Cigar City Mafia: A Complete History of the Tampa Underworld
October 6, 2010 by Cigar Maven
Filed under Cigar Books
Product Description
Bootleggers, gambling, ringleaders, arsonists, narcotics dealers and gang murders–a variety of characters flourished in the era known as Prohibition, and Tampa, Florida was where they battled for supremacy of the criminal underworld…. More >>
Cigar City Mafia: A Complete History of the Tampa Underworld
I’ll break this down quickly:
In general, this book is poorly written and poorly edited with lots of typos and poorly constructed sentences and paragraphs.
However, Tampa natives like myself will enjoy the content due to the familiarity of the names and places involved.
Rating: 3 / 5
I really looked forward to reading this book. My family was a part of Ybor City for 3+ generations and my grandfather never tires of telling tales of Tampa’s lawless past. (Although he was not a participant, it was impossible to live in that time and place and not know stories of the open corruption all around.)
I should have just listened to my abuelo. This book takes a potentially fascinating topic and turns it into a mind-numbingly dull list of names and murders. It reads like a rap sheet, with very little color or context. It’s not even chronological, with brief tales of one mobster plopped between stories from different decades for no apparent reason.
As an aspiring author myself, it pains me to see prose tortured worse than a ratted-out FBI informant. Unfortunately, that’s what happens much more often one would expect in a published work. Sentences are sometime tangled worse than a bowl of linguini, forcing the reader to tease them apart. And if read “part of his face was blown off” one more time in a description of a mafia hit, my own face may have blown off.
Besides the stylistic problems, there were also some factual errors. I found one pretty quick: on the first page of the first chapter. The author states that Tampa became a city in 1873 when it was actually incorporated in 1855. That’s a pretty basic fact, but it might slip by the casual reader. And there were many more like it sprinkled throughout the text.
More obvious are other mistakes in which the author contradicts himself. For example, a mobster named Red Italiano is stated to have fled to Sicily when the feds were closing in, then later retired to New Orleans. But several pages later, the author states that Italiano fled to Mexico and “there lived out the rest of his life” (another overused phrase in this book). I don’t know where Red ended up. Neither does the author, apparantly.
For the reasons above, this book was a major disappointment. Even worse is that since the topic is of limited commercial appeal, it will probably be the final say on the subject for years to come. By the time anyone else tries to revisit the tale, the major and minor players may have all passed away and the real history will be irretrievably lost.
The bloody, intriguing, and still partially covered-up story of Tampa’s colorful past deserves better than this.
Rating: 2 / 5
I tried in vain to read this book, as I am very interested in Tampa’s rich history. I didn’t see the first citation until several chapters in, and the research in general is extremely weak. The author simply repeats newspaper accounts without adding anything else, so he perpetuates flawed or false accounts without questioning them.
The terrible methodology would be partly forgivable if the author supplied a compelling text that was fun to read. Instead, the writing itself is laughable, with no real attempt to edit for style or content. There is certainly no artistry in the writing— it is bone dry.
As an aspiring historian with a deep interest in Florida history, this book was too bad to finish. I’m happy that I borrowed it from a friend rather than buy a copy. If I had bought a copy, I think i would have sent the book to the author, only beside a fish wrapped in newspaper. “Cigar City Mafia sleeps with the fishes.”
Rating: 1 / 5
From the blood-stained Mercury on the cover, to the police-blotter’s list of the `usual suspects’ at the end, you know immediately that THIS IS NOT A NOVEL. With all the detail and staccato of Walter Winchell reading you the Police Gazette comes a tour of Tampa’s millennium of mobsters – this powerful first effort to profile all the players, all the made-guys, and even a few innocent bystanders of “Tampa’s underworld” heretofore swept under the carpet. A piercing review of a parade of characters and their sometimes anecdotal anarchy, set in timelessness and the tiny town of Tampa. A microcosm of Mafia schemers and their plots, ploys and payoffs; prosecutorial passes, and presidential “whackings.” From turn-of-the-century “Little Havana” gambling halls and a numbers racket called “bolita” ran crooked games to fund favored politico and policemen. To the smugglers, bootleggers, loan-sharks and their hitmen of Tampa’s “Era of Blood” – daylight point-blank shotgun “hits” of rivals fighting for control of bolita bars throughout the barrio. There’s the “bodyguard” nick-named “Scarface” who owned the “Boston Bar” where “Omerta” ruled the road, and those who were even thought to be a rat were found in the river or the bay, in an oil drum, or never found at all. And the eventual and inevitable rise of Santo Trafficante Jr. as one of the world’s most powerful international gambling-smuggling mobsters in history. The true “Teflon Don” who never went “up the river” but did end up residing in a mausoleum in the L’Unione Italiana cemetery just blocks from the little Latin Quarter. His funeral attended by all the local notoriety except one: his brother in-crime Henry, as a decades-long feud between them over the family business exceeded even death. This is not fiction, it is TRUE CRIME. Researched from libraries, referenced with archived newspaper articles, and from interviews of law enforcement officers – only they will talk about it… because as one Tampa official put it, “If I told you…, we’d both be dead.” Tampa Historian GARY MORMINO says, “Don’t expect the Tampa Chamber of Commerce to recommend this book” for more than one reason I suspect. And that’s reason enough for me to read it twice.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book gives the reader a flavor of the criminal element of Tampa society that was active in a period that extended from the early 1900′s to the mid-1960′s, with connections that continue into the present day. It is an interesting read, but much of its contents must be taken with a large dose of skepticism. The information regarding gangland murders and gang family connections are generally well known, but much of the information about “police corruption” is undocumented and based upon speculation. In particular, the naming of a Tampa Police Department supervisor who went on to be elected Sheriff as having been in a position to be suspected of corruption is tainted by innuendo that falls short of accusation, and is unwarranted.
It appears the author relied heavily upon an unidentified source who provided an oral history of the era based upon what he believed to have been the actions and motives of the major players. That source is likely to have come from the criminal element, not the law enforcement side.
There are some gaps in the chronology and it is sometimes necessary to backtrack and re-read some accounts in order to ascertain how the different stories fit together. There is an uneveness to the writing which suggests either the absence of a good editor or a rush to get the book into print.
Despite these defects, the book does give an interesting overview of the violent era of Tampa’s gang-dominated past.
Rating: 3 / 5