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As I noted in part one of my coverage of Paul Moses' "The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia," I'm half Italian, and I grew up in South Philadelphia's Little Italy.
Being half Italian and growing up in an Italian American neighborhood in South Philadelphia, I was aware of organized crime at an early age. Back in the 1960s, I lived around the corner from Angelo Bruno, who was then the boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family.
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New immigrants, and new kinds of crime, were flooding the city and the old Irish cops on the beat didn’t understand either. It was time to launch a special force. They called it “The Italian Squad.”