Will satisfy true-crime readers interested in the grimy realities behind Mafia glamour and undercover work.
Memoir of infiltration of the New Jersey Mafia, told with bluster and bravado.
In 1982, Russell—who co-authored this book with Picciarelli (co-editor: Bronx Noir, 2007, etc.)—was a state trooper trying to infiltrate organized crime in Newark, when a dispute over a pilfered briefcase led to Mafia associates shooting him in the head. His superiors realized his survival enhanced his undercover credibility, so they directed him toward an ambitious plan: pose as “owner of a small oil-delivery business and try to work my way into the good graces of the Gambino or Genovese crime families.” Having learned that “getting close to the wiseguys required that you be subtle,” he ingratiated himself with a Genovese captain. Known to the gangsters as “Mikey Ga-Ga,” Russell soon began working for “made member” Joe Zarra, “a greedy bastard [who] would want to capitalize on my earning possibilities.” The strict Mafia hierarchy of autonomous “crews” made Russell’s brazen undercover work easier; he even opened an office next to Zarra’s social club, allowing him to record the crew on audio and video. This proximity led to numerous close calls, on top of Russell’s concern that Newark’s mob-connected cops might finger him. The stress actually forced him to resign from the investigation, yet he soon returned as a civilian contract employee, ultimately earning his supervisor’s accolade: “One lone Irishman took down an entire Mafia crew.” The book’s strength is its specificity: Russell details his encounters with many notorious figures in New York’s “Five Families” and provides a good sense of the nitty-gritty tradecraft involved in undercover investigations. Yet, the plausible narrative is undercut by Russell’s braggadocio: He so often portrays the mobsters as stupid, and his own perfidy as overt, that he never really seems to be in danger.
Will satisfy true-crime readers interested in the grimy realities behind Mafia glamour and undercover work.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00587-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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