Add another Mafia to the list (Italian, Irish, Russian…), then. Fascinating reading for true-crime buffs.
A stout but fast-moving tale of criminal misdoings from Havana to Manhattan and beyond, courtesy of a Cuban crime boss with a plan.
The corporation of the title is not one that Citizens United directly benefits, but it has plenty of political dimensions all the same. This corporation is the Cuban exile version of the Mafia, and its adventures and misadventures might make Don Corleone blanch. At the center of the action is a former police officer who, having fought against Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs and logged time as a bagman for corrupt superiors, set up shop in the United States. By English’s (Whitey’s Payback, 2014, etc.) account, José Miguel Battle y Vargas (1929-2007) reshaped the angles of the Cuban addiction to bolita, a simple lottery game, to work the gambling racket—and then other vices, including, in time, the trade in cocaine. Still young when he started, he “conveyed leadership through his demeanor and gravitas rather than inspiring rhetoric or brilliant business strategies.” The business turned violent, and Battle dealt decisively with his many enemies, one of whom killed his brother; as English writes of two of Battle’s soldiers, “they had done so many killings together in the last few months, they hardly needed to talk about it. It was all second nature.” Naturally, Battle had it in mind to take revenge on Castro as well as keep his empire afloat. Had the movie not had an earlier model, he might have made a good study for Scarface. Still, as will happen, the Corporation fell apart under the strain of rivalries, power struggles, and legal interference only to be supplanted by other criminal organizations. English capably covers half a century of criminal enterprise, avoiding the clichés of the true-crime genre while stocking his narrative with familiar players: the capos and goons, the cops and informants, a mistress or two, and John F. Kennedy.
Add another Mafia to the list (Italian, Irish, Russian…), then. Fascinating reading for true-crime buffs.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-256896-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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