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Start giftingOperation Underworld
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the US Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it.
Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Haffenden was prepared to make a deal with the devil–the man who put "organized" into organized crime. Even from his cell in Dannemora State Prison, former Public Enemy #1, Charles "Lucky" Luciano still had tremendous power. Luciano was willing to wield it for Haffenden. But he wanted something in return—Luciano's contacts in Italy to track the Nazis' movements.
Operation Underworld is a tale of espionage and crime like no other, the unbelievable, first-ever account of the Allied war effort's clandestine coalition between the Mafia and the US Government to protect New York, vanquish the Nazis by taking the fight to the enemy in the 1943 US invasion of Sicily.
Matthew Black is a labor and crime historian who was recruited by James P. Hoffa's office in 2016 to author Dave Beck-A Teamster's Life. Black has also worked as a staff writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune and has written articles for Alaska Airlines magazine. He has published dozens of articles on History101.com, where he has individually brought some 42 million readers to his work. Born and raised in Seattle, he is a graduate of the University of Washington with an honors degree in history. While he travels the country and the world at a feverish pace in search of stories, he calls San Diego home, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Jonathan Todd Ross, a graduate of the NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, has narrated over 120 audiobooks across a wide variety of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, self-help, YA, biography and memoir, children's literature, and romance. He's won an Audie Award (Restart by Gordon Korman), received numerous YALSA and Earphone Awards (Swindle by Gordon Korman, Fake Mustache by Tom Angleberger, and more), and made all of his middle school bullies regret every mean thing they ever said to him when he narrated Tom Brady's The TB12 Method. Jonathan loves narrating all genres, bringing the author's words to audio-life.
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