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THE GENERAL

IRISH MOB BOSS

Fascinating and colorful.

Veteran Irish crime journalist Williams exhaustively documents the amazing 20-year career of arch-burglar Martin Cahill.

Gunned down in 1994 in what was labeled an IRA hit, the slum-reared Cahill had risen from petty thief to international celebrity. His penchant for the absurd, especially when confronted by righteous authority, the author suggests, boosted his legend. Addressed once by a prosecutor hell-bent on “exposing” him, Cahill instantly dropped his pants, exposed his Mickey Mouse underdrawers, and danced around in them briefly, as it were, until restrained. Anxious to differentiate himself from drug dealers who had become the target of a Dublin vigilante group known as Concerned Parents Against Drugs, Cahill invents the Concerned Criminals Action Committee to protect the rights of “ordinary, decent criminals.” Williams makes it clear, however, that Cahill was no latter-day Robin Hood. Brutal threats were as much a part of his modus operandi as the elaborate planning of crimes that got him nicknamed the General. He tried to assassinate Ireland’s leading forensics expert, who was set to finger him, and shocked the nation by nearly succeeding. His criminal record included the largest gold robbery in Irish history and one of the largest European art thefts on record. In one of Williams’s most riveting chapters, he shows Cahill stapling an accomplice’s fingers to the floor, then hammering nails through his palms to grill him about the disappearance of some loot; swayed finally by piteous denials, he then pulled out the nails and drove the guy to a hospital. Cahill constantly twitted the cops and got away with it, but his refusal to discuss revenue sharing with the IRA was, authorities surmise, fatal. Energetically told and buttressed by the investigative skills that have distinguished Williams’s work for the Irish Sunday World, this biography, originally published in Europe in 1995, inspired John Boorman’s controversial film of the same title.

Fascinating and colorful.

Pub Date: May 28, 2003

ISBN: 0-765-30624-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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 Yorker staff 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

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IN COLD BLOOD

"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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