Recommended reading - Tucker’s People aka The Underworld (1943):

Tucker’s People

By Ira Wolfert.

aka The Underworld.

Filmed as Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky.

Published by Black Curtain Press.

First published 1943.

Hardcover.

ISBN-10: 1515426157

ISBN-13: 978-1515426158

Description:

When Tucker's People was published in 1943 it was praised by the New York Times for its "blowtorch intensity." The idea for Tucker's People stemmed from Ira Wolfert's coverage as a reporter of the trial of James "Jimmy" Hines, a Tammany Hall district leader who was prosecuted by Thomas E. Dewey for letting Dutch Schultz take over the numbers game in New York. It is "a penetrating, sympathetic novel of frustration and insecurity, a story of little people, many of them decent people, battling against forces they are too feeble to resist and too simple to understand," according to the Saturday Review of Literature.