AustLit

Back cover of PB Books edition states: 'This is the story of the rise and fall of a crime czar. The main setting is the slums of a great American city: one square mile of tenements, factories, warehouses, shanties, and abandoned lots. Nine out of ten American gangsters are products of the slums. But the people of the slums aren't ashamed of this record. If anything, they're proud, particularly of racketeers like the Head Man. Yet the Head Man, the most notorious of all crime lords, the man who had the city in his pocket, was once a frightened, hungry, skinny little kid of the slums'.