(FORTUNE Magazine) – If Richard Behar's "Capitalism in a Cold Climate" (from the previous issue of FORTUNE) whetted your appetite for gangsters, then check out Robert Friedman's Red Mafiya (Little Brown). Beginning with the Russian mafia's brutal rise in New York, Friedman outlines the key figures in schemes involving everyone from the Bank of New York to NHL superstars; in the process, he exposes the political, economic, and criminal power of this new breed of organized crime (and receives a few threats along the way).

--AHMAD DIBA