Harmon’s no Breslin. Merely serviceable, this slim tale would have benefited from more skepticism and evidence.
By-the-numbers account of a lowlife mobster and his kin, whose claims, the author allows, “stretch the boundaries of credibility.”
Harmon opens with a telling admission: “This story is so remarkable—and my participation in it so unlikely—that it still feels somewhat surreal to me.” Hitherto the co-author of a celebrity memoir (Elvis and Me, with Priscilla Presley) and books of advice for the lovelorn, the author brings no particular reportorial skills to the tale of Gregory Scarpa Jr., a resident of a maximum-security federal prison by virtue of a long and nasty list of crimes. That acorn, by Harmon’s account, fell close to the oak. Scarpa Sr. was dubbed the “Grim Reaper” for his penchant for killing, and Dad—an FBI informant on the side—thought nothing of ratting out his kid in order to save his own hide. Thus far, no surprises. For all the gravitas of Don Corleone and family loyalty of Tony Soprano, mobsters are not known for their ethical sensibilities or contributions to society. The humdrum story gets a little more interesting at a couple of points. There’s the story of an FBI agent accused of committing four murders at the Mafia’s behest, and one involving Scarpa Jr.’s alleged relationship with a Muslim terrorist inside prison, through which, Harmon ventures, Scarpa was able to glean critical information several years before the 9/11 attacks and pass it on to the authorities. The feds ignored his warnings, however. Harmon writes, in soap-operatic tones, “In the wake of the tragedy of 9/11, Gregory was nearly consumed by rage and resentment. Why, he wondered, had the FBI so completely ignored his warnings?” Why, indeed? We’ll never know, but the author fails to provide compelling corroboration for the jailbird’s claims.
Harmon’s no Breslin. Merely serviceable, this slim tale would have benefited from more skepticism and evidence.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37024-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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