Material presented on The American Mafia history website (http://mafiahistory.us and http://www.onewal.com/) was gathered through decades of research into the history of American organized crime. A childhood interest in the subject blossomed into a full-time obsession in the late 1990s, when I began organizing collected newspaper clippings, notebook pages and index cards. That effort gave rise to this website in September 2002. The website is more of a process than it is a document. Very often new historical data becomes available and causes old assumptions to be revised or abandoned. Over the past few years, many underworld legends appearing on these pages have given way to more defensible statements. And other revisions are sure to be made in the months and years ahead. It is a pleasure to be able to share my interest with you. I welcome your emailed comments, questions, criticisms. I hope that the site is useful to you and that you check in from time to time to see what is new. Copyright © 2011, Thomas Hunt. All rights reserved.




Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Flynn's 'The Barrel Mystery' (1919)

About one hundred pages of The Barrel Mystery by William J. Flynn can now be accessed on the American Mafia history website. 

The Barrel Mystery, published in 1919 (copyright has expired), is the story of U.S. Secret Service efforts to help solve the "barrel murder" of 1903 and to dismantle Mafia counterfeiting operations supervised by Mafia boss of bosses Giuseppe Morello and his brother-in-law Ignazio Lupo. Author Flynn was head of the New York office of the Secret Service when Morello and his men were finally brought to justice.

Portions of the book were previously published on our Caged Wolves website. It is our hope to soon have the entire book available online.

Click here to read The Barrel Mystery.

Update 23 July 2015: The available portions of this book now total almost 130 pages.
Update 26 July 2015: About 175 pages of the book, plus an index, are now available.
Update 27 July 2015: More than 225 pages of the book, plus photos, are now available.
Update 28 July 2015: The entire book text is now available.