MY LIFE IN CRIME

A frank, and quite frankly fascinating first person story of a criminal career in the words of Gene -- who lived it -- as told to a highly capable (Butcher's Dozen) crime reporter. From the time when in school Gene ""got into the habit of being accustomed to things that were way out of my class"", to a Navy term which began at the age of 15 and showed him now to turn some easy money from pen jackets, and blankets, and narcotics stolen from the dispensary, this follows his professional application of the principle that ""An honest dollar buy as much as two crooked dollars"". Mostly in the midwest, but back and forth across the continent when his natural habital became unseasonable, Gene filled in on a fast dollar re and there-stickups, roadhouses, cars, slot machines, safes, armed robberies, arson, boot-egging, and here shows that ""there's no one way to steal, there's a thousand ways"". Here too a bitter to blistering commentary on the vanishing honest man; on police and political corruption from the fix outside to the court room (""If you haven't got money, you're guilty of everything in the book"") to the pen -- Leavenworth, Joliet, Pontiac, etc. where ""the only thing you couldn't buy was a woman"". There's a lot too on the science of crime from the take to its merchandising; on women; on narcotics; on the Syndicate; on the Prohibition-Depression eras to complete a dossier of one man and a life which has reached the end of the line, out of money, it of luck, and out of a future... A taped record, to which the high powered vernacular lends momentum. There will be strong publisher promotion.