Richmond-area readers and true-crime enthusiasts will find much to savor in this rousing, vivid report on a shocking crime...
Richmond, Virginia, native and noted historian Richardson (Built by Blacks: African-American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, 2008) vibrantly captures the essence of the infamous Tri-State Gang and how his hometown briefly morphed into a mob town.
In swift prose and exacting detail, Richardson revisits America’s gangster days in the 1930s, focusing on a particularly elusive group of gun-toting criminals who terrorized the East Coast. Richardson also impressively sets the grim scene in 1931 Richmond, a once-prosperous area now ravaged by the Great Depression and Prohibition, circumstances that sparked criminal activity borne out of financial desperation in the region. A criminal triumvirate—Walter Legenza, a sharp-featured, sociopathic felon; his younger bootlegger sidekick, Robert Mais; and Mais’ sweetheart, Marie McKeever—wreaked bloody havoc across Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia as the core of the notorious Tri-State Gang. They collaborated on a series of lucrative robberies and ushered in a wave of gangsterism from their hideout in a Goochland nightclub. Their first serious offenses were the coldblooded murders of 23-year-old Madelyne Whelton and a Federal Reserve Bank mail truck driver. Witnesses popped up amid the senseless bloodshed, which Richardson narrates with breathless precision, and Legenza and Mais were identified as main perpetrators in the gang’s illicit activities. While both were embroiled in dramatic court proceedings, their club sanctuary exploded and burned to the ground; eventually, both were sentenced to the electric chair. The gangsters attempted one last fight for freedom in a prison shootout and a daring jailbreak. Months later, with expert work by police detectives, both men were eventually recaptured and executed in 1935, Legenza remorselessly “surrounding himself with a fog of aliases, half-truths, and outright lies, even with only hours to live.” Richardson, who seems to have taken great pleasure in poring over the events, offers fascinating details about those personally affected by the Tri-State Gang’s wave of violence. Black-and-white photographs of the nightclub, its subsequent ruin, and various other locales are generously sprinkled throughout the text, adding new shades to the history.
Richmond-area readers and true-crime enthusiasts will find much to savor in this rousing, vivid report on a shocking crime spree.Pub Date: May 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60-949523-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The History Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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