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Between Good and Evil: A Master Profiler's Hunt for Society's Most Violent Predators
By Roger L. Depue, Susan Schindehette. 2005
The FBI's former top hunter of serial killers shares his unique perspective as both a lawman and a member of…
the clergy counseling convicts--revealing the dangerously thin line between good and evil.Cell 2455 Death Row: A Condemned Man's Own Story
By Caryl Chessman. 1954
In June 1948, 27-year-old petty criminal Caryl Chessman was sentenced in California on two counts of sexual assault, receiving two…
death sentences as punishment in a case that remains one of the most baffling episodes in American legal history. Maintaining his innocence of these crimes, Chessman lived in Cell 2455, a four-by-ten foot space on Death Row in San Quentin for the twelve years between his sentencing and eventual execution. He spent this time, punctuated by eight separate stays of execution, writing this memoir ? a moving and pitiless account of his life in crime and the early life that produced it. ChessmanOCOs clarity of mind and ability to bring his thoughts directly to the page, even within the stifling walls of San Quentin, help make this work the most literate and authentic expose ever written by a criminal about his crimes. "This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America's Most Violent Gang
By Samuel Logan. 2009
Like any American teenager, Brenda Paz spent much of her time with her friends. They would go to parties, listen…
to music, and show off their cars late into the night. But Brenda and her friends belonged to the Mara Salvatrucha--the MS-13--the most violent gang in America, and in addition to enjoying the things that all teenagers do, her friends were thieves, drug dealers, human traffickers, and murderers. A street gang that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the Mara Salvatrucha has spread across the United States and Central America with startling speed, boasting tens of thousands of members. They deal ruthlessly with competing gangs and any members who display disloyalty, often leaving a trail of dismembered corpses in their wake. They are poised to surpass the Mafia as the country's most organized criminal network. And by operating within the insular Central American immigrant communities, the Mara Salvatrucha has been able to easily elude law enforcement. All that changed when Brenda Paz turned informant for the FBI, exposing the incredible scope of the gang's operations. But Brenda's cooperation with the FBI was only the beginning. What followed is an extraordinary story of strength, intelligence, and incredible courage. This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha takes us into a dark and violent world that few people have seen, but is closer than you think.Nailed!: The Improbable Rise and Spectacular Fall of Lenny Dykstra
By Christopher Frankie. 2013
Nailed! is a dramatic biography of Lenny Dykstrathe heroic center fielder for the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies in…
the ’80s and ’90s whose gritty play earned him the nickname Nails. ” Dykstra’s unlikely post-baseball rise in the business world is a success story that is only matched by the sordid tale of his ultimate downfall. From famously receiving financial guru Jim Cramer’s ringing endorsement as one of the best” stock prognosticators, to hanging out with Charlie Sheen and numerous prostitutes, to holding court in his $15 million California home, Dykstra lived a highflying lifestyle. He was the toast of the business world before his litany of crimes were detected and his empire began to unravel in 2009, leading to a conviction and prison sentence in 2012 with more charges pending. Through compelling storytelling supported by extensive research and documentationincluding interviews with many of Dykstra’s friends, family, and business associatesNailed! Peels back the layers of this onion to reveal that the criminal charges of grand theft auto, identity theft, vandalism, lewd behavior, sexual assault, and more are just the tip of the iceberg. This is an engaging read of a sports and business hero gone bad.Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers
By Michael Connelly, Carl Franklyn, Len Cariou. 1992
From #1 bestseller Michael Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the gripping, true stories that inspired and informed his…
novels. Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet. Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.Award-winning nonfiction author Stillman offers a novelistic depiction of the Mojave Desert manhunt for Donald Kueck, a desert hermit who…
shot and killed deputy sheriff Stephen Sorensen when Sorensen approached Kueck's trailer on a routine check. She begins with background on the violent history of the desert region, then depicts present-day Antelope Valley, an hour's drive north of Los Angeles, as a place where loners and outcasts build make-shift homesteads. Stillman's narrative gets into the minds of both men as they navigate the territory of one of the last American frontiers. The book is based on Stillman's Rolling Stone article, "The Great Mojave Manhunt. " Each chapter opens with a b&w image of the region. Stillman teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of California-Riverside-Palm Desert. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)Daughter of the King: Growing Up in Gangland
By William Stadiem, Sandra Lansky. 2014
The only daughter of Meyer Lansky opens up about her life as a wild child of the 1950OCOs, her heartbreak…
and tragedy u including the insanity of her mother, and the crippling handicap of her baby brother - and her fatherOCOs unexpected tenderness. "Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets
By Frank Partnoy. 2009
As the global financial crisis unfolds people everywhere are seeking to understand how markets devolved to this perilous, volatile state.…
In this dazzling and meticulously researched work of financial history, first published in 2003, and now thoroughly revised and updated, law professor and financial expert Frank Partnoy tells the story of how "classical" Wall Street securities like stocks and bonds were quietly eclipsed by ever more "quantum" products like derivatives. He documents how, starting in the mid-1980s, each new level of financial risk and complexity obscured the sickness of corporate America, and how Wall Street's evlving paradigm moved farther and farther beyond the understanding-and regulation-of ordinary investors and government overseers, leading inevitably to disaster.Swiped: How To Protect Yourself In A World Full Of Scammers, Phishers, And Identity Thieves
By Adam Levin, Beau Friedlander. 2015
Increasingly, identity theft is a fact of life. We might once have hoped to protect ourselves from hackers with airtight…
