A History of Violence:: An Encyclopedia of 1400 Chicago Mob Murders.1st Edition

Very interesting

A fascinating book that reveals the extent of mob-related murders in Chicago. However, some serious editing should have been done before publication. The poor use of punctuation and occasionally weird sentence construction forced me to read some entries a couple of times to understand them. There's also an entry that's so obviously wrong that I can't imagine how it got into the book. On page 203, referring to the arrests of Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown [Heady] for the kidnapping/murder of Bobby Greenlease, he wrote, "The results of the prosecution are unknown". It's fairly well known that they were executed.

Professor Johnson has made an important contribution to the history of crime in general, and specifically to organized crime study about the blood-soaked past of the Chicagoland area. This interesting and easy to read compendium should be on the shelf of anyone who seeks expertise about the mob. A great deal of the information in this book would have been lost to history were it not for the initiative of Wayne Johnson. If you have not read "A History Of Violence" you don't know how violent the history of Chicagoland has been. Peter J. Puleo author "Cop on the Scene" available on Amazon.

As an aficionado of the Chicago Outfit, I enjoyed the vast amount of information provided. I was surprised, however, by the poor sentence construction, misspellings, grammatical errors, etc. I read some endorsements by some mob experts that I really respect and this was somewhat disappointing to me because of the difficulties mentioned here. It would have been helpful to have a glossary of all of the deaths so that the book could be used as a reference source.

This is an invaluable resource for the dedicated Chicago Outfit researcher. Priceless for cross checking dates and details regarding the over 1000 Outfit-related murders in Chicago since 1919. Highly recommended.

This is a great book for a novice mob watcher. I have not read a book put together like this before.

Great book. My friend "borrowed" it. I have yet to get it back.

Really good book

very informative