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 Yorkerstaff 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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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