About a decade and half ago, after having a few preparatory pints in one of the mirrored booths of a landmark Irish pub near the theater, a few guys from my office went to see the film “State of Grace,” starring Sean Penn and Garry Oldman as Hell’s Kitchen Irish gangsters. Partway through the movie, the cozy drinking spot we’d just left turned out to be the site of a vicious, glass-shattering beating by one of the film’s gangsters. Other familiar Gaelic parts of the city later came bristlingly alive with gang violence throughout the story, which climaxes in a shootout during the St. Patrick’s Day parade. All of it added an element of long-lost menace to the Manhattan streets for our walk to the subway.

It is precisely this feeling of lost dread and historical power – of the clannish, feuding city buried just beneath the increasingly gentrified surface – that T.J. English hopes to restore to the Irish-American story with his new book, “PaddyWhacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster” (ReganBooks, 468 pages, $27.95), which traces the role of the Irish in the underworld from the time of John Morrissey’s arrival in New York in 1849 to the flight of South Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger in 1995 (Whitey still tops the FBI’s most wanted list).

Mr. English is author of the rightly celebrated history of the Hell’s Kitchen gang wars from the 1960s to the 1980s, “The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob,” which has become a crime classic since 1990 because of its author’s wonderful reporting skills. For that book (published around the same time as “State of Grace” was made), Mr. English conducted hundreds of interviews and crafted them into a rolling multiple narrative of the Irish gang wars that propels the reader through some horrific scenes and ugly characters . He never flinched from his sometimes ghastly material by becoming sociological.

Mr. English casts a much wider net here, following the “150-year run for the Irish Mob.” His story moves with the diaspora from Ireland to Boston to New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It includes both bosses from the Irish-American political and gangster world (a sometimes blurry distinction, especially in the porous world of Tammany Hall). Patterns emerge amid the gunfire – fatherless Irish boys finding voice in the community of the gang and diligently working their way up the criminal system like figures in a skewed Horatio Alger story.

“To some, the story of the Irish American gangster is the stuff of legend,” writes Mr. English, “a tribute to the rebellious, defiant, tough-as-nails side of the Irish temperament. To others, the saga is shameful, a best forgotten example of anti-social behavior at its most homicidal.”

Mr. English presents both sides, but if he had a weaker stomach, the reader certainly would be deprived of many stories that are this book’s primary strength. While gangsters like the Prohibition mobster Owney Madden (for whom “fame was a whore to be kept at arm’s length”) are clearly more to Mr. English’s personal taste than others, he finds something compelling in all of the killers, strikebreakers, mob bosses, fixers, hit men, crooked cogs in corrupt machines, lords of the waterfront, and clear “whack jobs” presented here.

Mr. English’s is the latest and most ambitious of the recent books that have examined underworld history through the proud struggles of one ethnic story. Like Rich Cohen’s “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” Mr. English’s book recounts gangster history with a kind of awe and qualified longing, as seen from the safety of assimilated success. In this kind of tough guy ethnic history, the good news of the Irish’s successful immigrant story – going from urban ditchdiggers to delivery into the suburban mainstream – is flipped on its head.

Mr. English tells his stories well, but along with this book’s memorable portraits, scams, rubouts, and enriching gang talk, lovers of the genre unfortunately must swallow a fair amount of ethnic score-settling. Once landed in the New World, Mr. English explains, Irish-Americans invented gangsterism. Although criminal societies were imported from Italy in the 1880s and 1890s, he argues, real credit for the American brand of organized crime should go to the Irish, who “had been in the United States for over forty years by then,” by which time “the American Underworld – which was based on criminal infiltration of the System for social advancement and economic gain – was already firmly entrenched.” It was only with Prohibition that Irish criminal turf was gradually lost in mob wars with the late-coming Italians.

The urgent need for this book, Mr. English contends, is to strike back against the Italian claim-jumpers whose “Mafia” has not only grabbed Irish rackets and territories but won the gang war for popular culture, unjustly becoming synonymous with all organized crime through a few influential movies and headline-grabbing dons. One of the chief creators of modern, big business style organized crime, Lucky Luciano, Mr. English reduces to “a glorified pimp and dope pusher,” which is worse than calling Al Capone a mere tax cheat, while Luciano’s mastermind partner Meyer Lansky “achieved posthumous fame when he was reincarnated as ‘Hyman Roth'” in “Godfather II.”

The score-settling even extends to the crowning Irish achievement, the election of an Irish-American president in 1960, which Mr. English sees as the setup for what he regards as the Mafia’s hit of all hits, the murder of John F. Kennedy – “the latest and loudest salvo in the ongoing war between the dagos and the micks.” (Followed, presumably, by the omerta of all omertas somehow kept by the conspirators.) It’s telling that the saga of organized crime can demonstrate defiant traits of the Irish character for Mr. English but the great criminal success of a Luciano or Gambino or Costello has to do with outside forces like Prohibition or Hollywood.

Nothing has been tried on this scale before, and despite the over-the-top theorizing and the author’s occasional sloppiness with dates, most of the book is entertaining and useful. Lovers of true-life gangster books will find plenty to like, especially in those sections of the book based on his own interviewing and reporting rather than second-hand theory. In the passages about Southie and the Bulgers, and his history of the Westies, he has created some remarkable portraits, fascinating chapters in his ambitious and rewarding history.

Mr. Ward last wrote in these pages on A.J. Leibling.