Racketeers, (Paperback)

The Great War was over and a changed America was about to plunge headlong into the Roaring Twenties. With the onset of Prohibition, saints and sinners, ministers and mobsters rub elbows unlike any other time before or since. Old enemies become friends and friends become enemies. Prohibition quickly turns into the biggest employment opportunity in history-madmen become millionaires and small time hoodlums become kings. And crime gets organized. Shortly after Tommy Trent steps in to help reorganize Fat Eddie DiStella's neighborhood, everyone realizes that Tommy is taking over. Everyone but Fat Eddie, that is. And after Tommy saves Eddie's daughter's life, Eddie turns a blind eye to his take-over of the biggest speakeasy in the neighborhood and the way Tommy turns it into the biggest nightclub in the city. Dottie's is run by the glamorous Dottie Deuce, Tommy's best friend with whom he has been in love since he was a boy. But Fat Eddie's daughter has fallen in love with Tommy, too. And as Tommy pays less and less attention to her and her father, and begins palling around with Rocco Petrelli, the Babe Ruth of Crime, Fat Eddie begins to see red. In those uncanny days of Prohibition, as rival gangs declare war over barrels of beer, where alliances are made to be broken, an act of betrayal goes awry, sparking the bloodiest gang war the country has ever seen. Will time and circumstance come together for Tommy and Dottie or will they succumb to a long harrowing battle filled with triumph and heartache, bullets and bottles? Set against the back drop of the Roaring Twenties, filled with hot jazz, bootleg booze and hot young flappers, Racketeers is a tale of a forgotten breed of gangster, the pioneers of organized crime, and the women who loved them.