By David Amoruso

Davide Vadacca is considered a rising star within Sacra Corona Unita, Italy’s fourth largest criminal group. At the young age of 32 he is one of the organization’s leaders in the city of Lecce. Authorities say he is also the man behind a violent war that is terrorizing the honest, hardworking people of the Italian city.…

CRIME BEAT: ISSUES, CONTROVERSIES AND PERSONALITIES FROM THE DARK SIDE on Artist First Radio Network is pleased to announce its schedule for January 29, 2014, through April 23, 2015. Topics covered include John Gotti, Murder Inc., the 1960s and drugs, Woody Harrelson's father, the Vatican, and more.

Here is the lineup:

• January 29 -…

By Seth Ferranti

To many in his hometown of Washington, D.C., during his 1980s reign as the city’s biggest cocaine and crack dealer, Rayful Edmond was public enemy number one. At the height of Dodge City’s brutal crack epidemic in 1987, this 22-year-old man was responsible for distributing 60 percent of the cocaine that flooded the city’s…

By David Amoruso

Authorities and the media alike tend to focus on the bosses and captains of mob families, and deservingly so. But it isn’t until we take a look at the young up-and-coming mobsters that we get a sense of what’s in store for the future of La Cosa Nostra in the United States.

Take 36-year-old Giuseppe Destefano (photo above). He…

By David Amoruso

The times they keep a-changin’. Over a decade ago, Casablanca restaurant in Maspeth, Queens, was the home base of Joseph Massino, boss of the Bonanno family, one of New York’s five Mafia families. At that time he wielded tremendous power as he was the only boss not behind…

By David Amoruso

When it comes to the mob in America everybody knows about the five families in New York or Al Capone in Chicago. But what about a smaller city? Like Tampa, Florida. A city that has a long and colorful history of violence filled with gangsters from Italy, Spain, Cuba, and the U.S. itself. A brand-new magazine and tour shine a…

By Peter Lance

John Marzulli, who covers organized crime for the N.Y. Daily News today broke a story on the new memoir by John A. “Junior” Gotti to be released this week. As Marzulli reports, the book had been under wraps for months. It will be…

By David Amoruso

It was undoubtedly the biggest crime news of 2014, the capture of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman on February 22 at his condominium in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. But in a new…

By David Amoruso

It was to be the a huge blow against Mexican drug cartels. “These cartels will be destroyed,” Attorney General Eric Holder said. Led by the ATF, Operation Fast and Furious was to cripple the cartels’ ability to traffic and use American guns. But things turned out very differently and people continue to die from ATF-facilitated…

By David Amoruso

Antonio Madafferi, an honest and successful businessman or senior leader of the ‘Ndrangheta crime clan in Melbourne, Australia? It depends on who you ask, but police are quite certain that Madafferi runs one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations, one that moves record-breaking amounts of drugs and has connections…