by Phillip Crawford Jr. (Author)
"Queer Joints, Wiseguys and G-Men" is a collection of posts from the author's now-deleted blog "Friends of Ours," and involves gay bars, Italian mobsters and FBI agents and their crossing paths during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Included among them are the following tales: Baltimore mayor Tommy D'Alesandro - the father of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - had Mafia ties, and provided protection for the vice rackets; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ignored an early warning about the Mafia Commission which allowed organized crime to spread; Texas mayor Sam Hoover was a mob associate who ran a burglary crew of teen boys which doubled as his stud stable; and Jack Ruby had extensive ties to the gay scene - and may have been homosexual - which the FBI investigated after he shot JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The book also includes gay bar hopping adventures across the country during this pre-Stonewall era compiled from FBI files which had identified "notorious places of amusement."