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Welcome everyone to another episode of the MostNatorias podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes.

Glad to have you here with me as always. I'm very thrilled to be speaking to Rich Cohen today.

He is a prolific award-winning writer, a New York Times best-selling author of a multitude of books,

including The Chicago Cubs, Story of a Curse, Tough Jews, Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams,

Monsters, Sweet and Low, and When I Stop Talking. And he's here with me now to talk about his most

recent work called The Last Pirate of New York, A Ghost Ship, A Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster

Nation. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me.

So from a very early age you write, you have been fascinated with gangsters.

Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago where not much was going on or so it felt like not

much was going on. My father's from a neighborhood in Brooklyn where a lot of the gangsters lived

and because he maybe didn't know a lot of bedtime stories or didn't know what to talk about to a kid.

He told me a lot of stories about the gangsters from his neighborhood and I became

completely fascinated by those stories. And that's probably why I moved to New York as soon

as I could and when I became a writer I started researching gangster stories and that's

tough to use. It's about murder and corporate, which is like a half-tourish, half-italian mob

in Brownsville, Brooklyn. That's near where my father lived. And so it's always been mixed up with

my father and his stories and where he came from and I've been fascinated by my whole life.

So I've done quite a few episodes on New York gangsters. Mostly late 19th century, early to mid 20th

century. This is a story that's different from what I've done in the past. It's pretty fascinating.

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