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In March of 1992, the highest-ranking member of the Mafia in America ever to defect broke his blood oath of silence and testified against his boss, John Gotti. He was Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, second in command of the Gambino organized crime family, the most powerful in the nation. Because of Gotti's uncanny ability to escape convictions in state and federal trials despite charges that he was the Mafia's top chieftain, the media had dubbed him the "Teflon Don." With Sammy the Bull, this would all change. Gravano's testimony would eventually lead to the convictions, guilty pleas or extended prison terms of dozens of key Cosa Nostra figures-including Gotti as well as key union officials involved in labor racketeering. His collaboration with the government would also spawn a "veritable flood" of cooperating witnesses from organized crime. Today, thanks in large part to Gravano, the Mafia is in shambles.

In UNDERBOSS: Sammy The Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia, Peter Maas, bestselling author of The Valachi Papers and Serpico, chronicles the gangster life of Sammy Gravano—a participant in almost every key event of the modern Cosa Nostra. Based on dozens of hours of exclusive interviews with Gravano, and much of it written in Sammy the Bull's own voice, Maas's latest Mafia history ushers readers as never before into the uppermost secret inner sanctums of organized crime. It is an underworld of power, lust, greed, betrayal, deception, sometimes even honor, with the specter of violent death always poised in the wings. We have seen, read, and heard about this dangerously real world from the outside; now we are able to experience it in rich, no-holds-barred detail as if we were there ourselves.
—from the publisher's website