The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia - John M. Hagedorn - Books - The University of Chicago Press - 9780226232935 - August 19, 2015
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The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia


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Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called "Spanish Growth & Development." Hagedorn's main informant is 'Sal Martino, ' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the "In$ane Family," one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of "disorganized crime" but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGD-the reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 "peace" conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland, "The In$ane Chicago Way" makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.


320 pages, illustrations

Media Books     Hardcover Book   (Book with hard spine and cover)
Released August 19, 2015
ISBN13 9780226232935
Publishers The University of Chicago Press
Genre Demographic Orientation > Urban
Pages 320
Dimensions 236 × 163 × 24 mm   ·   576 g

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