Lanza's Mob: The Mafia and San Francisco

by Christina Ann-Marie DiEdoardo

From the 1920s until the early 21st century, one Sicilian mob family defied everyone from the California attorney general to J. Edgar Hoover to chart their own American Dream. Unlike their flashier rivals in New York and Chicago who met their end by the knife, the bullet, or a judge's gavel, this crime family prospered and grew alongside their adopted home of San Francisco. This book tells how they did it.

Readers will learn how the Lanzas managed to retain control of their patch from the end of Prohibition through the Summer of Love and into the beginnings of the dot-com era, gaining insight into not only "what" the west-coast branch of the Mob did, but also "why" they did it. The documentation of how this mostly unknown crime syndicate formed, evolved, and eventually folded is set against the backdrop of the city of San Francisco transforming itself from a gritty port and manufacturing hub dominated by Italian- and Irish-Americans into the multicultural intellectual and services capital it is today.

232 pages, Hardcover

Published June 27, 2016

About the author

Christina Ann-Marie DiEdoardo is a criminal defense lawyer, historian and poet in San Francisco, California. She is the author of "Lanza's Mob: The Mafia and San Francisco", the first in-depth look at the history of the Italian Mafia in San Francisco, which ABC-CLIO published in June 2016.

Her first book of poems, Pizza, Mermaids and Girldick: Transition Odes and Other Musings, was published in 2015. Christina also contributed the “Nietzsche and a Trans Woman Walk Into a Prison” chapter for Orange Is The New Black and Philosophy, published in September 2015 by Open Court Press.

Reviews

[Royce Ratterman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lanza's Mob: The Mafia and San Francisco...
is an historical overview filled with minimum details pertaining to an 'Old School' style mobster who kept a lower public profile than many of his constituents; complete with an opening timetable of historically related events. The work includes highlights of mob related politicians, including President Kennedy & SF Mayor Joseph Alioto - whose wife, Angelina Alioto, was the niece of Dallas crime family 'alleged' mobster John Genaro and whose father had direct ties with known mobsters.
Read for personal research. Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
These types of works, revealing the history and details of the USA's Dragon-of-Corruption's many heads, are an exciting read for me.
I found this work compelling and a good addition to my collection:
Mobsters, Unions, and Feds; The Mafia and the American Labor Movement; The Hollywood Connection: The True Story of Organized Crime in Hollywood; The Chicago Outfit; The Boys in Chicago Heights: The Forgotten Crew of the Chicago Outfit; The Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000; The People v. the Democratic Party; American Mafia: Chicago: Chicago's Mob Bosses: From Accardo to Zizzo; True Stories; The Black Mafia: African- organized crime in Chicago. 1890–1960; Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 1911; Criminology of Mafias: The Gangs of New York; Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia - A True Story by FBI Agent Joseph D. Pistone... along with my many other autobiographical works by mobsters, law enforcement personnel, journalists, etc.
Star rating relates to the book's contribution to my research needs.