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A True Story of Genealogy,
Hidden History, and Organized Crime
by Todd B. Ennis
GHETTOS TO GANGLANd
a Genealogy Journey
What if the silence in your family wasn’t accidental, but engineered?
A DNA test was supposed to confirm what Todd Ennis already knew. Instead, it shattered everything.
What began as a simple search for his great-grandfather’s immigration records unraveled into a multi-generational mystery. The trail stretched from the chaos of Ellis Island to the shadowed backrooms of Prohibition-era Brooklyn, revealing secrets buried beneath forged names, altered addresses, and deliberate omission.
Behind the family bakery was something far more dangerous: direct ties to the Black Hand, Murder Inc., and the earliest architecture of American organized crime.
As long-held family stories collapsed, soda bottles became clues. Bakeries became crime scenes. Relatives once dismissed as distant or unremarkable emerged as hidden collaborators in a criminal underworld built on bootlegging, racketeering, and silence.
Blending true-crime history with a deeply personal reckoning, Ghettos to Gangland is a cinematic memoir of discovery, inheritance, and the quiet power of breaking generational silence.
"INDICT 6 COPS, 97 IN ALCOHOL RING QUIZ," blared the Daily News headline on August 2, 1938, exposing a sprawling bootlegging operation tied to Lucky Luciano.
In 1938, federal agents raided a bootlegging operation at 91 Mulberry Street. The address had once been linked to Lucky Luciano’s office. Nearly 100 people were indicted. One of the names on the list was Jack Polotnick, my great-grandfather.
I didn’t find this in a family album. I found it in a forgotten newspaper. And it changed everything I thought I knew.
About TODD
Todd Ennis is a New York–based builder and researcher whose search for family history uncovered far more than he expected. What began as a simple investigation led to DNA revelations, forgotten graves, and a hidden network of gangland ties.
His debut book, Ghettos to Gangland, traces a deeply personal journey through lost identities, altered names, and the silences that shaped generations.
