Historic True Crime

30 inside stories of the American Mafia, Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Camorra and others. Images of life in the Mob pervade our film and TV screens, some glamorous, some horrific - what is the reality? Investigative journalist Roger Wilkes has put together the largest ever collection of insider stories from prominent ex-mafiosi, infiltrators and award-winning writers.

Murder is an unspeakable horror but even more sickening depths are reached by serial and psycho killers.

Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s.

On 4 December 1851, Thomas Douglas Bateson, agent to the Templetown estate near Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan, was murdered as he returned on foot to Castleblayney after visiting the estate's model farm at Corratanty...

Once upon a time, back in the 20s and 30s, in Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who exist now only in legend and in the memories of a few old men. Their names were Louis Lepke, Abe Reles, Bugsy Segel, Dutch Shultz, Meyer Lansky, and they were Jewish gangsters: Jews with Guns; tough, fearles Jews who roamed the streets in a time when a Jewish boy could fashion a future that was murderous and daring and wide open.

The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

This is an account of how an angry young man can cross the line that divides theoretical support for violence from a state of 'killing rage', in which the murder of neighbour becomes thinkable. Over 3000 people have died in Northern Ireland since 1969, and most of them have died at the hands of their neighbours.

A timely and important book. It's quite remarkable how one building has played host to such debauchery.

If only the walls could talk...' Iain DaleDesigned as a city dwelling for the modern age, Dolphin Square opened in London's Pimlico in 1936. Boasting 1,250 hi-tech flats, a swimming pool, restaurant, gardens and shopping arcade, the complex quickly attracted a long list of the affluent and influential. But behind its veneer of respectability, the Square has become one of the country's most notorious addresses; a place where the private lives of those from the highest of high society and the lowest depths of the underworld have collided and played out over the best part of a century.

This is the story of the Square and its people, an ever-evolving cast of larger-than- life characters who have borne witness to, and played pivotal roles in, some of the most scandalous episodes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Oswald Mosley and the Carry On gang to allegations of systematic sexual abuse, it is a saga replete with mysterious deaths, exploitation, espionage, illicit love affairs and glamour, shining a light on the changing nature of British politics and society in the modern age.