Red Hook: Brooklyn Mafia, Ground Zero

Dimatteo presents a follow-up to his memoir The President Street Boys, his story of growing up in a mafia family. This book set in a now-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood starts with the group known as the White Hand, a collection of various Irish American gangs prevalent in the 1900s. They were supplanted by the Italian group the Black Hand in the 1920s. The book covers the 1970s and contemporary times too, when the federal government used racketeering laws to break up the five Italian American crime families that operated in NYC. The book is breezy and profane, and it’s sometimes hard to determine where the reconstructed mobster and police dialogue originates from. With interjections by coauthor Benson (Gangsters vs. Nazis), the book veers from stories about Frankie Yale, Frank Nitti, and Al Capone to Dimatteo’s first-person accounts of witnessing a murder at age 5, driving for the mafia, and more.