The book will please Mafia completists, but the overall arc will feel more familiar than revelatory to most true-crime...
A straightforward update to the notorious 1978 Lufthansa Airlines heist.
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter DeStefano (Gangland New York: The Places and Faces of Mob History, 2015, etc.) understands the difficulty of opening new aspects of a crime immortalized in journalism, memoirs, and the film Goodfellas: “Of all the Mafia heists, rip-offs, scores, and plunders, none has been more iconic a part of American popular culture than the brazen [Lufthansa] robbery.” The author focuses on the 2015 trial of Vincent Asaro, an aged survivor of the era’s Five Families crews. Asaro, whose alleged participation in the crime had not been recognized, was wiretapped over several years for the FBI by his cousin Gaspare Valenti, another low-level mobster. The tapes revealed both men scuffling for years as their influence faded within the mob, itself more constricted in today’s New York City, as well as the chilling moment when Asaro realized Valenti’s betrayal. DeStefano leads up to Asaro’s trial with a narrative re-creation of the crime, its murderous aftermath, and the notorious figures involved, including Lucchese family underboss Paul Vario, robbery mastermind Jimmy Burke, and turncoat Henry Hill, the protagonist of Goodfellas. The author tries to counter the ambiguity surrounding the crime, noting, “while Hill’s public statements on the heist excluded Asaro...he had actually claimed to law enforcement as far back as 1983 that Asaro was involved.” Following the heist and the murders of many participants, Asaro ran stolen car operations for a Bonanno family crew, finding himself marginalized over time: “Part of the problem was Asaro’s volatility and temper.” Despite Valenti’s testimony, Asaro was acquitted at trial, a startling development. Though Asaro’s connection to Lufthansa still seems inconclusive, DeStefano paints him as a poignant if unlikable character, a criminal journeyman who survived a violent life to watch his status, wealth, and cherished lifestyle slip away.
The book will please Mafia completists, but the overall arc will feel more familiar than revelatory to most true-crime readers.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3830-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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