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By Changiz Lahidji, Ralph Pezzullo. 2018
Over 100 combat missions, 24 years as a Green Beret—Full Battle Rattle tells the legend of a soldier who served…
America in every war since Vietnam.Master Sergeant Changiz Lahidji served on Special Forces A teams longer than anyone in history, completing over a hundred combat missions in Afghanistan. Changiz is a Special Forces legend. He also happens to be the first Muslim Green Beret. Changiz served this country starting with Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, when he entered Tehran on a one-man mission to spy on Iranian soldiers guarding the US Embassy where 52 US diplomats were being held hostage. Three years later, he was in Beirut, Lebanon when a suicide car bomb exploded in front of the US Embassy killing 83 people. Weeks after that, he was shot by Hezbollah terrorists on a night mission. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led a convoy that was ambushed on its way to Fallujah. He was clearing houses in Mogadishu, Somalia on October, 1993 when a US Black Hawk helicopter was shot down 50 feet away from him in the incident that inspired Black Hawk Down. In 2002, he dressed as a farmer and snuck into Eastern Afghanistan and located Osama Bin Laden for the CIA. Along the way, Changiz earned numerous commendations, including the Special Forces Legion of Merit, Purple Hearts, and many others. Last year he was nominated for induction in Military Intelligence Hall of Fame and cited as “the finest noncommissioned officer to ever serve in Special Forces.” His story is an amazing tale of perseverance and courage, of combat and one man’s love of his adopted country.By Gregory L. Vistica. 2003
The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey is an incredible story and a modern morality tale about a man of compassion and…
promise trapped by a horrible secret.On the night of February 25, 1969, an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Bob Kerrey, led a commando raid on an isolated hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts, one thing is certain: around midnight, Kerrey and his men killed nearly two dozen unarmed women and children. What happened that night and why? It's a terrible secret that Kerrey has borne for more than thirty years. Kerrey went on to do heroic things in Vietnam and later as a politician. Since World War II, he is only Medal of Honor winner to sit as a member of Congress. In many ways, Kerrey's life following that tragic mission has been a struggle for redemption.So is Bob Kerrey a war hero or war criminal? Gregory L. Vistica, who uncovered the Thanh Phong atrocities in a widely-praised cover story for The New York Times Magazine, searches the entire span of Kerrey's life to answer that question.. From his rural boyhood in Nebraska, to his gut wrenching Navy SEAL training, to his aborted run for President, Kerrey's life will become a vehicle for understanding the Vietnam generation shaped in the 50s and sharpened by the tumultuous 60s.The Accused: 13-year-old Derek King and his 12-year-old brother, Alex, Sunday school students with choirboy looks.After midnight on November 26,…
2001, someone bludgeoned Terry King to death while he slept, and set his Florida home afire. By the time the firefighters extinguished the blaze, King's sons, Alex, 12, and Derek, 13, were at the home of their forty-year-old friend, Ricky Chavis, a convicted child-molester. By the next afternoon, following confessions, both boys were charged as adults in their father's slaying. Chavis was tried separately for the same crime-incredibly by the same attorney who would prosecute Alex and Derek, and argue two contradictory theories.The Victim: Their own father.When Alex divulged his sexual relationship with Chavis, the trial took a sensational turn. So did Alex and Derek, who recanted their confession and blamed Chavis to no avail. A jury convicted the boys of second-degree murder, but the judge threw the verdict out. Chavis was acquitted. But the case wasn't over. As more disturbing revelations came to light, as criminal motives became more complex, and as the line between guilt and innocence was crossed, a stunned nation watched in disbelief to learn the ultimate fate of the...Angels of Death.By Keith Elliot Greenberg. 2017
Killing For You is True Crime veteran Keith Elliot Greenberg's shocking, authoritative account of a brutal double murder. A KILLER…
