2 August

NEW - Fabio Testi - actor

Successful career followed breakthrough role in De Sica classic 

The actor Fabio Testi, whose role in an Oscar-winning 1970 drama directed by Vittorio De Sica remains his most famous, was born on this day in 1941 in Peschiera del Garda, a town on the southern shore of Lake Garda.  Testi played Giampiero Malnate, one of two young men competing for the affections of Micòl, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual in De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with which the director won one of his four Academy Awards.  The performance led Testi to be named best new actor at the 1971 Golden Globes, the awards made annually by foreign journalists accredited in Italy.  Appearing in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made Testi famous in Italy, representing a major breakthrough just two years after earning his big-screen debut.  Although nothing he subsequently did achieved similar heights, he went on to have a long and successful career, appearing in more than 100 films. Read more…

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Pietro Mascagni – composer

One opera was enough to build reputation of musician

Pietro Mascagni, the creator of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, died on this day in 1945 in Rome, at the age of 81.  Cavalleria rusticana was an outstanding success when it was first performed in Rome in 1890 and was said to have single-handedly brought the Verismo movement, in which the characters were ordinary people rather than gods, mythological figures or kings and queens, into Italian opera.  The opera’s beautiful intermezzo was used in the soundtrack of the 1980 film Raging Bull and a production of the opera was used as the setting for the climax of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III, with Michael Corleone’s son Anthony playing Turridu, the opera’s male protagonist. The film ends with the intermezzo playing.  In 2001 Andrea Bocelli recorded a song entitled Mascagni on his Cieli di Toscana album incorporating an excerpt from Cavalleria rusticana. Read more… 

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Bologna railway station bombed

Biggest terrorist atrocity in Italy's history killed 85

Italy suffered the most devastating terrorist outrage in its history on this day in 1980 with the bombing of Bologna's main railway station.   A massive 23kg (51lbs) of explosive packed into a suitcase left in a crowded waiting room was detonated at 10.25am, creating a blast that destroyed much of the main building of the station and badly damaged a train on one of the platforms.  Many people, locals and tourists, Italians and foreign nationals, were caught up in the explosion. Some were killed instantly, others died as a result of the roof of the waiting room collapsing on to the victims. There were 85 deaths and more than 200 other people were wounded.  The bomb was clearly placed to cause mass casualties. It was the first Saturday in the traditional August holiday period and the explosive-laden suitcase was left in a room with air conditioning, then still relatively rare in Italy. Read more… 

Francis Marion Crawford – author

Novelist found inspiration while living in Sorrento

The American writer Francis Marion Crawford was born on this day in 1854 in Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany.  A prolific novelist, Crawford became known for the vividness of his characterisations and the realism of his settings, many of which were places he had visited in Italy.  He chose to settle in later life in the coastal resort of Sorrento in Campania where he even had a street named after him, Corso Marion Crawford.  Crawford was the only son of the American sculptor, Thomas Crawford. He spent his childhood going backwards and forwards between Italy and America and studied at various American and European Universities.  He spent some time in India where he found the inspiration for his first successful novel, Mr Isaacs, which was published in 1882.  In 1883 he returned to Italy to settle there permanently. Read more… 

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Carlo Savina - film composer and musical director

Worked on major scores including The Godfather and Fellini’s Amarcord

Musical director Carlo Savina, who arranged soundtracks written by such luminaries of the film music industry as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, was born on this day in 1919 in Turin.  Savina was also a prolific film composer in his own right and is credited with writing or arranging the scores of at least 200 movies in a career spanning more than 35 years. He won a David di Donatello award for Best Music for the 1985 crime drama The Pizza Connection, directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Michele Placido, a version of which was released in the United States as The Sicilian Connection.  Yet Savina is more frequently remembered for his work with Rota on the multi-award winning soundtrack of the first film in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy in 1972 and with Federico Fellini the following year on Amarcord. Read more… 

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Book of the Day: Vittorio De Sica: The Art of Stage and Screen, by Flavio De Bernardinis

Vittorio De Sica (1901-1974) is a unique film artist. While Rossellini and Visconti came into being with neorealism, De Sica matured through neorealism.  As an already established artist, he put himself wholly on the line and played a gambit that revolutionized Italian and world cinema. From 1923, the year he made his debut in a minor role with Tatiana Pavlova’s theatre company, and over the following twenty years of his career in Italian theatre and cinema, he sowed the seeds of the neorealism that would lead to his 1943 I bambini ci guardano (The Children are Watching Us). Vittorio De Sica. The Art of Stage and Screen tells his whole story, before, during and after neorealism. From the early days in theatre to his role behind the camera, De Sica runs the gauntlet of the history of the performing arts in Italy at a crucial point in time: the years straddling the decline of the theatre of the great stars of the 19th century tradition to the birth of the director’s theatre, the “talkies”, songs and gramophone records, up to the formidable season of “Sciuscià” (Ragazzi) (Shoeshine, 1946) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948).  

