Springfield, although a hotbed of criminal activity up until today, has largely gone under the radar for organized crime literature and this book helps fill in that void. With that being said, while extremely beneficial, primary sources do have their own shortcomings, and I’ll talk about it in a bit. Maybe a post-RICO world has perverted my world view, but when you see a seven year sentence imposed on a mobster these days, I think to myself, “Hmm… That doesn’t seem too bad…Could’ve been a lot worse.” By the end, I think we get a really good insight into what was going on in Parisi’s mind at the time, and really peel back the curtain on the emotional side of a high-level Italian criminal. One thing that surprised me was Parisi’s fear of prison and having to spend time in it. Parisi in his diaries goes into painstaking detail of his thoughts, emotions, and reflections on Siniscalchi, his murder, the gang war that followed and the atmosphere of the trial. For an area of study that is veiled in secrecy, getting one’s hands on a primary source like that is pretty awesome. There is a lot to like about the book, but there are a few short comings and small tweaks that I thought could make it that much better.Īmong the most compelling things going for this book is that it largely relies on the diaries and journals of the subject at hand, Joseph Parisi, augmented by trial transcripts and contemporary newspaper accounts. As the cover suggests, Parisi was involved in the murder of Carlo Siniscalchi, the “King of Bootleggers” in Springfield proper, and the book revolves around the intrigues that led up to the event and the subsequent trial.

Mafia Confessions, however, is a true story based on the lived experiences of Guisseppe “Joseph” Parisi, a Calabrian immigrant involved in the bootlegging racket of Springfield, Massachusetts. This was a good thing because when I first looked at the cover, it seemed like one of those cheesy fiction Mafia books. This book was not originally on my radar, and it wasn’t until the author reached out to me that I took notice.

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