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THE LAST GODFATHERS

INSIDE THE MAFIA’S MOST INFAMOUS FAMILY

An important contribution to the documentation of how low the lowlife can get.

The gang that could shoot straight—and bomb, maim, steal, cheat, bribe and otherwise wreak havoc—documented by a capable chronicler of organized crime in Italy.

Complementing Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2007), Rome-based Sunday Times correspondent Follain, by deromanticizing it straightaway, performs a valuable service in this account of the Sicilian Mafia’s Corleone clan. The name Corleone is strongly associated with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and the films it begat, but Marlon Brando’s quasi-chivalric padrino is far from the reality. As Follain notes, the Mafia—“ ‘men of honor’ as they like to call themselves”—began as hired goons for absentee landowners who helped oppress the ordinary people, and thus they have remained, parasites and leeches. The postwar Sicilian mob, strengthened by being installed in positions of political authority by the Allied occupation forces, institutionalized this parasitism. But, the author writes, it all unraveled when a state-appointed special judge, Giovanni Falcone, began to dismantle the mobsters’ power judicially—a campaign that, in May 1992, led to Falcone’s assassination, as well as the deaths of dozens of other judges, prosecutors and police officials. The Italian state cracked down hard, and the heads of the Corleone mob—including Luciano Leggio, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano—went into hiding and were eventually ferreted out one by one. The government achieved this difficult feat, writes Follain, with the help of “supergrasses”—well-placed informants within the Mafia, such as the prominent “soldier” Giuseppe Marchese. Within a few months more than 250 had broken the “law of silence” and accepted witness protection and other measures to protect informants.

An important contribution to the documentation of how low the lowlife can get.

Pub Date: July 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-312-56690-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009

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THE SHOOTING OF RABBIT WELLS

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

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This memoir of a childhood acquaintance who became a peripheral casualty of social turmoil is affecting despite a curious remoteness. Loizeaux (Anna: A Daughter's Life, 1993) revisits the suburban New Jersey of his childhood to exhume the story of a charismatic schoolmate of mixed race, William ``Rabbit'' Wells, mistakenly shot and killed by a young police officer, William Sorgie, in 1973. This account of Wells's life and death is indisputably a structural marvel, nimbly flitting back and forth in time in a way that should be confusing but isn't, thanks to his unfailingly clear prose and his eye for the detail that instantly impresses a scene on the mind. Piecing together a fragmented image of Wells—and, much less distinctly, the still-living Sorgie—Loizeaux flirts again and again with the circumstances of Jan. 13, 1973, but leaves the heart of the matter to a powerful climactic narrative. But while precise, Loizeaux's style also exhibits a sort of contrived-sounding hauntedness. For despite apposite autobiographical touches, the book doesn't really establish the source of the author's depth of feeling for Wells, as manifested in sometimes almost incantatory writing and heavy-handed symbolism. And while the transitory presence Wells had, even for those who became closest to him, understandably makes for a dearth of solid facts 25 years later, Loizeaux's rather flat novelistic reconstructions of speculative events become unwelcome as they mount up, repetitively signaled by phrases like ``I can imagine . . .'' or ``I suppose. . . .'' Ultimately, the wounds seem to have healed long ago (albeit with visible scar tissue) and been overtaken by broader upheavals. Thus, this story's power resides in its careful reckoning of a personal loss, not in the ``echoes of our national life''— Vietnam, urban rioting—that he perfunctorily refers to. Still, a quietly heroic rescue of a pointlessly stolen life, and an evocative snapshot of an extraordinary moment in an ordinary place.

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Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-55970-380-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997

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THE MISSING

A haunting look at the phenomenon of missing persons. Scottish journalist O'Hagan explored the United Kingdom in search of stories of people who have vanished. He begins with his own grandfather, a sailor lost at sea, and continues the search through the ugly tenements where he grew up—and where several boys were lost. He interviews the families of these children, and their agony is horribly vivid. One father happened upon a look-alike of his missing son and almost begged the boy to move to his house and pretend to be his son. Other parents obsessively flip through photographs of their missing children, forever frozen in time at the age they were when taken. The police call the vanished ``mispers,'' for missing persons, and are only now beginning to compile records on the subject. O'Hagan also visits a grim center for homeless teens, where the residents do their best to sever any remaining familial ties. He follows the trail of a number of lost girls to the home of Fred West, who killed at least 25 female boarders and buried them in his backyard. These stories are unrelenting, and O'Hagan presents solid insights into both the minds of the families and those of some who've deliberately disappeared. But the grisly litany would have been better served by the presence of real insight into why people vanish. He revisits the murder scene of James Bulger, a young boy killed by two 10-year-olds, and recounts episodes of his own cruelty, as a child, toward other children. But while O'Hagan raises the fascinating specter of child sadism, he doesn't speculate on its causes, quickly dropping the matter. Though somewhat lacking in a sense of the big picture, this is a powerfully observed and often heartbreaking portrait in miniature of those who disappear and the effect on those they leave behind.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996

ISBN: 1-56584-335-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: The New Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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