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How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II
Citadel
January 2023
On Sale: December 27, 2022
438 pages
ISBN: 0806542152
EAN: 9780806542157
Kindle: B09RGLWNKW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
For the first time ever the full story of how
Charles “Lucky” Luciano—the U.S. Mafia
boss who put the “organized” into organized
crime—was recruited by U.S. Naval Intelligence in 1944
to aid the Allied war effort in the U.S. invasion of
Sicily that was a turning point in WWII.
In
1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was
vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with
German and Italian agents then the U.S. Navy needed a
recourse just as insidious to secure it.
Naval
intelligence officer, Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden
had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La
Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the
longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains
along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York,
who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Haffenden was prepared to make a deal with the
devil–the man who put “organized” into
organized crime. Even from his cell in Dannemora State
Prison, former Public Enemy #1, Charles “Lucky”
Luciano still had tremendous power. Luciano was willing to
wield it for Haffenden. But he wanted something in
return—Luciano’s contacts in Italy to track the
Nazis’ movements.
Operation
Underworld is a tale of espionage and crime like no
other, the unbelievable, first-ever account of the Allied
war effort’s clandestine coalition between the Mafia
and the U.S. Government to protect New York, vanquish the
Nazis by taking the fight to the enemy in the 1943 U.S.
invasion of Sicily. It was an ingenious strategy carried out
by some of history’s most infamous, improbable, and
unsung heroes on both sides of the law. It was a Faustian
bargain that brought homefront enemies together but, as
journalist and crime historian Matthew Black reveals, one
that ultimately succeeded in helping the Allies win World
War II.
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