A by-the-numbers prequel to the rise of Whitey Bulger’s informant-riddled empire.
The sad, true, bloody story of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang.
Somewhat similar in tone to Bryan Burroughs’ Public Enemies (2004), this journalistic and encyclopedic history of New England’s vicious mob wars seems almost an artifact in the wake of Whitey Bulger’s recent arrest—and Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy’s excellent Whitey Bulger (2013). Nevertheless, Songini (The Lost Fleet, 2007) makes an admirable attempt to tie together the lies, myths, facts and legends of the 1960s and ’70s war between the Winter Hill Gang and the McLaughlin brothers’ outfit. It’s a difficult story to piece together—as the author admits in his source notes, his principles for storytelling often had to fall back on the question, “What is most likely?” Much of this history has been examined before in books ranging from biographies of Bobby Kennedy to insalubrious portraits of characters like gang leader Buddy McLean and hit man Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi. Strangely, Songini chooses to tell his version mostly through the eyes of a relatively minor figure in the organization, albeit a vicious one. The book focuses on Joseph “The Animal” Barboza, a particularly savage killer with scores of successful murders. The author relates the printed details of countless murders, all facts that could have been pulled out of Wikipedia or newspaper archives, and seldom delves into the mechanics of running a syndicate. There are truly absurd moments that surely inspired some cinematic departures—one story finds Flemmi’s brother shooting a victim in the head with a policeman’s revolver. When the officer complained that the bullet was traceable, Flemmi reportedly lopped off the poor guy’s head. It’s a dark corner of American history that deserves to be scrutinized, but it will take more than this surface skim to make sense of the madness of the times.
A by-the-numbers prequel to the rise of Whitey Bulger’s informant-riddled empire.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-37363-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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. Maryland decision. 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
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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