PLOT Twenty-six-year-old actor Daniel Wozniak was unemployed, facing eviction, and deep in debt for his upcoming wedding. So he devised a diabolical plan: He asked his neighbor Sam Herr, a young war veteran, to help him move some things into the attic of an empty theater. There, Wozniak shot Herr twice in the head before taking his ATM card and cell phone. Hours later,Wozniak performed on stage with his fiancée in a local production of the musical Nine, convinced that he had gotten away with murder…A DRAMATIC LAST ACT Wozniak dismembered his victim’s body and hid the pieces. Then he lured Herr’s college friend Juri “Julie” Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment and shot her twice in the head. The police immediately declared Herr a prime suspect—just as Wozniak had planned. But when Herr was declared missing, and his ATM withdrawals led authorities to Wozniak at his bachelor party, the actor was forced to play the role of a lifetime in a shocking murder investigation that would be his greatest—and final—performance…Includes 8 pages of photosOperation Dark Heart tells the story of what really went on—and what went wrong—in Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer led…
a black-ops team on the forefront of the military efforts to block the Taliban's resurgence.For a moment he saw us winning the war. Then the military brass got involved. He witnessed firsthand the tipping point, when what seemed like certain victory turned into failure.This wasn't the first time he had seen bureaucracy stand in the way of national security. He had participated in Able Danger, the aborted intelligence operation that identified many of the future 9/11 terrorists but failed to pursue them. His attempt to reveal the truth to the 9/11 Commission would not go over well with the higher-ups.Operation Dark Heart made headlines when the Department of Defense bought the entire unredacted first printing. The book's revised second printing includes redactions, which, according to The New York Times, "offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that clocks information the government considers too important for public airing." But most importantly, Operation Dark Heart remains a stirring indictment against military bureaucracy and a culture of cover-ups.FROM ADULTERY…Ex-Marine and bodyguard Chris Coleman was a family man with a secret: He wanted to leave his wife for…
another woman, Tara Lintz. But as head of security for the world-famous Joyce Meyer Ministries—an evangelical organization that frowns on divorce—Coleman had to make other plans. TO MURDER…On May 5, 2009, Illinois police received a call from Coleman, who claimed he was unable to contact his family. When investigators arrived at his home, they found Coleman's wife and two sons strangled in bed. Across the walls, spray-painted in red, were various obscenities—the word punished among them. TO LIFE—OR DEATH.Who could have done something so sinister? As Coleman played the part of a grieving husband, forensic evidence at the crime scene told a different story. Key testimony from Lintz afforded yet more evidence of Coleman's guilt—and soon a jury would find him guilty of three counts of murder in the first degree.By Joe Urschel. 2016
It's 1933 and Prohibition has given rise to the American gangster--now infamous names like Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger.…
Bank robberies at gunpoint are commonplace and kidnapping for ransom is the scourge of a lawless nation. With local cops unauthorized to cross state lines in pursuit and no national police force, safety for kidnappers is just a short trip on back roads they know well from their bootlegging days. Gangster George "Machine Gun" Kelly and his wife, Kathryn, are some of the most celebrated criminals of the Great Depression. With gin-running operations facing extinction and bank vaults with dwindling stores of cash, Kelly sets his sights on the easy-money racket of kidnapping. His target: rich oilman, Charles Urschel.Enter J. Edgar Hoover, a desperate Justice Department bureaucrat who badly needs a successful prosecution to impress the new administration and save his job. Hoover's agents are given the sole authority to chase kidnappers across state lines and when Kelly bungles the snatch job, Hoover senses his big opportunity. What follows is a thrilling 20,000 mile chase over the back roads of Depression-era America, crossing 16 state lines, and generating headlines across America along the way--a historical mystery/thriller for the ages.Joe Urschel's The Year of Fear is a thrilling true crime story of gangsters and lawmen and how an obscure federal bureaucrat used this now legendary kidnapping case to launch the FBI.By Carlton Smith. 2006
From 1974 to 1991, someone in the midwestern city of Wichita was leaving behind slain tortured bodies and anonymously proclaiming…
