From publisher blurb: It was an age of the Black mask. When the Roaring Twenties whimpered out on October 24, 1929, America awoke to a bleak cold reality. The stock market had crashed. Businesses failed. Millions were soon to be thrown out of formerly secure jobs. Thanks to the experiment called Prohibition, organized crime controlled many sectors of a now faltering economy. The gangster had been romanticized in books and films and even pulp magazines like Gangster Stories and The Underworld. Their bloody depredations were tolerated, even celebrated, during the good times because no one knew how to legislate a thirst for alcohol out of existence. Once the Depression settled over a frightened nation, tolerance became a luxury. With Repeal in 1934, the gangster no longer had an exclusive lock on the lubrication of sorrow. He had become too powerful, too brutal and the underworld was now moving into more vicious territory­ drugs and white slavery. America began looking for heroes…..