Humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, John and Robert Kennedy sought desperately to eliminate Castro. Their strategies for overthrowing the Cuban leader were so elaborate and bizarre, they could only engender paranoia. Castro openly threatened to retaliate. Pro-Castro agitator Lee Harvey Oswald learned that Robert Kennedy was personally supervising groups plotting against the Cuban leader. Filled with rage and a sense of destiny, Oswald went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, announcing he would kill A...

"At the age of twelve, my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world." —Henry HillWhen Henry Hill entered the Witness Protection Program, he was certain that his criminal days had finally come to an end. He was wrong.For over twenty years, Henry Hill lived the high life as a powerful member of the Lucchese crime family, a life immortalized in Martin Scorsese's classic film Goo...

Investigative reporter Gus Russo returns with his most explosive book yet, the remarkable story of the "Supermob"―a cadre of men who, over the course of decades, secretly influenced nearly every aspect of American society. Presenting startling, never-before-seen revelations about such famous members as Jules Stein, Joe Glaser, Ronald Reagan, Lew Wasserman, David Bazelon, and John Jacob Factor―as well as infamous, scrupulously low-profile members―Russo pulls the lid off of a half-century of...

November 22, 1963. A policeman’s wife was fetching their sick child from school. A young shoe store manager had no idea what lay in wait for him that day. A future president was tending to his farm. A future vice president was standing on the steps of his college library. A Georgetown student was looking forward to playing the piano for the president when he returned to Washington, DC, that evening. A future movie star was attending his second-grade art class.Then the news rang out ...

The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but.In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, DC intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men, already notorious iconoclasts within their respective agen...

Using breakthrough reporting and interviews with long-silent sources, Gus Russo and Stephen Molton have crafted a dramatic retelling of the time before, during, and after the killing of John F. Kennedy. The book centers on the two opposed sets of brothers—the Kennedys and the Castros—who collectively authored one of modern history's most dangerous, and tragically ironic, chapters. Bobby Kennedy pushed for the murder of Fidel Castro and instead got the death of his beloved brother, a psychi...

The never-before-told story of the great Chicago crime family called The Outfit.It is a common misperception that all the true-life organized crime stories have been written. Yet perhaps the most compelling gangster tale is one that has been, until now, too well-hidden. This is the story of the Outfit: the secretive organized crime cartel that began its reign in prohibition-era Chicago before becoming the real puppet master of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Washington D.C.The Ou...