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
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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