This exceptionally captivating narrative, tracing the glittering rise and bloody fall of the Billionaire Boys Club, lives up to its subtitle's lofty, lurid promise. Joe Gamsky, a latter-day Jay Gatsby, grew up poor but smart enough to win a scholarship to L.A.'s posh Harvard School. Joe became friendly with schoolmate Dean Karny, and the two remained close after Joe (who changed his last name to Hunt) began a stint as a trader in Chicago. After losing millions on speculative trades and being expelled from the Mercantile Exchange, he rebounded, starting a new venture in Los Angeles, the Billionaire Boys Club, with Karny. The two attracted their richest friends from the Harvard School, and soon money was pouring into the BBC coffers for the stated purposes of technological research and investment. Sullivan (whose 1986 Esquire article on Hunt was the origin of this book) expertly details the grand ambitions of the BBC, which seemed achievable for a time. But the boys were greedy, as they candidly admitted to Sullivan; and Hunt's ability to manipulate their parents, along with his Ponzi and pyramid schemes, relied on a constant influx of cash. When Hunt matched wits with Ron Levin, a far superior con artist, the BBC was doomed. Karny provides fascinating details about the BBC's slide into a total amorality, rooted in avarice and almost cultlike devotion to the emotionally contained but charismatic Hunt. The result was the murder of Levin and two others. This archetypal L.A. story, set against the waning '80s, takes a further twist when Karny enters the Witness Protection Program, sending Hunt and other BBC members to jail for life. But Hunt has already gained what amounts to an acquittal on one murder charge, and he is fighting for a new trial on his outstanding convictions. Thoroughly researched and compulsively readable, an essential entry in the true-crime canon. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-512-4
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
Worthy examination of our “smartest” serial killer.
Sprawling cultural history attempts to link the Unabomber’s crimes to his educational background.
“What effects did Harvard have on [Ted] Kaczynski?” asks environmentalist Chase (In a Dark Wood, 1995, etc.), who, like his subject, attended Harvard in the 1950s, felt alienated from the institution during tumultuous times, and later sought solitude in rural Montana. The author focuses on Kaczynski’s undergraduate participation in an “ethically questionable” psychological experiment conducted by renowned behavioral expert Henry Murray during the last years of his covert Cold War research. To Chase, Murray epitomizes the postwar science establishment in his collusion with the federal government on morally compromised projects such as the CIA’s notorious hallucinogen tests, which drew on Murray’s personality theories. The author sees the young Kaczynski—smart, socially maladjusted, in flight from an oppressive family life—as an embodiment of the ’50s “Silent Generation,” seething with rage beneath a conformist veneer. Chase argues that Kaczynski’s part in Murray’s experiment, which by most accounts involved extensive verbal abuse and trickery, may have provoked his eventual homicidal obsessions. Thanks to his unfortunate Harvard experiences (grinds like Kaczynski were ostracized by the preppy students) and the ’50s “culture of despair,” which directly informed his Unabomber “manifesto,” Kaczynski was radicalized well before his graduate study at Berkeley in the late ’60s, asserts the author. Indeed, he already planned to move somewhere rural and begin a campaign of vengeance. Chase is a solid if sometimes dour writer, and does thorough work here, including actual correspondence with the cantankerous Kaczynski. Readers of his previous, highly controversial environmental writings will not be surprised by his contention that, although mainstream academia shunned Kaczynski’s manifesto, its ideas actually presage the coming of a new generation of eco-radicals. While his broad view of educational and psychiatric transformations during the ’50s and ’60s is provocative, some may feel he strays too far from his purported target, the enigmatic, murderous Kaczynski.
Worthy examination of our “smartest” serial killer.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-02002-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A tour of life on the edge with a charming, terrifying rogue.
Reluctant reformed criminal Mackenzie delivers a gritty tale of stunted childhood, vicious criminality, and struggle for redemption, all with the Irish flavor of South Boston.
Born in 1958, Southie native Mackenzie was delivered to and then delivered from a miserably unfit set of parents (“I came . . . from shit stock,” he reminisces), but didn’t have any better luck with the foster system. Beaten, molested, and generally made miserable, the author unsurprisingly developed a strong survivor’s instinct and a mean streak a mile wide. In his early teens, Mackenzie began supporting himself by breaking and entering homes. He indulged his constant desire to fight with plenty of street brawling; detailing how he’d break each and every one of an opponent’s ribs, Eddie Mac reports somewhat redundantly that he “was vicious as they come, a monster.” As such, he came to the attention of mob boss Whitey Bulger. Mackenzie's story of how he became a dedicated enforcer for the man who controlled Southie is full of the standard convolutions of the lives of outlaws. Sometime jailbird, party to various scams, drug dealer, gleeful and dedicated womanizer, conflicted mentor to youth as troubled as he had been, Mackenzie has a textbook checkered past, and the reader is run ragged just trying to remember all the characters the author loved or crossed. His tale is no less engaging for all that, however; the narrative voice rings with energy and brings to life the insular, brash streets of a Southie that no longer exists—though it’s still plenty tough down there. Eventually, Whitey rats him out and it all comes to an end, with Eddie cooperating with the government to avoid prison and care for his two youngest daughters. (He has five.)
A tour of life on the edge with a charming, terrifying rogue.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-58642-063-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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