SATELLITE BOY

Hardened criminal meets the slide rule in a historical true-crime tale.

It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest, as freelance journalist Amelinckx does, that “master thief Georges Lemay and electrical engineer Harold Rosen…gave rise to the modern communication age, forever changing our world.” Rosen deserves the accolade (none other than Arthur C. Clarke said as much), but Lemay is incidental, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time—namely, on a yacht slip in South Florida, where he was spotted after pulling off a major bank heist in Canada. He was spotted thanks to Rosen’s invention of a geosynchronous satellite that allowed for simultaneous communication around the world. When Early Bird launched, the FBI, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard beamed out public-enemy photographs of Lemay, a dapper but vicious fellow, and he was caught. (He escaped, sending J. Edgar Hoover into a tizzy.) Amelinckx delivers two separate books that are thinly joined by that happenstance. In doing so, he makes some good points: Rosen certainly deserves more credit than he gets for having revolutionized satellite technology, for one, allowing the U.S. to pull ahead of its Soviet rivals in the space race, and Lemay makes for an interesting case who ought to have been put away for much longer than he was. After doing time for bank robbery and literally getting away with murder, in the mid-1970s, he got into “the lucrative drug business, focusing on…a more potent cousin to PCP that had its heyday as a recreational drug during that decade.” Well known in Canada but less so elsewhere, Lemay makes a fine study in sociopathy. There are a lot of tangents to work through—e.g., it’s not particularly germane to the author’s yarn that the Beatles used Rosen’s satellite technology to broadcast “All You Need Is Love” worldwide. Still, there are some nice twists and turns.

An average book, but true-crime buffs and historians of technology will find points of interest.