himself to police and reporters as "BTK" for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Then, for the next 14 years, BTK was silent. But when he began sending letters again, investigators would not miss their chance...Stunningly, police arrested Dennis Rader, the president of his church board and the father of two. As a shocked community watched, evidence began to pile up. Then Rader coldly described how he went about "his projects" as the families of his victims relived the horrific scenes this supposed pillar of the community had unleashed on their loved ones.From the tricks he used to enter his victims' homes to the puzzles he sent the media and the key role his own daughter may have played in his arrest, The BTK Murders is the definitive story of the BTK killer. He was, as one victim's family member called him, "a black hole inside the shell of a human being"—and the worst American serial killer since Ted Bundy.This is the story of an author and his apprentice. It is the story of literary influence and tragedy. It…
is also the story of incarceration in America.Norman Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song, his novel about condemned killer Gary Gilmore, when he struck up a correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, Federal Prisoner 87098-132. Over time, Abbott convinced the famous author that he was a talented writer who deserved another chance at freedom. With letters of support from Mailer and other literary elites of the day, Abbott was released on parole in 1981. With Mailer’s help, Abbott quickly became the literary “it boy” of New York City. But in a shocking turn of events, the day before a rave review of Abbott’s book, In the Belly of the Beast, appeared in TheNew York Times, Abbott murdered a New York City waiter and fled to Mexico. Eerily, like Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s true-life novel, Abbott killed within six weeks of his release from prison. Now Jerome Loving explores the history of two of the most infamous books of the past 50 years, a fascinating story that has never before been told.By Rod Englert, Kathy Passero. 2010
Blood Secrets reveals how forensic experts read the story of a murder told in the traces of blood left behind,…
providing crucial evidence that has helped convict criminals who might have otherwise walked free.When Rod Englert began his career in law enforcement, virtually no police force in the world knew how to correctly examine blood spatter. He spent years studying and testing how blood behaves, pioneering a vital new tool that is now a part of any criminal investigation. In Blood Secrets he demonstrates how detectives and forensic experts use blood-spatter analysis to solve real cases.How can the police tell what type of murder weapon was used when the body is missing and all that's left is a trace of gore? How can they tell if a victim was moved, or which person in a room fired the fatal shot? Englert lays out what he's learned on a variety of intriguing cases, from puzzling murders in tiny, remote towns to the highest-profile celebrity trials--including O. J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and many others.Filled with fascinating details of forensic science and real-life CSI stories, Blood Secrets shows the techniques and tools used to decipher blood spatter's code.By Audie Murphy. 1949
The classic bestselling war memoir by the most decorated American soldier in World War II. Originally published in 1949, To…
Hell and Back was a smash bestseller for fourteen weeks and later became a major motion picture starring Audie Murphy as himself. Many decades later, this classic wartime memoir is just as gripping as it was then. Desperate to see action but rejected by both the marines and paratroopers because he was too short, Murphy eventually found a home with the infantry. He fought through campaigns in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. Although still under twenty-one years old on V-E Day, he was credited with having killed, captured, or wounded 240 Germans. He emerged from the war as America's most decorated soldier, having received twenty-one medals, including our highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. To Hell and Back is a powerfully real portrayal of American GI's at war.By Adrian Havill. 2001
Death seemed to be part of Garrett Wilson's life. Both of his parents had died by the time he was…
in his early twenties. So friends shrugged when sadly, an infant daughter, and then a son, succumbed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Six years later, after he divorced his wife, Missy, and married another woman, his former spouse became convinced that their child's passing was anything but natural. Was it cold-blooded murder by Garrett, or a quest for revenge by his ex-wife? Missy's own investigation that led to Garrett Wilson's arrest and eventual trial will keep the reader guessing until the final pages. Havill takes us through each stage of this intricate and chilling story all the way to the courtroom, where the jury's stunning verdict is given. Acclaimed author Adrian Havill conducted nineteen in-person interviews with the accused both before and after his trial. He had full access to both the defense and prosecution teams. The result is an unprecedented look at a murder investigation and an edge-of-the-seat real-life medical thriller that stretches from Maryland to Texas and Florida.The Death of an Heir is Philip Jett's chilling true account of the Coors family’s gilded American dream that turned…