Flavio De Bernardinis (Rome, 1957) is a scholar of the history and aesthetics of cinema and entertainment. He is the author of L’arte secondo Kubrick (2003) and Arte cinematografica: il ciclo storico del cinema da Argan a Scorsese (2017). He teaches Film History and the Analysis of Film Language at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. 

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Fabio Testi - actor

Successful career followed breakthrough role in De Sica classic 

The poster for the film that
made actor Fabio Testi famous

The actor Fabio Testi, whose role in an Oscar-winning 1970 drama directed by Vittorio De Sica remains his most famous, was born on this day in 1941 in Peschiera del Garda, a town on the southern shore of Lake Garda.

Testi played Giampiero Malnate, one of two young men competing for the affections of Micòl, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual in De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with which the director won one of his four Academy Awards.

The performance led Testi to be named best new actor at the 1971 Golden Globes, the awards made annually by foreign journalists accredited in Italy.

Appearing in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made Testi famous in Italy, representing a major breakthrough just two years after earning his big-screen debut.  Although nothing he subsequently did achieved similar heights, he went on to have a long and successful career, appearing in more than 100 films, working alongside international stars such as Oliver Reed, Anthony Quinn, Robert Mitchum, Eli Wallach and David Hemmings, as well as Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave.

From the 1980s onwards, he featured in dozens of television dramas, some theatre productions and, in more recent times, became a regular celebrity on reality TV programmes such as survival show L’isola dei famosi (The Island of the Famous) and Grande Fratello (Big Brother).

Despite his workload, Testi found time to turn an experiment growing kiwi fruit on his estate in northern Italy into a thriving business. At one time he was the third largest producer of kiwi fruit in Italy, growing more than 10,000 plants on a 70-hectare site.

Testi’s interest in the cinema was first sparked by seeing Lake Garda used as a backdrop for low-budget pirate films in the 1950s, when a production studio based in Peschiera del Garda would use the lake for scenes supposedly set in the Caribbean. 

He was studying to be an architect, but as a young man with a natural athletic build, he persuaded the studio that he could perform stunts as a body double. He was a stuntman in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and briefly appeared in the same director’s Once Upon a Time in the West before making his acting big-screen debut in another of the so-called spaghetti western genre, Straniero…Fatto il segno della croce! (Stranger…Cross Yourself!) directed by Demofilo Fidani.

Fabio Testi appeared in more
than 100 films in a long career

Initially, Testi’s plan was to use the money he earned from small parts to help pay for his place at an architectural institute in nearby Verona but eventually enrolled at Verona's Academy of Fine Arts for acting classes.

Later, fearing that his early roles in all-action westerns and other genre films would lead him to be typecast, he went to England, taking acting lessons in London and some diction classes in Cambridge to improve his English.

The life-changing part of Giampiero in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a drama about life among Ferrara’s wealthy elite at a time of increasing Fascist hostility towards the Jewish community, is said to have followed a recommendation made to De Sica by Fidani.

His new-found fame set up Testi for a career that encompassed a wide range of parts, from art films and to thrillers and crime dramas, as well as in the somewhat bloodthirsty giallo murder-mystery genre that became popular with Italian audiences in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Testi’s private life for a while provided good copy for Italy’s burgeoning gossip magazines. He had relationships with several glamorous actresses, including Edwige Fenech, Charlotte Rampling, Lynne Frederick, Ursula Andress, Jean Seberg and Brooke Shields.

He has been married twice, to the Spanish actress and stylist Lola Novarro, with whom he had three children, and later to Antonella Liquori, a gallery owner.

Testi in a scene from his latest starring role, as a
retired spy in Reflection in a Dead Diamond

What turned into a lucrative sideline growing kiwi fruit came after he bought some land near Verona once owned by his grandfather. He saw kiwi fruit being grown in Los Angeles and decided, as an experiment, to see if he could grow some on his newly-acquired plot.

