Harsh, chilling, lurid and gripping.
St. Louis Magazine founding editor Heidenry (The Gashouse Gang, 2008, etc.) delivers a lean, mean account of an infamous 1953 kidnapping and murder.
The victim was Bobby Greenlease, the six-year-old son of a wealthy Kansas City car dealer. On Sept. 28, the boy was kidnapped by one of the most dysfunctional and tragically inept crime couples on record: Carl Hall, a dissolute sociopath and congenital failure, and his girlfriend Bonnie Heady, an alcoholic and prostitute. Heidenry’s narrative is meticulously detailed and devoid of sentiment or attitudinizing. The horrific actions of Hall and Heady, their outrageous bungling and the web of deceit and betrayal following their crime play out with the cold-eyed terseness and resigned nihilism of classic film noir entertainments like Detour or Born to Kill. After successfully snatching Bobby from his tony private school—an operation that depended heavily on luck—Hall and Heady embarked on a series of snafus that would seem funny if not for the sickening crime at their center. Hall couldn’t even manage to strangle Bobby, as he had planned, because the length of rope he brought was too short. Paranoid and awash in alcohol and drugs, he compulsively complicated plans for the delivery of the ransom money—a staggering $600,000, the largest ever payout—sending the Greenlease’s representatives on a series of wild goose chases undone by Hall’s inability to get an address right or formulate coherent demands. After finally successfully retrieving the money, Hall went on a spending spree, aligning himself with another hardened prostitute and an ex-con cab driver, who quickly cottoned to Hall’s situation and colluded with a prominent mobster and a couple of crooked cops to take the prize for themselves…with predictably botched results. All the while, the distraught Greenleases desperately clung to hope, not knowing that their son was already dead
Harsh, chilling, lurid and gripping.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37679-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Marylanddecision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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