time that he had allotted for this very unique experiment, clearly demonstrating that no one would tolerate being treated as many blacks are, if he or she could possibly avoid it.)
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Gerard O'Neill

Gerard O'Neill was an American journalist, newspaper editor, and writer.
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Dan Henderson

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Greg B. Smith

Greg B. Smith, reporter for New York’s Daily News, covers the federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan that serve as Ground Zero in the battle to end mafia influence in America. An investigative reporter for nearly twenty years, Smith has written for The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Examiner, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and other newspapers around the country. He’s also a frequent guest on TV and radio discussing everything from racketeering to the Latin Kings street gang to world terrorist organizations. Mr. Smith lives with his wife and two boys in Brooklyn, New York. ~ Penguin Books
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