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.




Thursday, January 5, 2017

1939: Sberna goes to The Chair

On this date in 1939: Charles Sberna was executed in Sing Sing Prison's electric chair. Though convicted of participating in the killing of an NYPD officer, many to this day insist that he was innocent. 

As the son of a fugitive wanted for orchestrating a series of bloody anarchist-terrorist bombings and the in-law of a family of Mafia leaders, could Sberna possibly have received a fair trial?

'Wrongly Executed?' provides the details and historical background of the Sberna case. The story is a complex and controversial one, involving celebrity attorneys, underworld bosses, violent political radicals, media giants and ruthless establishment figures, all set in a period in which Americans sought stability and government-imposed order after years of political upheaval, economic depression and Prohibition Era lawlessness.