In the 1920s and 1930s, hoodlums, hucksters, and racketeers of Prohibition-era Philadelphia sold bootleg booze, peddled illicit drugs, ran numbers, and operated prostitution and insurance rings.  Among the warped but fascinating personalities who created and contributed to the Philadelphia crime scene were empire builders like Mickey Duffy, known as “Prohibition’s Mr. Big,” Max “Boo Boo” Hoff, dubbed the “King of the Bootleggers," the violent Lanzetti brothers, who ran their own illegal enterprise, mobster Harry “Nig Rosen” Stromberg, a New York transplant, and the arsenic widows poison ring, which specialized in fraud and murder.  With rare photographs and accounts of these characters' exploits, the authors chronicle the interwar era of Philadelphia's underworld. The upheaval caused by these gangs and groups mirrors the frenzied cultural and political shifts of the Roaring Twenties and the austere 1930s.
Softcover, 6 x 9, 128 pgs.