Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel sometimes known as Ben Siegel, was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was influential within the Jewish Mob, along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, and he also held significant influence within the Italian-American Mafia and the largely Italian-Jewish National Crime Syndicate. Described as handsome and charismatic, he became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters.
Raymond John Ryan was an American professional gambler, oilman, promoter, and developer. Described as having a larger-than-life personality, he mingled with prominent businesspeople and movie stars, as well as with cardsharps and mobsters on his path to fame and fortune. His sensational murder case was never solved.
Robert Alan Durst was an American real estate heir and murderer. The eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst, he gained attention as a suspect in the unsolved 1982 disappearance of his first wife Kathleen McCormack, the 2000 murder of his longtime friend Susan Berman, and the 2001 killing of his neighbor Morris Black. Acquitted of murdering Black in 2003, Durst did not face significant further legal action until his participation in the 2015 documentary miniseries The Jinx led to him being charged with Berman's murder. Durst was convicted of the murder in 2021 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was charged with McCormack's disappearance shortly after his sentencing, but died in 2022 before a trial could begin.
David Berman was a Jewish-American organized crime figure active in Sioux City, Iowa, the Twin Cities, and the Las Vegas strip. He was a casino gambling pioneer in Las Vegas, where he was a partner with mobster Bugsy Siegel at the Flamingo Hotel. Berman died in 1957 during surgery.
Susan Jane Berman was an American journalist and author. The daughter of mobster David Berman, she wrote about her late-in-life realization of her father's role in organized crime.
Matt Birkbeck is an American investigative journalist and author.
Jewish-American organized crime initially emerged within the American Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In media and popular culture, it has variously been referred to as the Jewish Mob, the Jewish Mafia, the Kosher Mob, the Kosher Mafia, the Yiddish Connection, and Kosher Nostra or Undzer Shtik. The last two of these terms are direct references to the Italian cosa nostra; the former is a play on the word for kosher, referring to Jewish dietary laws, while the latter is a calque of the Italian phrase 'cosa nostra' into Yiddish, which was at the time the predominant language of the Jewish diaspora in the United States.
Frank Peter Balistrieri was the crime boss of the Milwaukee crime family from 1961 to 1993. He was a central figure in the skimming of Las Vegas casinos during the 1970s and 1980s, and served several prison sentences.
Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war. Each book is dedicated to the rappers' mothers.
Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein was an American mobster who was a loanshark, bookmaker, racketeer and lieutenant to Tony "The Ant" Spilotro and the Chicago Outfit in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Barricade Books is an independent publishing company specializing in non-fiction titles and featuring biography, memoir, including holocaust memoirs, and true crime and Mafia titles.
Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family (1981) is the first memoir of Susan Berman, daughter of Las Vegas mobster David Berman. In it, Berman chronicles her mother Gladys's and her own obliviousness to what went on around them. When they finally became aware of their Mafia family, Berman's mother ended up dying in a mental institution and Susan endured a lot of psychotherapy.
A Deadly Secret: The Strange Disappearance of Kathie Durst is the true story of Robert Durst, the heir to a New York real estate dynasty who has been a person of interest in the missing-person case of his wife Kathie since her 1982 disappearance. The book was written by journalist and author Matt Birkbeck, and was published by Berkley/Penguin. A Deadly Secret was released in hardcover in 2002 and in paperback in 2003.
The Los Angeles crime family, also known as the L.A. Mafia or the Southern California crime family, and dubbed "the Mickey Mouse Mafia" by former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, is an Italian-American organized crime syndicate based in Los Angeles as part of the larger Italian-American Mafia. Since its inception in the early 20th century, it has spread throughout Southern California. Like most Mafia families in the United States, the Los Angeles crime family gained wealth and power through bootlegging alcohol during the Prohibition era. The L.A. family reached its peak strength in the 1940s and early 1950s under Jack Dragna, although the family was never larger than the New York or Chicago families. The Los Angeles crime family itself has been on a gradual decline, with the Chicago Outfit representing them on The Commission since the death of boss Jack Dragna in 1956.
The Killing of Tupac Shakur is a biographical, true crime account by American journalist and author Cathy Scott of the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. The book made news upon its September 1997 release, on the first anniversary of Shakur's death, because of an autopsy photo included in its pages. It was the first book to be released covering the rapper's death. The book was reprinted in the UK by Plexus Publishing and in Poland by Kagra. Coverage of the autopsy photo, taken of Shakur's body on a gurney in the coroner's examining room, catapulted the book onto the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. New editions of the book were released in 2002 and 2014.
The Murder of Biggie Smalls is a non-fiction true crime book by author and journalist Cathy Scott. Published in October 2000 by St. Martin's Press, it covers the March 9, 1997 murder of the Notorious B.I.G. in a drive-by shooting. A second updated edition of the book was released in September 2021.
The Millionaire's Wife: The True Story of a Real Estate Tycoon, his Beautiful Young Mistress, and a Marriage that Ended in Murder, by the author and journalist Cathy Scott, is a true crime account of the 1990 contract murder of George Kogan on an Upper East Side Manhattan street in broad daylight. The book was published for mass-market release by St. Martin's Press True Crime Library in March 2012.
Death in the Desert: The Ted Binion Homicide Case is a 2000 biographical and crime account by the American journalist and crime author Cathy Scott, with a second edition in 2012. The book, which was the first of four released about the case, details the homicide investigation and ensuing trial and re-trial of Ted Binion’s live-in girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her lover Rick Tabish in connection with Binion's death.
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst is a 2015 HBO documentary miniseries about New York real estate heir Robert Durst, a convicted murderer. It was written by Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Zac Stuart-Pontier.
Jeffrey Michael German was an American investigative reporter who wrote for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun, his career spanning four decades. He was stabbed to death in 2022. Elected official Robert Telles, whom German had investigated and reported on, is accused of his murder.
