Compare this book to Reppetto’s Breaking the Mob and you’ll see how the Reppetto book is outshone. Although Fox didn’t discuss the Mafia’s beginnings in Philadelphia, he was correct in writing on page 349: “In Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston the local Mafiosi had generally seized control of numbers gambling by 1940.” He was on to something going on with the Italians, but gives print more to the Jews because they talked on the record during the Kefauver hearings in 1950-1951.

Aside from his “After Dallas” chapter, which is good to know about the backgrounds and agendas of those who wrote about the Mafia in the 1960s and 1970s, the reader will consider the different theories that became fact (poof!) without the truth behind them. Fox also wants readers to see how Americans changed their attitudes towards Italian Americans and crime and how this association got stronger with the publication of these Mob books and movies like “Godfather.”

It’s a shame that a historian like Fox could not devote more time to cities like Philadelphia whose Mafia had been here for a long time and had a written history waiting to be resurrected. As a source on the Cosa Nostra generally, this book is far better than Reppetto’s, but the GSWs are earned because Philadelphia’s importance for the Mob was not understood by Fox, (just the New York Families.)

Gun Shot Wounds

2008 PhillyMafiaHistory.com