'Boss Tweed': When the King of New York Was the King of Corruption

William Grimes of the New York Times discusses a new release:

...In "Boss Tweed," Kenneth D. Ackerman, a freelance historian who has written two books on the Gilded Age, chronicles Tweed's rise and fall, from his early days as the head of a volunteer fire company to his reign as the city's undisputed political overlord, a position that he abused with gusto until chronic overreaching finally brought him down, undone by a disgruntled former associate who turned over incriminating documents to The New York Times...

Boss Tweed, by Kenneth D. Ackerman, is a March 2005 release from Avalon Publishing Group, hardcover, 437 pages, ISBN: 0786714352, list price $27.00. It is currently available at a discount from several sellers.

Of course, this review would come out on the same day that the New York Times (and lots of others) are reporting that two retired NYC police detectives have been charged with allegedly being Mafia hit men back while they were on the force. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/nyregion/11mob.html?incamp=article_popular_5)

And, of course, just to make this really interesting, one of them, Louis Eppolito, wrote a book years ago about being a cop in a family with mob connections:

...Mr. Eppolito, 56, who once co-wrote a book about his life as a police officer whose relatives were in the mob, and Mr. Caracappa, 63, who worked in a police unit that was responsible for investigating mob killings, were arrested on Wednesday night at an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas, Ms. Mauskopf said. Mr. Eppolito retired in 1990, Mr. Caracappa two years later.

For more than a decade, the men, while collecting their police pensions, have lived across the street from one another in an affluent gated community in Las Vegas, Mr. Caracappa working as a private investigator and Mr. Eppolito playing bit parts in nearly a dozen popular movies, including "Goodfellas" - portraying mobsters, hoodlums and drug dealers. They appeared in Federal District Court in Las Vegas last night, where an acting United States magistrate judge, Jennifer Togliatti, postponed an extradition hearing until today...

The book in question is Mafia Cop: The Story of An Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob, by Lou Eppolito and Bob Drury. It's out of print, but Alibris, just for instance, had 65 copies available at post time, starting at $2.95 but jumping to $10 and above very quickly. Biblio.com has 20 copies, with only three in the US under $10. If this is anything like when Claude Dallas got released (and books related to him sky-rocketed in price but sold out quickly), both availability and price are likely to move around pretty substantially for a while.

UPDATE: 2:45 p.m. What do they say in New York? Forget about it? (With the proper regional accent, of course.)

I just checked, and the used copies of Mafia Cop, at the low end at least, have been swooped away. I stopped looking at the $25 range.