Not exactly a self-portrait of a criminal mastermind, but a somewhat worthwhile glimpse into the schizoid world of a corrupt...
A former crooked cop looks back on his conflict-of-interest life as a policeman and midlevel grifter.
Italian-American and native Chicagoan Pascente’s nonfiction debut, co-written with crime novelist Reaves (Mean Town Blues, 2008, etc.), is a rollicking mess of a wiseguy memoir that vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and sins of a long-vanished criminal gangland of Chicago. Born in 1942 (he died in 2014) in a typically rough urban district of the city’s Near West Side, Pascente grew up with future “made man” Tony Spilotro (immortalized in Nick Pileggi’s book Casino), who would eventually be financially linked to Pascente’s future police boss William Hanhardt. While Spilotro went on to become a mob heavyweight running a casino empire in Las Vegas in the 1960s, Pascente served in the Army before getting an early discharge for joining the police force; he ended up working under Hanhardt, who would exploit Pascente’s gangland connections. During his more than 25 years as a cop, the author may have spent more time committing crimes than preventing them. The book is packed cover to cover with Pascente’s pithy tales of the dirty deeds he and his corrupt cohorts (with cartoon gangster names like Johnny Bananas, Louie the Mooch, and Milwaukee Phil) pulled off for big money: insider bank scores, racetrack betting swindles, casino heists, mail and insurance scams, and plenty more. Pascente, for all his shady dealings, ended up doing very little jail time in a minimum-security prison for insurance fraud (although he did lose his police pension). Of course, his criminal curriculum vitae can’t compare to those of Henry Hill or Whitey Bulger, but Pascente comes off about as affable as any criminal could. In the end, he expressed a modicum of shame and regret over his weakness for the lure of easy money.
Not exactly a self-portrait of a criminal mastermind, but a somewhat worthwhile glimpse into the schizoid world of a corrupt cop.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-134-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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