An engaging theory that lacks convincing evidence.
Former federal prosecutor McCallion delves into the alleged ties between a Corsican drug trafficking ring and U.S. government officials in this true-crime book.
The French Connection that smuggled heroin to the United States through Marseille, France, was one of the most notorious drug trafficking operations. McCallion writes that he was curious about how the ring, run by a Corsican Mafia group known as the Unione Corse, evaded prosecution. In this book, he claims to have found the answer. The author is blessed with three compelling central figures in this narrative: William Spector, a former U.S. intelligence agent; his mysterious ex-wife, former model Patricia Richardson; and French financier Paul-Louis Weiller, one of her “mentors.” Richardson, according to the author, decided when she was young that she’d be a Bond girl with “the deadly spy skills of James Bond himself.” After Richardson left Spector in 1971, writes McCallion, Spector tried to expose alleged ties that she and Weiller had with the Unione Corse, alleging that she used Spector’s auto dealership to smuggle drugs into the U.S.: “Paul-Louis Weiller—to the best of my knowledge—is the key financier of the international drug syndicate,” Spector testified to a 1978 Congressional panel. Using this testimony and other records, McCallion claims the Unione Corse owed its impunity to a 1947 “accord” between France and the U.S. and that the mobsters’ “virtually unlimited funds helped finance [Richard] Nixon’s political rise to power.” However, his questionable evidence for this assertion is largely limited to a 1968 meeting in which Weiller agreed to contribute $2 million to Nixon’s campaign. Overall, the book does raise intriguing possibilities. However, it offers conjecture rather than a resolution of “The Major Unsolved Crime of the 20th Century.” In the end, it largely fails to support its theory that mobsters had an “unholy alliance” with the Nixon administration and the CIA.
An engaging theory that lacks convincing evidence.Pub Date: June 9, 2023
ISBN: 978-1737149286
Page Count: 242
Publisher: HHI Media
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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