Herbert Asbury – The Gangs of New York

The Gangs of New York is a tour through a now unrecognisable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research. Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather.