Thanks to writers like Mario Puzo, filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and actors like Al Pacino and James Gandolfini, American and Sicilian Mafia characters are well-known figures in contemporary popular culture. Other powerful organized crime groups appearing in popular media include the Neapolitan Camorra and Mexican drug cartels.

This book takes a close look at all these examples of organized crime by examining the different ways these organizations and their members have been portrayed in many of our most popular novels, movies, and TV series, and how the gangster figure has evolved from its earliest depictions in a trio of Hollywood films in the 1930s up to the present day.