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BLOOD OATH

THE HEROIC STORY OF A GANGSTER TURNED GOVERNMENT AGENT WHO BROUGHT DOWN ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST POWERFUL MOB FAMILIES

An insider peep into the New YorkNew Jersey crime networks. With the help of Wagman (The Nazi Hunters, not reviewed), former wiseguy Fresolone begins his gritty confessions of life as a mobster with the hair-raising scene of his own induction ceremony into the Bruno crime family. Fresolone is already working for the Feds and has strapped to his body more than one tape recorder. It is to be the first-ever taping of a Mafia initiation ceremony- -complete with the blood-letting from the initiate's finger. In the old days, Fresolone laments, they used to mop up the blood with fragments of a saint's picture; now they ``make do'' with tissue paper. The Mob was everything the young Fresolone hoped for growing up in the Down Neck section of Newark. Down Neck was controlled by the powerful Bruno family based in Philadelphia, run nominally by the ``reluctant don'' Angelo Bruno, a mild and compromising kind of man. The real power, though, was the fearsome Tony Bananas, with ``Patty Specs,'' i.e. Pasquale Martirano, as his underboss. After Bananas had Bruno assassinated, he assumed control of the Bruno family enterprise and became our hero's employer. The relation was a tense one. In the end, Fresolone seems to have felt intense personal loyalty only to Specs, a man already dying of liver cancer. Fresolone points out that interfamily murder and strife is comparatively rare these days. It is, rather, internal family violence that is the current curse of Mob hierarchies and that seems to have most affected Fresolone. Eventually, his collaboration with the Feds brought in almost 40 major Mob figures, a fact of which he seems genuinely proud, as if it is a just retribution for what he sees as the Mafia's betrayal of its own principles of loyalty and honor. Not a prose masterpiece, but the genuine article as far as Mob documents go. With its personal touch and its relentless detail, it's a solidly alarming read.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-671-77905-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

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HOW TO FIGHT ANTI-SEMITISM

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.

While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

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