Will satisfy true-crime readers interested in the grimy realities behind Mafia glamour and undercover work.
Memoir of infiltration of the New Jersey Mafia, told with bluster and bravado.
In 1982, Russell—who co-authored this book with Picciarelli (co-editor: Bronx Noir, 2007, etc.)—was a state trooper trying to infiltrate organized crime in Newark, when a dispute over a pilfered briefcase led to Mafia associates shooting him in the head. His superiors realized his survival enhanced his undercover credibility, so they directed him toward an ambitious plan: pose as “owner of a small oil-delivery business and try to work my way into the good graces of the Gambino or Genovese crime families.” Having learned that “getting close to the wiseguys required that you be subtle,” he ingratiated himself with a Genovese captain. Known to the gangsters as “Mikey Ga-Ga,” Russell soon began working for “made member” Joe Zarra, “a greedy bastard [who] would want to capitalize on my earning possibilities.” The strict Mafia hierarchy of autonomous “crews” made Russell’s brazen undercover work easier; he even opened an office next to Zarra’s social club, allowing him to record the crew on audio and video. This proximity led to numerous close calls, on top of Russell’s concern that Newark’s mob-connected cops might finger him. The stress actually forced him to resign from the investigation, yet he soon returned as a civilian contract employee, ultimately earning his supervisor’s accolade: “One lone Irishman took down an entire Mafia crew.” The book’s strength is its specificity: Russell details his encounters with many notorious figures in New York’s “Five Families” and provides a good sense of the nitty-gritty tradecraft involved in undercover investigations. Yet, the plausible narrative is undercut by Russell’s braggadocio: He so often portrays the mobsters as stupid, and his own perfidy as overt, that he never really seems to be in danger.
Will satisfy true-crime readers interested in the grimy realities behind Mafia glamour and undercover work.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00587-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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