Secret Societies presents a visual history of real organised crime, exploring the growth and demise of the American Mafia's first boss of bosses, Giuseppe Morello, and his powerful brother-in-law, Ignazio Lupo. The Mafia has been widely popularised in cinema, literature, music, and urban mythology — some tales inspired by reality, many distorted through creative perspective. Criminal behaviour during the notorious Prohibition Era is often referenced, but few accounts cover the preceding years.
This publication fills that gap with archival photographs, documents, and visual material that tells the story of organised crime before it became Hollywood material — when it was not glamorous mythology but brutal reality, documented in police records, newspaper clippings, and the faces of the people involved. The visual approach gives the history an immediacy that text alone cannot achieve.
Secret Societies understands that the most important crime stories are not the ones that have been retold a thousand times but the ones that have been overlooked — the origins, the precursors, the real events that the myths were built on.