Breaking the Mob - Couverture souple

Frank Friel joined the Philadelphia Police Force in 1960 at the age of 18. From 1982 to 1988 he was chief investigator and co-director of the Philadelphia Police/FBI Organized Crime Task Force in Philadelphia. He was guest lecturer for the FBI on the problems of organized crime, serves as a consultant to Major League Baseball on organized crime, and teaches courses about organized crime at LaSalle College and St. Joseph and Temple Universities. He travels around the country assessing the professional standards of police departments on behalf of the National Commission on Accreditation. Friel retired from the Philadelphia Police Department in 1989 to take a position of Director of Public Safety in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. In 1997, he started Atlantic Security International Investigations, a division of Atlantic Security Inc., where he currently serves as president.John Guinther is a Philadelphia-based author and journalist. Three of his articles have been cited for excellence by the American Bar Association. He is the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy and Gerald Loeb awards. He has written six other books. Guinther's articles on the Ferber case were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. The same year, he was awarded the Louis Apotheker citation for the advancement of the cause of justice by a non-lawyer. Another of his books, Brotherhood of Murder, written with Thomas Martinez, has been filmed by Showtime, starring William Baldwin, and is also available through iUniverse.com. His most recent book is Direction of Cities (Viking/Penguin, 1997).

Between 1981 and 1989, Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo was boss of one of the most violent gangs in the history of organized crime, the Philadelphia-Atlantic City mob. Friel describes Scarfo's rise to power, his bloody feud with his arch rival, and the rise and fall of Scarfo's "Young Executioners," who used the streets of Philadelphia as their murder playground. Friel also tells of his efforts to save an innocent man convicted of two mob murders from the electric air.