Next book

TOP HOODLUM

FRANK COSTELLO, PRIME MINISTER OF THE MAFIA

Will appeal to readers of criminal histories and tales of New York’s political underworld.

Biography of a low-profile “original gangster” who connected the Prohibition era and the “Five Families.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist DeStefano (The Big Heist: The Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia, and Murder, 2017, etc.) creates another readable, well-researched take on organized crime. Frank Costello (1891-1973), writes the author, “was like the fictional bootlegger Jay Gatsby.” Unlike Gatsby, Costello thrived for decades, due to a combination of luck and restraint, even as the American public turned against the gangsters who were elevated during Prohibition. Costello was closely connected to mob heavyweights like Lucky Luciano, and his political connections and aversion to the limelight helped him survive. At the height of his power, Costello and Tammany Hall influenced the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt: “The relationship between the mob and Tammany was one that seemed to be shaped by the reality of their separate worlds.” DeStefano acutely re-creates the strange milieu of New York City politics during the peak of organized crime’s influence, tracking the interplay among Costello, political fixers, law enforcement, and reformers like Fiorello La Guardia. The author notes that important people “were taken in by [Costello’s] smoothness and his persuasiveness.” During the 1940s, he was increasingly pursued by righteous prosecutors, offended by his evident impunity. DeStefano follows his trials, concluding, “since 1927, the box score read: Costello 3 and federal prosecutors 0.” Despite his attempts at respectability, Costello’s notoriety increased, culminating in a 1951 televised appearance. “Of all who testified,” writes the author, “it was Costello who represented what [Sen. Estes] Kefauver saw as the face of organized crime.” DeStefano tells Costello’s story well, yet the nature of his subject’s discreet crime philosophy and careful existence limits the author’s strengths. Apart from a botched attempt on Costello’s life in 1957 organized by Vito Genovese (after which Costello purportedly retired), his story is largely free of violence and dramatic set pieces after Prohibition.

Will appeal to readers of criminal histories and tales of New York’s political underworld.

Pub Date: July 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8065-3869-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Citadel/Kensington

Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

Close Quickview