The book will please Mafia completists, but the overall arc will feel more familiar than revelatory to most true-crime...
A straightforward update to the notorious 1978 Lufthansa Airlines heist.
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter DeStefano (Gangland New York: The Places and Faces of Mob History, 2015, etc.) understands the difficulty of opening new aspects of a crime immortalized in journalism, memoirs, and the film Goodfellas: “Of all the Mafia heists, rip-offs, scores, and plunders, none has been more iconic a part of American popular culture than the brazen [Lufthansa] robbery.” The author focuses on the 2015 trial of Vincent Asaro, an aged survivor of the era’s Five Families crews. Asaro, whose alleged participation in the crime had not been recognized, was wiretapped over several years for the FBI by his cousin Gaspare Valenti, another low-level mobster. The tapes revealed both men scuffling for years as their influence faded within the mob, itself more constricted in today’s New York City, as well as the chilling moment when Asaro realized Valenti’s betrayal. DeStefano leads up to Asaro’s trial with a narrative re-creation of the crime, its murderous aftermath, and the notorious figures involved, including Lucchese family underboss Paul Vario, robbery mastermind Jimmy Burke, and turncoat Henry Hill, the protagonist of Goodfellas. The author tries to counter the ambiguity surrounding the crime, noting, “while Hill’s public statements on the heist excluded Asaro...he had actually claimed to law enforcement as far back as 1983 that Asaro was involved.” Following the heist and the murders of many participants, Asaro ran stolen car operations for a Bonanno family crew, finding himself marginalized over time: “Part of the problem was Asaro’s volatility and temper.” Despite Valenti’s testimony, Asaro was acquitted at trial, a startling development. Though Asaro’s connection to Lufthansa still seems inconclusive, DeStefano paints him as a poignant if unlikable character, a criminal journeyman who survived a violent life to watch his status, wealth, and cherished lifestyle slip away.
The book will please Mafia completists, but the overall arc will feel more familiar than revelatory to most true-crime readers.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3830-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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