A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime, sure to interest those who follow mob mayhem.
“He would shoot you in the head over a cold ravioli.” When it comes to mob psychos, Chicago Tribune writer Coen writes, there’s no place like the Windy City.
With players like Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo and Jimmy “Poker” DiForti, it could hardly be otherwise. For decades, writes the author, the Chicago Mafia maintained a unified front, working under “one ‘Old Man,’ a shadow mayor of sorts” and, unlike its East Coast counterpart, holding strictly to the time-honored code of silence. Fortunately for the law, the Chicago Outfit, as it was known, had its share of human foibles. When things got ugly, torn by drugs and power feuds, some of the syndicate’s foot soldiers went freelance. One was Frank Calabrese Jr., son of a powerful loan shark, who provided the FBI with juicy details about such events as the slaying of the brothers Spilotro, young punks doomed by their habitual boasting, among other transgressions. Calabrese acquired these details by secretly recording his father, who was then cooling his heels in the pen, and from the tapes the feds slowly pieced together a decades-long history of the Outfit’s maneuverings in Chicago. When they had assembled enough data, they commenced a prosecution, the legal outcome of which was still unknown as Coen’s book went to press. One telling point of the government’s argument adverted to pop culture: “This is not The Sopranos; this is not The Godfather,” said one prosecutor. “This case is about real people and real victims.” So it was, and Coen does a creditable job of telling about their star-crossed lives.
A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime, sure to interest those who follow mob mayhem.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55652-781-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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