Crime Capsule

Pittsburgh's small but lucrative Cosa Nostra mafia family was on the rise in 1985 with a newly crowned Don... The men who came to dominate the rackets in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and West Virginia opened the family to massive profits from drug trafficking and a street tax on other criminal activities. At the same time, the Youngstown, OH faction of the family launched a brutal mob war against the weakening Cleveland mafia and the Altoona, PA crew violently clamped down on their city. Discover gritty stories of a made member who controlled who a local police department hired, an informant who betrayed his own mafia grandfather and father, numerous unsolved murders and a mob mole in the Pittsburgh office of the FBI. This is the tale of a mafia family at the pinnacle of its power, willing to do anything to hold on to that power and its downfall in the criminal underworld.

In 1988, Judge Joe O'Kicki was regarded by his peers as one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States. He was newly re-married, sworn in as the president judge of a Pennsylvania county and on the fast track to a federal bench....

Silently, however, a state police vice unit was in the midst of covert operation into O'Kicki's personal affairs. The judge would be accused of soliciting bribes, frequenting brothels and running the county as if he were a "battleship commander.'? Later he'd concoct a plan to flee the country and exact revenge on his enemies.

Set in the aftermath of the 1977 Johnstown flood and including courtroom testimony, the memos of whistleblowers, contemporary interviews and excerpts from O'Kicki's unfinished tell-all memoir, "Jailing the Johnstown Judge'? is a fresh examination of the extraordinary Western Pennsylvania case that attained international infamy.

On a stormy November evening in 1885, John Sharpless answered a knock on his door. Less than an hour later, he was found dead in his barn from a blow to the back of the head; his bloodstained hat lay next to him on the ground. A $3,000 reward for the killer sparked an overzealous bounty hunt across southeastern Pennsylvania, and numerous innocent men were arrested. Samuel Johnson--a local African American man with a criminal record--was charged. Despite the Widow Sharpless's insistence that Johnson was not the man who had come to their door, he was tried and sentenced to hang. Author Stephanie Hoover offers an in-depth investigation of the crime. From the events of that night and the mishandling of the investigation by a corrupt police force to the trial and conviction of Johnson and the efforts of the Quaker community to appeal the sentence, Hoover profiles a miscarriage of justice in Delaware County.