A masterful work of true crime—and, to be sure, true punishment.
A veteran Los Angeles journalist delivers a searing account of gang violence and its consequences.
Katz, the author of The Opposite Field, engagingly delineates the story of Giovanni Macedo, who, like so many immigrant kids in L.A., didn’t have much direction in life, swept into MacArthur Park as part of “a diaspora hastened by the US government’s geopolitical meddling and the American people’s appetite for cheap and tenacious labor.” By the early 1980s, that area, writes Katz, “had become an immigrant crossroads: America’s new Ellis Island.” Macedo joined the gang that controlled his neighborhood, a fearsome outfit called the Columbia Lil Cycos—part of a still larger and surprisingly well-organized syndicate with perhaps 20,000 members in Southern California alone, as well as thousands more in “at least” 120 cities in the U.S. and a handful of Latin American nations. Macedo began as a gofer of sorts in an enterprise designed to extort protection-racket “rent”—thus the title—from the street vendors of the neighborhood; if he had killed a reluctant customer, he would have graduated to a full collector. But he botched the job, becoming a target himself for a dreadful mistake made along the way. Katz’s narrative serves to explain why so few gang crimes are ever punished, thanks to loyal foot soldiers and a culture “where survival has long depended on forgetfulness.” There are countless ironies throughout, not least that the city government broke the gangs’ power in one small corner of the world by regulating street vending—so that now, with onerous business licenses, “the vendors still had to pay to be policed.” Macedo’s grim story, expertly documented by Katz, cries for a documentary series to follow his fortunes as, after years in prison, he strives for redemption.
A masterful work of true crime—and, to be sure, true punishment.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781662601736
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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