Michael Cannell's "A Brotherhood Betrayed," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc. by Michael Cannell.

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A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc is a preposterously cinematic story, rich with zoot-suited gangsters crashing nightclubs with blinged out chorus girls and bodies dumped from Pontiacs in the dark reaches of the Brooklyn waterfront.

For a decade the heavy-browed, jut-jawed Jewish mobster Abe Reles ran Murder, Inc., an assassination squad charged with eliminating informants. He was short with bulging Popeye arms and a manner so menacing that his presence intimidated everyone in the room. “There was something about Reles’s physical bearing, a look in his eye, that actually made the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” a district attorney said. His role would once have gone to Joe Pesci, but Pesci is too old to play it now. So let’s give it instead to the Irish actor Tom Hardy, provided he can pull off a plausible Brooklyn accent. I bet he can.

For Lucky Luciano, the scar-faced, cobra-eyed mob lord who rarely expressed any emotion, I’d tag the ever steely...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Michael T. Cannell's website.

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--Marshal Zeringue