In September to be released as the film THE FAMILY, starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. Directed by Luc Besson, produced by Martin Scorsese. Fred Blake has moved to Normandy with his dysfunctional family, ostensibly to write a history of the Allied landings.. But Fred’s real name is Giovanni Manzoni - an ex-Mafia boss who has snitched. And his record in other locations under the FBI Witness Protection Program would indicate that his cover is not likely to last very long.

Badfellas is the definitive account by Ireland's most respected crime writer and journalist, Paul Williams, of how organized crime evolved in Ireland over the past four decades. Drawing on his vast inside knowledge of the criminal underworld, an unparalleled range of contacts and eye witness interviews, Williams provides a chilling insight into the godfathers and events - that have dominated gangland since the late 1960s. Until the explosion of paramilitary violence in the 1970s, Ireland was a criminal backwater. However, petty criminals with dreams of the big time were quick to emulate the ruthless actions of the subversives. Organized crime took hold in Ireland and soon armed robberies, kidnappings and murder became commonplace. After the introduction of heroin to Ireland by Dublin's Dunne family in the late 1970s, there was no going back. Badfellas traces how the hugely lucrative drug trade that then emerged led to the gang wars that have corroded communities and devastated countless lives. Badfellas describes in gripping detail the shocking depths to which the mobsters have sunk. Badfellas is essential reading for anyone who cares about keeping communities safe

World football is in crisis. The corruption scandal engulfing FIFA is arguably the biggest story in the history of modern sport and a watershed for sport governance. More than a decade ago, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson laid the foundations for subsequent investigations with the publication of Badfellas, a groundbreaking work of critical sport sociology that exposed the systematic corruption at the heart of world football. It was a book that FIFA and Sepp Blatter tried to ban. Now re-issued to combine the original contents of Badfellas with new chapters covering the current crisis, this book points to the ways in which FIFA’s new administration can learn from the Blatter story. The prequel traces the course of Sugden and Tomlinson’s game-changing investigation into FIFA, while the sequel updates the FIFA story from 2002 onwards and provides a chronology of crises and scandals within the FIFA narrative. Demonstrating the vital importance of critical investigative methods in sport studies, Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting Badfellas, the book FIFA tried to ban is essential reading for anybody looking to understand Blatter’s rise and fall.

Uncovers a world where male identity is expressed each day through physical strength and power. Focusing on professional criminals and violent men, the author shows how workshop camaraderie, hard physical work and criminal reputations allow for changing masculinities.

World football's governing body FIFA has claimed credit for the success of one of the world's greatest and most lucrative sporting spectacles, the football World Cup, and the expansion of the world game more generally. Yet, as Asia stages its first World Cup, behind the scenes the administration of the world game is in shambles. Though the President of FIFA, Joseph Sepp Blatter, secured a second term at a heated FIFA Congress on the eve of Japan/Korea 2002, internecine rivalries persist at the heart of the Organization, and FIFA finances continue to be veiled in secrecy. In Badfellas, the tale of FIFA's expanding fortunes, recurrent crises and internal rivalries is told, from the growth of the World Cup from its politically driven origins in Uruguay in 1930 to its status as one of the world's most lucrative media spectacles. It details how the interests of small third-world countries have been betrayed as the FIFA family expanded and reveals how an organization founded by seven European nations has come to control the future of the game in more than 200 countries in the post-colonial world.

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One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.