Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon. Los Muchachos, the syndicate founded by Falcon, thrived as a major cocaine distribution network in the US from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. At their height, Los Muchachos made more than a hundred million dollars a year. T. J. English has been granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of Los Muchachos, sitting down with Willy Falcon and his associates for many lengthy interviews, and revealing never-before-understood details about drug trafficking.

DANGEROUS RHYTHMS tells the symbiotic story of jazz and the underworld: a relationship fostered in some of 20th-century America’s most notorious vice districts. For the first half of the century, mobsters and musicians enjoyed a mutually beneficial partnership. By offering artists like Louis Armstrong, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald a stage, the mob --- including major players Al Capone, Meyer Lansky and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano --- provided opportunities that would not otherwise have existed. Even so, at the heart of this relationship was a festering racial inequity. The musicians were mostly African American, and the clubs and means of production were owned by white men.

For 16 years, Whitey Bulger eluded the long reach of the law. But finally, in 2011, he was arrested in southern California and returned to Boston, where he was tried and convicted of racketeering and murder. T. J. English covered the trial at close range, interviewing Bulger’s associates as well as lawyers, former federal agents, and even members of the jury in the backyards and barrooms of Whitey’s world. In WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED, English offers a startlingly revisionist account of Bulger’s story.

To underworld kingpins Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Cuba was the greatest hope for the future of American organized crime in the post-Prohibition years. But Mob dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others who would lead an uprising of the country's disenfranchised against Batista's hated government and its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that bestselling author T. J. English captures here in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory.

Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob, from the mid-nineteenth century all the way to the present day. History shows that the heritage of the Irish American gangster was established in America long before that of the more widely portrayed Italian American mafioso, and has held strong through the modern age.