The brutal truth at point blank range. Drawing on two decades of original research and personal experience, multi award-winning writer the late George Carpozi Jr and William Balsamo, great nephew of the first godfather, Don Guiseppe 'Battista' Balsamo, trace 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 the Irish racketeers, to the Mob which went on to run organised crime throughout Italy and America, and whose insidious influence even reached into a presidential administration. The Mafia has long been one of the most mythical and misunderstood criminal organisations. This book, with filmic detail, behind-closed-doors dialogue and first-hand story-telling, gets deeper inside it than ever before.