In Harlem’s tumultuous history, there are many tragedies. For those growing up in this part of New York City, a young man known simply as Fritz from West 112th Street became an urban legend in Harlem. In the 1970s, Richard “Fritz” Simmons is introduced to the drug trade by an associate of the Lucchese crime family, one of the five families of La Cosa Nostra (the Mafia). After negotiating a deal with the Medellín Cartel, Fritz becomes New York’s Cocaine Consignment King. Harlem Holiday brings her inside scoop after almost three decades of silence.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

The Crack Era: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Kevin Chiles chronicles one of the most treacherous periods in New York City’s history. As told by a man The New York Times once described as, “the biggest drug lord in Harlem since Nicky Barnes”, the book lays bare the harrowing exploits of the narcotics trade Uptown during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s - a world where the lust for freebase cocaine set off a veritable gold rush that turned ghetto boys into young millionaires almost overnight.

Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography is an intimate look at the day-to-day dealings of a drug kingpin in the heart of the ghetto. It's also the story of a boy born in poverty in Texas who grew up in a single-parent household in the heart of South Central, who was pushed through the school system each year and came out illiterate. His options were few, and he turned to drug dealing. This untold autobiography is not only personal, but also historical in its implications.

Rene "Boxer" Enriquez grew up on the violent streets of East L.A., where gang fights, robberies, and drive-by shootings were fueled by rage, drugs, and alcohol. When he finally landed in prison - at the age of 19 - Enriquez found an organization that brought him the respect he always wanted: the near-mythic and widely feared Mexican Mafia, La Eme. What the organization saw in Enriquez was a young man who knew no fear and would kill anyone - justifiably or not - in the blink of an eye.

Fat Joe is a hip-hop legend, but this is not a tale of celebrity; it is the story of Joseph Cartagena, a kid who came of age in the South Bronx during its darkest years of drugs, violence, and abandonment, and how he navigated that traumatizing landscape until he found—through art, friendship, luck, and will—a rocky path to a different life. This memoir, written in Joe’s own intensely compelling voice, moves with the momentum of pulp fiction, but underneath the tragicomedy and riveting tales of the streets and the industry is a thought-provoking story about a generation of survivors.

To Jeezy’s legion of fans, his name is synonymous with hustle, grit, and the integrity to go out there and achieve your dreams. In his first book, Adversity for Sale: Ya Gotta Believe, Jeezy shares never heard stories of what it took for him to beat the odds and get out of the streets, his mindset he carefully honed to get an edge, and the lessons that changed his life and business.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

They were the DeMeo gang - the most deadly hit men in organized crime. Their Mafia higher-ups came to know, use, and ultimately fear them as the Murder Machine. They killed for profit and for pleasure, following cold-blooded plans and wild whims, from the mean streets of New York to the Florida Gold Coast, and from coast to coast. Now complete with personal revelations of one of the key players, this is the savage story that leaves no corpse unturned in its terrifying telling.

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.

His real name was Earl Simmons. As a child, he placed higher on tests than his fellow students and liked to spend mornings with his mother and sisters playing games and making pancakes. But for young Earl - a boy growing up on the streets of Yonkers, New York - that kind of childhood didn’t last long. Beatings, abuse, and neglect very soon had him moving on to other things, like robbing, stealing, drugs, and, eventually, jail. Along the way, however, he found a talent and a passion for rhyme.

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.

From one of rap’s most evocative writers comes a stirring memoir and “masterpiece of a book” (Snoop Dogg) about how Boosie Badazz, one of the industry’s most controversial figures, was able to overcome insurmountable odds to make his music dreams a reality.

The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gangster.

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America...until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime family values. And by guys like Sal Polisi. As a member of New York's feared Colombo Family, Polisi ran the Sinatra Club, an illegal after-hours gambling den that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters. But the nonstop thrills of Polisi's criminal glory days abruptly ended.

A mother and her three young children are found hacked to death in their beds. The apparent weapons, an ax and butcher knife, are found nearby. A month later, the husband and father, who was away on a business trip when the bodies were found, is accused of the killings. A successful businessman and devoted member of a fundamentalist religious group, David Hendricks has the total support of his extended family. Police paint a darker picture, and prosecutors face the daunting task of convicting him on a case based on completely circumstantial evidence.

