A well-researched, irreverent tale of a serious yet fascinating crime and the anachronistic underworld that sparked it.
A raucous account of “the largest burglary in the history of England,” committed by unrepentant, elderly career criminals.
In his debut, Montreal-based New York Times Canada correspondent Bilefsky combines humor, pathos, and technical nitty-gritty in a clearly written procedural. In the spring of 2015, the gang burgled the vault at the Hutton Garden Safe Deposit, the central storehouse of London’s diamond district, after three years of planning. The author writes that the tale’s “villains,” despite their physical infirmities, were “possessed by a fearlessness borne of age. What was there to lose?” The crew members resemble characters from a British crime movie, having devoted their lives to the robbery profession; indeed, the ringleader had participated in the notorious heist portrayed in the 2006 film The Bank Job. Bilefsky captures the meticulous, complex planning of the break-in, noting how “old-school burglars across London had sniffed out that something big was afoot.” The robbery displayed both brazen expertise and clumsy improvisation, with the thieves even stepping out to buy additional heavy equipment to penetrate the vault: “They wanted what they’d set out to take…$19 million worth of gold, gems, diamonds, and cash.” The theft’s discovery created a media circus and alarmed the close-knit community of old-school jewelers. “The shock was visceral and heartbreaking,” writes the author. Yet, Scotland Yard’s elite Flying Squad quickly identified the malefactors by analyzing London’s pervasive closed-circuit network, followed up by intensive surveillance and wiretaps, which captured the old thieves’ injudicious bragging. As one detective noted, “after the heist, their age kicked in.” Following mass arrests, the principal thieves struck plea bargains, leaving frustrated prosecutors to try the conspiracy’s motley hangers-on. Bilefsky takes a balanced approach, acknowledging the media-cultivated public appeal of the gang’s old reprobates but also noting how the losses from the safe deposit wiped out many businesses and families’ savings.
A well-researched, irreverent tale of a serious yet fascinating crime and the anachronistic underworld that sparked it.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-60951-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Are the scales of justice at work here? Hardly. But Dunne’s courtroom tales are a lot more lucid than most judge’s...
Surging reports on high-society murder cases, featuring some of the most seamy and venal behavior this side of Gomorrah, from the man who wrote the book on such doings, Dunne (The Way We Lived Then, 1999, etc.)
Collected here are Dunne’s articles from Vanity Fair on high-profile courtroom dramas involving O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Claus von Bülow, the murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut—nine stories in all, including a lacerating piece on the murder of his daughter, Dominique. Making no pretense at balance (Dunne is nothing if not opinionated and a great deal of the effectiveness of this work revolves around that), the author is scrupulously honest in his reporting, and thorough. He also moves at a good clip, pulling readers along as though a hand had clasped their sleeve, pointing out inconsistencies in testimony and the willful corruption of the truth by shady lawyers. O.J. gets the most pages: “The Simpson case is like a great trash novel come to life, a mammoth fireworks display of interracial marriage, love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth, beauty, obsession, spousal abuse, stalking, brokenhearted children, the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides, and all the justice that money can buy.” Dunne has a knack for capturing the air of unreality that bathes these trials, but the crimes themselves are simply grisly: “The porno star and the unemployed dishwasher implicated each other in helping Murillo as he held a pillow over her face to muffle her screams. It had taken the three of them 15 minutes to kill her.” Dunne also has a way with delivering a dig—“A man just convicted of twice attempting to murder his wife would not seem like much of a catch to most women”—although he can also be prim: a particular judge, for example, was “noticeably dressed in a manner associated more with Hollywood agents than with superior court judges.”
Are the scales of justice at work here? Hardly. But Dunne’s courtroom tales are a lot more lucid than most judge’s instructions to their juries.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60873-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
If you’ve seen Walsh’s show, you’ve already read the book. Still, fans of true-crime writing and students of television will...
Grim tales of crime and punishment from a pioneer of reality TV.
Walsh, the Jack Webbish emcee of America’s Most Wanted, has good reason to hate criminals who prey on the young: his son Adam was kidnapped and murdered in 1981. His popular Fox Network program, which asks viewers to call in with sightings of criminal suspects and missing children, has been something of a cultural phenomenon—and, as the FBI and other police agencies have acknowledged, it has helped close hundreds of cases that might otherwise have gone unsolved. Here, Walsh profiles several incidents where his program has helped put an end to the careers of monsters such as the child molester and murderer Kyle Bell, “the worst scumbag out there,” and Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, the so-called Railroad Killer, a “demon presence” who raped and murdered his way across Texas. Not all his subjects are sexual deviants, however, for Walsh, who recalls sitting in the mud at Woodstock, grooving along to Jimi Hendrix, seemingly would reserve a circle of hell for counterculture types gone bad. Much of his book is devoted to the case of Ira Einhorn, the LSD evangelist and rad-chic philosopher with an apparent penchant for beating women, who, Walsh alleges, murdered a girlfriend in 1977, jumped a $40,000 bail after having been defended by now-Senator Arlen Specter, and split to France, from which he has so far successfully avoided extradition, despite Walsh’s best efforts. Walsh also recounts the case of Kathleen Soliah, a fugitive Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist wanted for murder and bank robbery; having remade herself as a respectable suburban soccer mom called Sara Jane Olson, Soliah, apprehended thanks to AMW, is now pleading for clemency for her youthful indiscretions, a plea Walsh contemptuously dismisses.
If you’ve seen Walsh’s show, you’ve already read the book. Still, fans of true-crime writing and students of television will find it of interest.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-01995-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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