Essential for students of organized crime in America. Murder and mayhem buffs will enjoy it too.
The Mob comes to America, and rivers of blood flow.
The literature surrounding the Mafia is vast, particularly in the glory days of the 1930s and ’40s, but very slight for the first days of the American mob. London-based journalist and historian Dash (Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York’s Trial of the Century, 2007, etc.) fills the gap with this altogether excellent account, which begins, as always, in Corleone, Sicily. Giuseppe Morello—variously known as “The Clutch Hand,” “Little Finger” and “One Finger Jack”—earned his chops as a mobster, starting off with penny-ante crimes and swiftly working his way up to the murder of a corrupt cop. Things got hot after that, whereupon Morello made for New York and set up shop doing much the same work, then branching out to take part in whatever mischief was afoot. Dash swiftly reviews the reasons why the Mafia evolved in Sicily, and why it was so exportable, noting that local habits of keeping quiet and resisting state power proved helpful in protecting the newcomers from the authorities—even though the metropolitan police soon organized an “Italian Squad” made up of Italian-American cops such as the little-sung Joe Petrosino, murdered on Morello’s orders, and Michael Fiaschetti. Dash’s narrative soon involves Secret Service agents, politicos and ward bosses, minor hoods and ordinary citizens, building toward Morello’s downfall. Hubris and retribution figure heavily, as do a slew of second-generation mobsters who had designs of their own, independent of the old-timers. Dash writes with flair and care alike, taking pains to keep a complicated story and a vast cast of characters on track while studding the tale with nicely hard-boiled observations, including, “The one trait Joe Masseria fatally lacked was a talent for diplomacy.”
Essential for students of organized crime in America. Murder and mayhem buffs will enjoy it too.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6722-0
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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