Underboss - Hardcover

“In Underboss, Peter Maas has written a truly revealing book about the Mafia. Beyond its historical significance, this is a genuinely dramatic story,
unadorned by hype, exposing a secret society in startling detail.”
Anthea Disney, CEO of HarperCollins

The explosive inside story of life in the New York Mafia

Underboss is the life story of Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano. Gravano is the highest-ranking member of the Mafia in America to break the blood oath of silence and testify against his boss, John Gotti, leader of the famous organized crime mob, the Gambino family. Gravano’s testimony in March 1992 was critical to the final conviction of Gotti – known up to that point as the ‘Teflon Don’ for his uncanny ability to escape conviction – as well as many other underworld figures. Today, John Gotti is serving life in prison without parole, and as a direct result of Gravano’s testimony, the Mafia was gravely compromised.

In Underboss, Peter Maas takes the reader into the innermost sanctums of organized crime. Quoting extensively from exclusive interviews with Gravano, he documents his colourful life story, growing up in Cosa Nostra (the Mafia’s true name), an underworld of power, greed, betrayal and honour, with the spectre of violent death ever present. The book tells how Gravano earned his Mafia apprenticeship at what was outwardly a hairdressing school, and chronicles his rise through the ranks of the Mafia to become the Number Two in the notorious Gambino Mafia family.

This is the inside story of the world’s most powerful criminal organization, told from its very heart. Through Gravano’s life story, the book reveals how the Mafia exerted its grip on power from the 1940s right through to the 1980s and beyond, dominating the building and gambling industries by racketeering, using threats, beatings, murders and executions to achieve control. But the Mafia also worked to its own codes of ‘honour’, codes which Gravano himself was to turn against the organization, providing a compelling twist to his compulsive story.