Shadowland: How the Mafia Bet Britain in a Global Gamble [Paperback]

An astonishing, first-hand account of an unknown chapter in Mafia history

A revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller spanning much of the 20th century, this page-turning chronicle tells of an elaborate Mafia plan to "invade" Europe, taking over its gambling, by using 1960s London as a bridgehead. The capital city of the Swinging Sixties was a world of gambling, guns, and gangsters. Several veterans of the era are astonished that they survived it and some feel protected enough—now that most of the killers are themselves dead—to reveal to author Douglas Thompson the details of one of history's greatest criminal conspiracies, and of how world-champion boxer Freddie Mills really died. The tension is ferocious as the tale moves from London to New York and Las Vegas, down to Miami, into Havana, on to the Bahamas, and back to an unexpected denouement in London. This brutal, terrifying, intrigue-packed account of the Mob's Machiavellian global manipulation of governments and officials even unearths a London connection to the assassination of JFK. Recounting events from the viewpoint of the pawns as well as the kingmakers, this chronicle includes big players of Mafia history, controlled by the gangster genius Meyer Lansky, but it also considers the hit men, the fixers, the hoodlums, and the wiseguys.