Overview

With Boston to the north and New York City to the south, Connecticut's history of organized crime is often overlooked. This is the untold story of New Haven's illegal past. One of America's most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf--working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses. Representing the Genoveses, Midge Renault reigned supreme thanks to his reputation for wanton violence. Meanwhile, Colombo capo Ralph ""Whitey"" Tropiano maintained a lower profile, which belied his reputation as a vicious killer. But it was his lieutenant, Billy ""The Wild Guy"" Grasso, who ultimately rose to the top after joining the New England Patriarca Family, enjoying a short rule that ended with a murder plot that left him on the wrong end of a bullet.

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Paul Bleakley is assistant professor of criminal justice and University Research Scholar at the University of New Haven. He is vice chair of the American Society of Criminology's Division of Historical Criminology. Paul has worked at universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Before entering academia, he worked as a journalist in both London and Sydney. He is the author of several books on historical crime, including Under a Bad Sun (2021) and The Australian Gamble (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). He currently lives in West Haven, Connnecticut. Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, ""This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration."" Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.

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