It’s often difficult—if not downright overwhelming—to keep track of the many players in this story, but aficionados of Mafia...
ABC news correspondent Lance (Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI, 2009) delivers an exhaustive examination into the life and crimes of Mafia capo Gregory Scarpa Sr. and his questionable decadeslong relationship with the FBI.
The author reveals that Scarpa, a notoriously violent killer, received tens of thousands of dollars from the FBI for feeding them information that would help indict several of his rival gangsters. Yet despite his claims that he had killed more than 50 people, Scarpa never spent more than 30 days in jail. In addition, writes Lance, Scarpa was known to J. Edgar Hoover and was recruited to assist the Feds when their methods failed—most notably, in the “interrogation” of a Mississippi Ku Klux Klan member who was involved in the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. But Lance is most interested in the relationship that developed between Scarpa and his handler, Agent Lindley DeVecchio. He asserts that over many years, DeVecchio supplied classified information to Scarpa, which in turn led to the deaths of several of Scarpa’s adversaries. DeVecchio was eventually indicted on multiple counts of murder, although the case was dropped before the trial concluded. Lance delves into the details of the trial through newly released court records to prove DeVecchio’s involvement in Scarpa’s nefarious activities. The book is extensively researched, using personal interviews, letters, court documents and declassified FBI files. At more than 600 pages, it could use some editing, however, especially toward the end, when Lance attempts to connect the story of Scarpa and DeVecchio to larger issues of international terrorism.
It’s often difficult—if not downright overwhelming—to keep track of the many players in this story, but aficionados of Mafia history and those concerned with FBI corruption will find this thorough investigation satisfying.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-145534-6
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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