What began as a hobby eventually grew from a 10-acre orchard to a 70-hectare site. Other fruit producers were inspired to add kiwi fruit to their range and in time Italy became the largest grower of kiwi fruit in Europe.

Testi has continued to work in his mid-eighties. His latest big-screen starring role came as recently as 2025, in a French production entitled Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), in which he plays a retired spy living on the French Riviera, who fears old enemies have caught up with him when his beautiful nextdoor neighbour vanishes without trace.

The moat surrounding the fortified historic
centre of Peschiera del Garda

Travel tip:

Peschiera del Garda, where Fabio Testo was born, is a lakeside town on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, distinctive for its historic centre being contained within the walls of a Venetian fortress, entirely surrounded by water. Some 30km (18 miles) west of Verona, it sits where Lake Garda flows into the Mincio river, which in turn flows into the Po southeast of Mantua. The fortress is a 16th‑century pentagonal stronghold with five bastions, later expanded by the Austrians. It is part of the UNESCO-listed Venetian Works of Defence. It is accessed on one side by the Porta Brescia, one of the monumental gates into the fortress, which has been beautifully preserved and leads directly into the old town.  To the other side is the Porta Verona, the second main gate. Inside, the centre comprises narrow streets, pastel-coloured buildings, bridges over canals, and waterfront cafes and restaurants. Beyond the fortification to the west is the long, lakeside promenade Lungomare Mazzini, which leads to a pebble beach at Lido Cappucini. 

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The wonderfully preserved Castello
Estense in the centre of Ferrara

Travel tip:

Ferrara is a city in Emilia-Romagna, about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Bologna. It was ruled by the Este family between 1240 and 1598. Building work on the magnificent Castello Estense, a medieval-Renaissance moated fortress in the centre of the city, began in 1385 and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line.  The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.   Ferrara is also notable for Palazzo dei Diamanti, a palace in Corso Ercole I d’Este, that takes its name from the 8500 pointed diamond shaped stones that stud the façade, diamonds being an emblem of the Este family. It was designed by Biagio Rossetti and completed in 1503. The palace now houses the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara on its first floor. With a population of 132,000, Ferrara is known for its broad Renaissance streets, its cycling culture and remarkably intact urban layout, which was given UNESCO status in 1995. Close to the Castello Estense is the Romanesque‑Gothic Duomo di San Giorgio, begun in the 12th century. Other Renaissance gems include the Palazzo Schifanoia, the Corpus Domini Monastery and the Palazzo Paradiso.

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More reading:

How author Giorgio Bassani wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis to reflect the plight of wealthy Jewish Italians in 1930s

Lino Cappolicchio, who played Giampiero’s rival in the De Sica film

Vittorio De Sica, Oscar-winning maestro

Also on this day:

1854: The birth in Tuscany of American writer Francis Marion Crawford

1919: The birth of film composer and musical director Carlo Savina

1945: The death of composer Pietro Mascagni

1980: Terrorists bomb Bologna railway station

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1 August

Cosimo de' Medici

Banker who founded the Medici dynasty

The first of the Medici rulers of Florence, Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici, died on this day in 1464 in Careggi in Tuscany.  Cosimo had political influence and power because of the wealth he had acquired as a banker and he is also remembered as a patron of learning, the arts and architecture.  Cosimo, who is sometimes referred to as Cosimo the Elder (il Vecchio) was born into a wealthy family in Florence in 1389. His father was a moneylender who then joined the bank of a relative before opening up his own bank in 1397.  The Medici Bank opened branches in Rome, Geneva, Venice and Naples and the Rome branch managed the papal finances in return for a commission.  The bank later opened branches in London, Pisa, Avignon, Bruges, Milan and Lubeck, which meant that bishoprics could pay their money into their nearest branch for the Pope to use.  Read more…

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Antonio Cotogni – baritone

Singer who moved the composer Verdi to tears

Antonio ‘Toto’ Cotogni, who achieved international recognition as one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, was born on this day in 1831 in Rome.  Cotogni’s fine baritone voice was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi and music journalists wrote reviews full of superlatives after his performances.  Cotogni studied music theory and singing from an early age and began singing in churches and at summer music festivals outside the city.  He made his opera debut in 1852 at Rome’s Teatro Metastasio as Belcore in Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore.  After that he did not sing in public for a while, concentrating instead on building up his repertoire.  After singing in various Italian cities outside Rome he was signed up to sing at Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 1857 in Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy, also by Donizetti. Read more…

