Connection to Romeo and Juliet

A few weeks ago, I was reading this book called Son of the Mob. The similarities between this and Romeo and Juliet were pretty obvious. The main characters father was a mob boss, and the father of the girl he falls in love with is a FBI agent. Personally, I liked it better than Romeo and Juliet, the characters in the book are modern teenagers so it's easy to relate to, and it isn't written like a poem. But I guess it's nice to know where the idea came from...