into a nightmare when a meticulously plotted kidnapping went horribly wrong.In the 1950s and 60s, the Coors dynasty reigned over Golden, Colorado, seemingly invincible. When rumblings about labor unions threatened to destabilize the family's brewery, Adolph Coors, Jr., the septuagenarian president of the company, drew a hard line, refusing to budge. They had worked hard for what they had, and no one had a right to take it from them. What they'd soon realize was that they had more to lose than they could have imagined.On the morning of Tuesday, February 9, 1960, Adolph “Ad” Coors III, the 44-year-old CEO of the multimillion dollar Colorado beer empire, stepped into his car and headed for the brewery twelve miles away. At a bridge he stopped to help a man in a yellow Mercury sedan. On the back seat lay handcuffs and leg irons. The glove box held a ransom note ready to be mailed. His coat pocket shielded a loaded pistol.What happened next set off the largest U.S. manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. State and local authorities, along with the FBI personally spearheaded by its director J. Edgar Hoover, burst into action attempting to locate Ad and his kidnapper. The dragnet spanned a continent. All the while, Ad’s grief-stricken wife and children waited, tormented by the unrelenting silence. The Death of an Heir reveals the true story behind the tragic murder of Colorado’s favorite son.By James Brady. 2005
A memoir from the New York Times bestselling author of Warning of War and Marines of Autumn, James Brady's The…
Scariest Place in the World. Half a century after he fought there as a young lieutenant of Marines, James Brady returns to the brooding Korean ridgelines and mountains to sound taps for a generation. It's been years since Brady first wrote of Korea in The Coldest War, drawing raves from Walter Cronkite and The New York Times, which called it "a superb personal memoir of the way it was." In the spring of 2003, Brady and Pulitzer Prize–winning combat photographer Eddie Adams flew in Black Hawk choppers and trekked the Demilitarized Zone where it meanders into North Korea, interviewing four-star generals and bunking in with tough U.S. recon troops, in Brady's words, "raw meat on the point of a sharpened stick." Brady recalls that first time on bloody Hill 749, the men who died there, what happened to the Marines who lived to make it home, and experiences yet again the emotional pull of a lifelong love affair with the Corps in which they all served. Brady summons up the past and illuminates the present, be it the Korea of "the forgotten war," the Yanks who fought there long ago, or today's soldiers standing wary sentinel over "the scariest place in the world." The result is uplifting, inspiring, often heartbreaking, and this Brady memoir proves as powerful as his first.By John Johnson Jr., Joel Selvin, Dick Cami. 2012
The never-before-told story of The Peppermint Lounge, the famed Manhattan nightspot and mobster hangout that launched an eraThe Peppermint Lounge…
was intended to be nothing more than a front for gambling and other rackets but the club became a sensation after Dick "Cami" Camillucci began to feature a new kind of music, rock and roll. The mobsters running the place found themselves juggling rebellious youths alongside celebrities like Greta Garbo and Shirley MacLaine. When The Beatles visited the club, Cami's uncle-in-law had to restrain a hitman who was after Ringo because his girlfriend was so infatuated with the drummer.Working with Dick Cami himself, Johnson and Selvin unveil this engrossing story of the go-go sixties and the club that inspired the classic hits "Twisting the Night Away" and "The Peppermint Twist."By Brian McDonald. 2006
Elizabeth Lochtefeld was a glowing, charismatic and driven woman who'd built a million-dollar fortune in Manhattan before settling into a…
new life in one of America's most elite resort communities. She'd planned to dedicate the rest of her life to charity-and to marry and finally start a family of her own. When Lochtefeld met thrity-seven year-old Tim Toolan-- a tall, strapping, handsome, and Columbia graduate and Wall Street ace who'd made it to Vice President at Smith Barney-she thought she'd found Mr. Right. She told friends she was in love. She hinted at marriage. But soon she saw past the Golden Boy facade, finding a deeply troubled man with a history of erratic bahavior -- a man given to violent mood swings who'd been fired from his position at Smith Barney after trying to steal an $80,000 Roman bust from a Park Avenue antiques show. Two days after she ended the affair, she lay dead on the floor of her Nantucket cottage.Safe Harbor: A Murder in Nantucket is the true story of love gone terribly wrong.By James A. Warren. 2013
