Looking at the accounts of the time, historian Kristofer Allerfeldt provides a readable and informative analysis of how and why we arrived at our present understanding of organized crime in the Unites States. By going back to the original accounts of the events that inform our understanding of much of the subject, this work will question some of our most deeply held assumptions on crime and its role in US society. In a series of thematic sections it will examine how America alternately celebrated and condemned ambitious gangsters and blood-thirsty hoodlums as well as equally ambitious and corrupt law enforcers and politicians in this era of rapid change. It will look at why we remember such figures as Al Capone, but have largely forgotten his far more successful and innovative precursor, Mike MacDonald. It will question why history has condemned some public figures for connections with the mob, and yet eulogized others who seem only to have covered their far muddier tracks much better, or had the fortune to have commentators, then and now, prove they paid off the right people.