Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin. By Lee Server.St Martin’s Press; 516 pages; $29.99. Virgin Books; £9.99.

J OHNNY ROSSELLI was the gangster equivalent of the title character in Woody Allen’s “Zelig”, a mysterious shape-shifter who kept bumping into the 20th century’s biggest figures. During the bootlegging years, Rosselli rode the train between Los Angeles and Chicago, delivering messages from the two cities’ respective kingpins, Jack Dragna and Al Capone. When the mob muscled in on the movie business, Rosselli was in Hollywood to keep the unions under mafia control; but he also found time to romance Jean Harlow, a starlet; to dine out with Harry Cohn, a studio boss; and to clink cocktail glasses with Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan. Turning to Las Vegas in the 1950s, he schmoozed Frank Sinatra and negotiated with Howard Hughes. And when the CIA hatched a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, Rosselli was invited to Miami to make the arrangements.

According to Lee Server’s exhaustively researched biography, Rosselli lived out a quintessentially American success story. He was a patriot who volunteered to serve in the second world war, and professed to have come from Chicago. But he was actually born in primitive Esperia, in rural Italy, in 1905. As a boy named Filippo Sacco, he joined his father in Boston, but, as Mr Server points out, the country was “a tricky place” for immigrants. “It needed its foreigners but it hated them too.”

The teenage Sacco’s drift into crime was perfectly timed. Prohibition became law in 1920, turning petty crooks into tycoons. Previously law-abiding citizens handed their money to racketeers, the racketeers used it to build empires, and those empires lasted long after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933.

By that stage, Rosselli was a fixture among the hoods. Having changed his name and moved to Los Angeles in 1924, he ran shipboard casinos that got around gambling and drinking restrictions by ferrying their glamorous clientele out to international waters. But that wasn’t his only job. He was personable, intelligent and discreet enough, as well as sufficiently handsome, to become the confidant of gangsters and celebrities—and, in the case of Capone, a gangster who was also a celebrity.

Written in the snappy style of a hardboiled detective novel, Mr Server’s 500-page tome functions as an in-depth history of the growth, development and eventual decline of organised crime in America. The author argues that without the mobsters, America might have done a lot less growing and developing itself. According to this telling, nothing much happened in the middle decades of the last century without crooks facilitating or profiting from it, from Marilyn Monroe’s stardom to John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Rosselli was usually on hand to grease the wheels.