An in-depth look at the strategy and tactics of the visionary commander who beat the United States in the Vietnam…
War.General Vo Nguyen Giap was the commander in chief of the communist armed forces during two of his country's most difficult conflicts—the first against Vietnam's colonial masters, the French, and the second against the most powerful nation on earth, the United States. After long and bloody conflicts, he defeated both Western powers and their Vietnamese allies, forever changing modern warfare. In Giap, military historian James A. Warren dives deep into the conflict to bring to life a revolutionary general and reveal the groundbreaking strategies that defeated world powers against incredible odds. Synthesizing ideas and tactics from an extraordinary range of sources, Giap was one of the first to realize that war is more than a series of battles between two armies and that victory can be won through the strength of a society's social fabric. As America's wars in the Middle East rage on, this is an important and timely look at a man who was a master at defeating his enemies even as they thought they were winning.Ash WednesdayBeautiful, bubbly, 20-year-old Kim Antonakos was returning to her New York City apartment after a night of clubbing with…
a friend. A business major with wild black hair, long polished fingernails, and a new Honda her loving father had bought her, Kim took good care of herself and looked forward to a bright future. But on her way home in the early morning darkness of that Ash Wednesday, Kim was abducted-and her mysterious kidnappers would be the last people to see her alive.Scorching BetrayalAs Kim's father, wealthy computer executive Tommy Antonakos, launched a widespread, feverish search for his daughter, he had no idea that her abductors were right under his nose. A cold mastermind had ordered had ordered Kim to be bound, gagged and left in the freezing basement of an abandoned house, hoping to extract ransom from her father. When the plans fell through, he and his henchman panicked, returned to the basement and doused a near-frozen Kim with gasoline, setting her on fire.Burned AliveWhen the fire was extinguished, all that was left of the lovely coed were her charred, lifeless remains. What would drive the kidnappers to commit such a cruel and senseless murder? How did their plans to cover their tracks result in another killing? And how were the murderers finally snared? Read all of the fascinating facts in a startling expose of extortion, murder, and ultimate justice.By Frances Wood. 2007
Unifier or destroyer, law-maker or tyrant? China's First Emperor (258-210 BC) has been the subject of debate for over 2,000…
years. He gave us the name by which China is known in the West and, by his unification or elimination of six states, he created imperial China. He stressed the rule of law but suppressed all opposition, burning books and burying scholars alive. His military achievements are reflected in the astonishing terracotta soldiers—a veritable buried army—that surround his tomb, and his Great Wall still fascinates the world.Despite his achievements, however, the First Emperor has been vilified since his death. China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors describes his life and times and reflects the historical arguments over the real founder of China and one of the most important men in Chinese history.By Werner Otto Müller-Hill. 2011
A recently discovered diary held by a German military judge from 1944 to 1945 sheds new light on anti-Hitler sentiments…
inside the German army.Werner Otto Müller-Hill served as a military judge in the Werhmacht during World War II. From March 1944 to the summer of 1945, he kept a diary, recording his impressions of what transpired around him as Germany hurtled into destruction—what he thought about the fate of the Jewish people, the danger from the Bolshevik East once an Allied victory was imminent, his longing for his home and family and, throughout it, a relentless disdain and hatred for the man who dragged his beloved Germany into this cataclysm, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Müller-Hill calls himself a German nationalist, the true Prussian idealist who was there before Hitler and would be there after. Published in Germany and France, Müller-Hill's diary The True German has been hailed as a unique document, praised for its singular candor and uncommon insight into what the German army was like on the inside. It is an extraordinary testament to a part of Germany's people that historians are only now starting to acknowledge and fills a gap in our knowledge of WWII.