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Kaspar Capparoni - actor

Found fame co-starring with crime-fighting dog

The actor Kaspar Capparoni, an accomplished performer on stage and screen whose fame received its biggest boost after he starred alongside a German Shepherd dog in the TV crime series Il Commissario Rex, was born in Rome on this day in 1964.  Capparoni played the part of Commissioner Lorenzo Fabbri, a homicide detective who is accompanied in his work by a talented police dog known as Rex, whose ever-growing range of skills are often key to solving the crimes Fabbri is charged with investigating.  Il Commissario Rex, which was screened by Italian national broadcaster Rai between 2008 and 2015, revived a show previously shown on TV in Austria but which had ceased production in 2004 after 11 years.  Capparoni portrayed Commissioner Fabbri for four seasons, working alongside two German Shepherds in the Rex role. Read more… 

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Ottavio Bottecchia - cycling champion

First Italian to win the Tour de France

Ottavio Bottechia, who was the first of the seven Italian riders so far to have won the classic Tour de France cycle race, was born on this day in 1894 in San Martino di Colle Umberto, a village in the province of Treviso about 50km (31 miles) north of Venice.   Bottechia, who took up cycling as a sport only after serving with a cycle battalion of the Bersaglieri Corps, an elite, highly-mobile infantry force deployed by the Royal Italian Army in World War One, won the Tours de France of both 1924 and 1925.  Such was his dominance of both those races that he achieved the distinction - unique at the time - of wearing the leader’s yellow jersey for all 15 stages in 1924, a feat he almost repeated the following year, when he held the lead for 13 stages.  His successes brought him fame and financial reward yet his life began in hardship. Read more… 

Francesca Scanagatta - soldier

Woman pretended to be a man to join Austrian army

Francesca Scanagatta, an Italian woman who served in the Imperial Austrian army for seven years while pretending to be a man, was born on this day in 1776 in Milan.  Scanagatta – sometimes known as Franziska – was a small and apparently rather plain girl, who was brought up in Milan while the city was under Austrian rule. She admired the Austrian soldiers to the extent of wishing she could join the army, yet knew that as a girl she would not be allowed to.  Even so, it did not stop her dreaming and throughout her childhood and teenage years she worked on becoming physically stronger through exercise while reading as much literature as she could about the army.  By contrast, her brother Giacomo hated the idea of joining up. He was rather effeminate in nature and the very thought of becoming a soldier filled him with dread.  Read more…

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Paolo De Poli – enameller and painter

Artist devoted his life to an ancient technique

A painter who became fascinated with the ancient art of enamelling, Paolo De Poli was born on this day in 1905 in Padua.  At first De Poli experimented with enamelling small, decorative objects but after he mastered his craft he moved on to creating large panels for the interiors of ships, hotels and public buildings.  De Poli trained in drawing and embossing on metal at the art school Pietro Selvatico of Padua and then studied oil painting in Verona. He embarked on a career as a portrait and landscape painter.  In 1926 he participated for the first time in the Biennale di Venezia with the oil painting Still Life.  While travelling in the 1930s he visited art museums and archaeological sites and became interested in the traditional art of working with vitreous enamel.  From 1933 onwards, he devoted himself to creating enamel works on metal.  Read more…

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The Arab conquest of Sicily

Fall of Taormina put island in Muslim control

The Arab conquest of Sicily, which began in 827, was completed on this day in 902 with the fall of Taormina, the city in the northeast of the island that was the last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, which had been in control for more than 350 years.  The island had been coveted by powers around the Mediterranean for centuries and raids by Saracens, as the Muslim Arabs from Roman Arabia became known, had been taking place since the mid-7th century without threatening to make substantial territorial gains.  However, in 827 the commander of the island's fleet, Euphemius, led a revolt against Michael II, the Byzantine Emperor, and when he and his supporters were at first driven from the island by forces loyal to Michael II, he turned to the Aghlabids, the rulers of Ifriqiya, the area of north Africa now known as Tunisia, for help.  Read more…

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Book of the Day:  Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, by Tim Parks

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance, their power derived from the family bank. Medici Money tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed.To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. 

