Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson with Paz de la Huerta as Lucy Danziger; photo: HBO

In an era when corruption was universal, lives were cheap, and everyone -- from politicians to prostitutes -- was getting stumbling-drunk on contraband cocktails, it took a lot for your story to stand out. As the third season of Boardwalk Empire kicks off on HBO, we’ve selected some of the juiciest real life stories behind the television exploits of Nucky Thompson and crew. Read on for tales of the gamblers, grandstanders, and gangsters who shaped the United States under Prohibition.

The book behind the HBO series, “Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City” tells the story of the city’s rise from sleepy resort to gangster’s paradise. Utterly dependent on the pleasure-seeker’s dollar, Atlantic City’s success -- at any cost -- was everyone’s business, and nobody tolerated naysayers and critics. Author Nelson Johnson previously served as the attorney for the Atlantic City Planning Board and therefore brings a tantalizing insider’s perspective to the deals and dodges that birthed the modern city. The book traces the career of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration for Steve Buscemi’s Boardwalk Empire character, who ran the local Republican political machine, and whose flamboyant, ruthless personality drove the transformation of his city. For fans of the show, the HBO tie-in edition includes behind-the-scenes production photos, and a foreword by executive producer Terence Winter.

Nucky Johnson was far from the only public figure exploiting the turbulent twenties for his own wealth and glory. Arnold Rothstein is mainly remembered today as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series: an event that shows up in popular culture from “The Great Gatsby” to The Godfather Part II as a symbol of America’s loss of innocence. Yet in his biography of Rothstein, David Pietrusza shows that fixing baseball games was just the beginning of a breathtaking career of swindling, racketeering, smuggling, and violence, which turned the man known as “The Big Bankroll” into one of New York’s most influential and notorious characters, right up until his mysterious murder in a Times Square hotel room in 1928.

Rothstein’s protégé Salvatore Lucania, better known as Lucky Luciano, is the subject of Tim Newark’s biography “Boardwalk Gangster” -- a fascinating account that delves into government archives to tell the story of Luciano’s extraordinary life. Rising to power on the back of Rothstein’s demise, Luciano established “The Commission” to oversee the American Mafia, was convicted and imprisoned on charges of abetting prostitution, only to be released by the government during World War II, which needed his help to monitor the Mafia-controlled New York waterfront and prevent the landing of German and Italian spies. He was deported from America after the war, but continued to control his criminal syndicate from Italy, despite close police surveillance for the rest of his life.

Less well known gangsters, whose life stories nevertheless illuminate their time, can be found in Mike Dash’s “The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and The Birth of the American Mafia,” which traces the origins of American organized crime to the back streets of Sicily in the 1890s. The story of Giuseppe Morello, a one-fingered mastermind whose lethal reign ushered in the era of the Five Families, is a gripping, violent tale given weight by the author’s extensive research into government archives, prison records, and interviews with Morello’s surviving family members and associates.

“The Bobbed-Haired Bandit” was the tabloid nickname for the daredevil thief Celia Cooney, whose spectacular criminal career made her a celebrity and a symbol of the lawlessness of Prohibition-era New York. In their biography of Cooney, Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson bring to life the woman whose life was labeled by William Randolph Hearst as “the strangest, weirdest, most dramatic, most tragic human interest story ever told.”

Of course, no collection of mobster lives could leave out Al Capone. In “Capone: The Man and the Era,” Laurence Bergreen delves into the paradoxes of the archetypal crime boss, whose devotion to his family and self-perception as a latter-day Robin Hood jarred with his cold-blooded embrace of violence in the pursuit of power. This biography richly evokes both the glamour and the grit of Capone’s era, and presents Capone as a symbol of the larger paradoxes of Prohibition.

Weaving together all these characters, from the most notorious to the nearly forgotten, Daniel Okrent’s kaleidoscopic “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” presents the history of the era as an American tragedy, a still baffling moment of spectacularly bad governmental judgment, which unleashed a wave of contradictory impulses and unintended consequences. Okrent served as creative consultant on Ken Burns’ 2011 documentary series Prohibition, and through his cast of characters -- among them Susan B. Anthony, H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky, rabble-rousing preacher Billy Sunday, and anti-booze battle axe Carrie Nation -- he sets out to unravel the mystery of Prohibition and answer his own driving question (and the working title for his book): “How the Hell did that Happen?”