Underboss - Softcover

‘Centring around family, greed, power and death, the real world of the Mafia is just as brutal and compelling as it seemed in the hugely successful Godfather movies.’
Daily Mirror

‘Brilliantly constructed and grimly fascinating.’
New York Times Book Review

The explosive story of Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano’s life in the Mafia

Sammy ‘The Bull’ 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 an underworld of power, greed, betrayal and honour, with the spectre of violent death ever present, eventually rising through the ranks 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 in the 1970s and 80s, using racketeering, 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.