Celeste Morello has an offer you can't refuse - the chance to walk the rough-and-tumble streets of South Philadelphia and learn the real story of organized crime.

Tired of the stereotypes, Morello - great-granddaughter of a Sicilian "man of honor" - offers a glimpse of history most Independence Hall tourists never see.Her Organized Crime Tour points out that the Irish and Eastern European Jews ran Philadelphia mobs long before La Cosa Nostra came along.

"I want people to realize that organized crime is universal. It's not just the Italians and Sicilians," says Morello, 35, a historian and criminologist who wrote her master's thesis on South Philadelphia's crime heritage.

Hers is a tale of poor immigrants in an insular neighborhood that bred familiarity and contempt. It is laced with memories of the turn-of-the-century Mafia that prided itself on honor and, Morello says, was less a gang than an ethnic Elks Club with a mean streak.

Most of all, it's a tale of lost lives.

Visit Christian Street, where 57 mobsters were slain along one four-block stretch between 1914 and 1930. One, Joseph Bruno, took 14 bullets in his right side.

Walk along Kater Street, once a red-light district where syphilis killed German and French prostitutes and rogue doctors introduced the drug trade by prescribing narcotic injections for menopausal women. See the Mafia clubhouse that is now a Vietnamese hair salon.

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Tour the cramped alleys where Irish laborers paid 24 cents a month for their rented rooms. See St. Mary Magdelene, the first Italian church in the United States.

Learn about Salvatore Sabella, who Morello says is the first known Sicilian Mafia boss in Philadelphia. And Anthony "Musky" Zanghi, Philadelphia's first stool pigeon, killed in 1932.

"These people weren't necessarily exposed to the outside theories and the outside ways," Morello said. "They were, and are, neighborhood-bound. And that can breed crime."

Until 1854, South Philadelphia was not part of the city but a municipality called Moyamensing, which in the language of the Leni-lenape Indians means "pigeon droppings." And it was a haven for criminals.

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