Tim Parks has lived in Italy since 1981. He is the author of 22 novels, four accounts of life in Italy, two books about Italian literature and two books in which he retraces the steps of Garibaldi and his Expedition of the Thousand. 

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31 July

Salvatore Maranzano - crime boss

Sicilian ‘Little Caesar’ who established New York’s Five Families

The criminal boss Salvatore Maranzano, who became the head of organised crime in New York City after the so-called Castellammarese War of 1930-31, was born on this day in 1886 in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily.  Maranzano’s position as ‘capo di tutti capi’ - boss of all bosses - in the city lasted only a few months before he was killed, but during that time he came up with the idea of organising criminal activity in New York along the lines of the military chain of command established in ancient Rome by his hero, Julius Caesar.  His fascination with and deep knowledge of the Roman general and politician led to him being nicknamed 'Little Caesar' by his Mafia contemporaries in New York.  Installing himself and four other survivors of the Castellammarese War as bosses, he established the principle of replacing the unstructured gang rivalry in New York with five areas of strictly demarcated territory. Read more…

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Alessandro Algardi – sculptor

Baroque works of art were designed to illustrate papal power

Alessandro Algardi, whose Baroque sculptures grace many churches in Rome, was born on this day in 1598 in Bologna.  Algardi emerged as the principal rival of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the field of portrait sculpture and although Bernini’s creations were known for their dynamic vitality and penetrating characterisation, Algardi’s works were appreciated for their sobriety and surface realism. Many of his smaller works of arts, such as marble busts and terracotta figures are now in collections and museums all over the world.  Algardi was born in Bologna, where he was apprenticed in the studio of Agostino Carracci from a young age.  He soon showed an aptitude for sculpture and his earliest known works, two statues of saints, were created for the Oratory of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna.  After a short stay in Venice, he went to Rome in 1625.  Read more…

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Antonio Conte - football coach

Southern Italian roots of the former boss of Chelsea

Antonio Conte, the coach who led Italy to the quarter-finals of Euro 2016 and later became head coach of Tottenham Hotspur, having previously managed Chelsea in the English Premier League, was born on this day in 1969 in Lecce, the Puglian city almost at the tip of the heel of Italy.  As a midfield player for Juventus, he won five Serie A titles and a Champions League. He also played in the European Championships and the World Cup for the Italy national team.  After returning to the Turin club as head coach, he won the Serie A title in each of his three seasons in charge before succeeding Cesare Prandelli as Italy's head coach.  Conte hails from a close-knit family in which his parents, Cosimino and Ada, imposed strict rules, although as a child Antonio was allowed to spend many hours playing football and tennis in the street with his brothers, Gianluca and Daniele.  Read more…

Mario Bava - filmmaker

‘Master of Italian Horror’ had far-reaching influence

Mario Bava, whose near-50 year career in the film business saw him become a pioneer for horror and other genres in Italian cinema, was born on this day in 1914 in Sanremo.  At various times a screenwriter, director, cinematographer and special effects artist, Bava’s work was largely on low-budget productions, yet with his imagination and artistic flair he created films that would have far-reaching influence in the movie industry.  Although the content tended towards the macabre, Bava is credited as the driving force behind the first Italian science fiction film in The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), the first big-screen giallo - the Italian murder mystery genre - in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), and the first Italian horror film in I Vampiri - The Vampires - in 1957.  His 1960 movie La maschera del demonio - The Mask of the Devil - was Italy’s first Gothic horror.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires, by Selwyn Raab

For half a century, the American Mafia outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned the FBI and other police agencies, wreaking unparalleled damage on America's social fabric and business enterprises while emerging as the nation's most formidable crime empire. The vanguard of this criminal juggernaut is still led by the Mafia's most potent and largest borgatas: New York's Five Families. Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York's premier dons, from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and others. This definitive history brings the reader right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime.  This updated tenth-anniversary edition of the New York Times bestseller features a new preface by the author and is the basis for the History Channel documentary series American Godfathers: The Five Families.

Selwyn Raab was a journalist, author and investigative reporter for the New York Times. He wrote extensively about the American Mafia and criminal justice issues and has won dozens of awards. He played an important role in exposing fabricated testimony surrounding the conviction of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.  His book Justice in the Back Room was the basis for the Kojak television series. 

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