Twins David and Dennis Pischke's lives change forever when their father dies and a man damaged by the war arrives at their farm near the isolated town of Moosehorn, Manitoba. Boleslaw Domko quickly works his way into their lives and their mother's bed. Where Children Run opens with one of their earliest memories - the day Domko throws their infant stepsister against the wall. In this firsthand account, the twins recall years of neglect, starvation, and enslavement; horrific beatings and candlelit nights spent in the nearby St. Thomas Lutheran Church.

The call came on the morning of July 13, 2011, from the historic Spreckels Mansion, a lavish beachfront property in Coronado, California, owned by pharmaceutical tycoon and multimillionaire Jonah Shacknai. When authorities arrived, they found the naked body of Jonah's girlfriend, Rebecca Zahau, gagged, her ankles tied and her wrists bound behind her. Jonah's brother, Adam, claimed to have found Rebecca hanging by a rope from the second-floor balcony. On a bedroom door in black paint were the cryptic words: She Saved Him Can You Save Her.

Lacey Spears made international headlines in January 2015, when she was charged with the "depraved mind" murder of her five-year-old son, Garnett. Prosecutors alleged that the 27-year-old mother had poisoned him with high concentrations of salt through his stomach tube. To the outside world, Lacey had seemed like the perfect mother, regularly posting dramatic updates on her son's harrowing medical problems. But in reality, Lacey was a textbook case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

A groundbreaking major best seller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano's gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as "the System," the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast

On September 28, 2000, former Indiana state trooper David Camm made a frantic call to his former colleagues in the state troopers office: He had just walked into his garage and found lying on the floor the bodies of his 35-year-old wife Kim and their two children Brad and Jill, ages seven and five. Three days later, things got worse when police arrested David Camm for the triple murder. Soon new stories started emerging about mistresses and violent bursts of temper.

Cherry Walker was a devoted, trusting, uncommonly innocent young woman who loved caring for a neighbor's little boy. But when she was asked to testify in court against his abusive mother, Cherry never got the chance. She couldn't lie if her life depended on it - and it did. Cherry's body was found on the side of a Texas road, after being doused with lighter fluid and set aflame. Attractive, manipulative, and violent, mother of four Kim Cargill had a wealth of dirty secrets she'd do anything to keep hidden.

Even in Chicago, a city steeped in mob history and legend, the Family Secrets case was a true spectacle when it made it to court in 2007. A top mob boss, a reputed consigliere, and other high-profile members of the Chicago Outfit were accused in a total of 18 gangland killings, revealing organized crime's ruthless grip on the city throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Painting a vivid picture of murder, courtroom drama, family loyalties and disloyalties, journalist Jeff Coen accurately portrays the Chicago Outfit's cold-blooded killers.

In this gritty New York Times best-seller, the true story of a crooked deal between the FBI and the Irish Mob is exposed. By providing a penetrating look into the mean streets of mid-1970s South Boston, the author shows how two kids from the neighborhood cross paths again years later, ending in the biggest informant scandal in FBI history.

Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western listeners can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.

Debra Newell is nothing if not a survivor. By the time she met John Michael Meehan online, she lived through a near-fatal childhood illness, an attempted rape in her 20s, the traumatic death of her sister at the hands of her brother-in-law, four failed marriages, and a litany of dating disasters. But despite those tragedies, she seemed to have it all: adoring children, a successful business, a fabulous penthouse apartment.

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt?

Billy the Kid - a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney - was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, New Mexico, deputies, killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881.

The son of Sicilian immigrants, Camillo Carmine Galante was raised in Manhattan's Little Italy and by all accounts born bad. By fifteen he was terrorizing the streets of New York's Lower East Side, scoring high marks for the "errands" he was running for his La Cosa Nostra elders. When he turned twenty, Galante was already one of the mob's top enforcers­-a sadistic thrill killer and clinically diagnosed psychopath with big dreams.

Battle Creek, Michigan, is famous as the birthplace of breakfast cereal, and the nearby suburb of Marshall is as wholesome as shredded wheat. Well-known for its colorful Victorian mansions, this stately slice of 19th-century Americana became infamous on a frigid night in February of 1991. Newscaster Diane Newton King was stepping out of her car, her children strapped into the backseat, when a sniper's bullet cut her down.