An engaging theory that lacks convincing evidence.
Former federal prosecutor McCallion delves into the alleged ties between a Corsican drug trafficking ring and U.S. government officials in this true-crime book.
The French Connection that smuggled heroin to the United States through Marseille, France, was one of the most notorious drug trafficking operations. McCallion writes that he was curious about how the ring, run by a Corsican Mafia group known as the Unione Corse, evaded prosecution. In this book, he claims to have found the answer. The author is blessed with three compelling central figures in this narrative: William Spector, a former U.S. intelligence agent; his mysterious ex-wife, former model Patricia Richardson; and French financier Paul-Louis Weiller, one of her “mentors.” Richardson, according to the author, decided when she was young that she’d be a Bond girl with “the deadly spy skills of James Bond himself.” After Richardson left Spector in 1971, writes McCallion, Spector tried to expose alleged ties that she and Weiller had with the Unione Corse, alleging that she used Spector’s auto dealership to smuggle drugs into the U.S.: “Paul-Louis Weiller—to the best of my knowledge—is the key financier of the international drug syndicate,” Spector testified to a 1978 Congressional panel. Using this testimony and other records, McCallion claims the Unione Corse owed its impunity to a 1947 “accord” between France and the U.S. and that the mobsters’ “virtually unlimited funds helped finance [Richard] Nixon’s political rise to power.” However, his questionable evidence for this assertion is largely limited to a 1968 meeting in which Weiller agreed to contribute $2 million to Nixon’s campaign. Overall, the book does raise intriguing possibilities. However, it offers conjecture rather than a resolution of “The Major Unsolved Crime of the 20th Century.” In the end, it largely fails to support its theory that mobsters had an “unholy alliance” with the Nixon administration and the CIA.
An engaging theory that lacks convincing evidence.Pub Date: June 9, 2023
ISBN: 978-1737149286
Page Count: 242
Publisher: HHI Media
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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