This book traces the Mafia's beginnings from an underground patriotic society which sprang up six hundred years ago in Sicily, through the group of Italian immigrants - the Black Hand - who savagely tore control of New York's waterfronts away from Irish racketeers, to the Mob which went on to run organised crime throughout Italy and America. Drawing on previously unavailable information and nearly two decades of research, William Balsamo - great-nephew of the first godfather - and George Carpozi Jr. trace the Black Hand's coalescence into an organisation whose insidious influence reached across the Atlantic and into a presidential administration. And they go behind the headlines to reveal with chilling clarity the true extent of the Mafia's influence today.