passwords and aggressive spam folders, and those are good ideas as far as they go. But the truth is, there are people out there -- a lot of them -- who treat stealing your identity as a full-time job. One such company is a nameless firm located in Russia, which has a trove of over a billion internet passwords. Another set up a website full of live streams of hacked web cameras, showing everything from people's offices and lobbies to the feeds from baby monitors. Even purchases made in person are still logged by retailers like Target, who are famously vulnerable to hackers. Adam Levin, a longtime consumer advocate and identity fraud expert, is your guide to this brave new world. By telling memorable stories and extracting the relevant lessons, he offers a strategy for dealing with these risks. You may not be able to prevent identity theft, but you certainly shouldn't wait until it happens to take action. Levin's approach is defined by the three M's: minimizing risk, monitoring your identity, and managing the damage. The book is also organized around the different problems caused by identity theft: financial, criminal, medical, familial, etc. , enabling readers to dip into the sections most relevant to them. Swiped is a practical, lively book that is essential to surviving the ever-changing world of online security. It is invaluable not only for preventing problems but helping cope when they arrive.El fixer
By Miguel Ángel Vega. 2021
El periodista que sirve de enlace entre corresponsales extranjeros y el infierno de los altos mandos de la delincuencia organizada…
en México. Un Fixer es un periodista conectado con jefes de cárteles, sicarios, narcomenudistas, cocineros de droga y agentes federales, miembros del ejército y policías. Su labor es abrirles paso a reporteros o documentalistas de Estados Unidos, Alemania, Francia, Holanda, Rusia de todo el mundo, para que realicen su trabajo en los lugares más violentos donde opera la delincuencia organizada en México. Miguel Ángel Vega, periodista de análisis social y director de cine, uno de los Fixers con más prestigio en el mundo, revela en este libro su historia: los peligros que enfrenta para lograr entrevistas, accesos fatídicos, lugares nunca visitados por ningún medio de comunicación. Detalla la angustia que viven los Fixers cuando deben librar a sus colegas internacionales de un levantón, de los interrogatorios brutales y de las amenazas de quienes conforman el Cártel de Sinaloa. El Fixer no es un libro de ficción la supera por mucho, sino el testimonio del reportero apasionado que libra atentados y jamás pierde la fe. No existe otro periodista que conozca tan bien a gente cercana al Mayo Zambada, a mujeres que han visto morir a sus parejas y deciden vengarlos con sus AK-47 o R-15. El autor comparte anécdotas delirantes: una comida con la madre del Chapo y uno de sus hijos; la negociación con matones del Cártel de Sinaloa para que dejen de golpear a corresponsales rusos o encuentros y conversaciones con esposas de capos, narcas, amantes de delincuentes peligrosos. El lector tiene en sus manos las confesiones de un Fixer nunca antes escritas, sin duda, un libro trepidante e incomparable.Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
By Radley Balko. 2013
The last days of colonialism taught America's revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result,…
our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other-an enemy.Today's armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit-which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon's War on Drugs, Reagan's War on Poverty, Clinton's COPS program, the post-9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians' ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas
By Oscar Goodman. 2013
In Being Oscar,one of America's most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The…
Mafia's go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and "Lefty" Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge.After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America's greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the $5, $25, and $100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story--the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.Dogfella: How an Abandoned Dog Named Bruno Turned This Mobster's Life Around -- A Memoir
By James Guiliani. 2015
How did a former mob enforcer become a compassionate advocate for animals in need of loving homes? How did his…
hardened heart open up to the plight of abused and abandoned pets? James "Head" Guiliani was an unlikely candidate to become a passionate animal rescuer. Raised in a religious family in a blue-collar neighborhood, James became involved in street gangs at a young age. By his mid-twenties, he'd become a 6'2" 250-pound enforcer for the Gambino crime family during the reign of infamous mob boss John Gotti. But after years of worsening alcohol and drug use and a stretch in the Riverhead Correctional Facility, James finally hit bottom. It was then that he met Lena Perrelli, who helped turn his life around, providing the love and support he'd rejected in the past. And when the couple rescued an abandoned and abused shih tzu, the second phase of James's salvation began. Lovingly named Bruno, the small dog opened the former enforcer's hardened heart, and James discovered a new purpose in life as a devoted animal rescuer. Dogfella tells how this onetime altar boy from Queens became a gang member, a mob confidante, an an addict and convicted felon--and how he found redemption by dedicating his life to animals. Alongside his personal journey, James shares stories from his rescue missions with Keno's Animal Rescue Shelter in Brooklyn: saving pit bulls from a dogfighting ring, driving through six-foot snowdrifts to reach 200 cats stranded in a blizzard, taking in homeless ducks from Staten Island, and many more. Sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and often poignant, James's story shows how the love of an animal can bring even the most hopeless cases a new purpose and a path to redemption.The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story Of A Teenage Drug Ring
By Terry Williams. 1989
Since 1982, sociologist Terry Williams has spent days, weeks, and months hanging out” with a teenage cocaine ring in cocaine…
bars, after-hours clubs, on street corners, in crack houses and in their homes. The picture he creates in The Cocaine Kids is the story behind the headlines. The lives of these young dealers in the fast lane of the underground economy emerge in depth and color on the pages of this book.The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story Of Injustice In The American South
By John Grisham, Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington. 2017
A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal…
justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent livesAfter two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free.The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system--a relic of the Jim Crow era--failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island
By Liza Jessie Peterson. 2017
ALL DAY is a behind-the-bars, personal glimpse into the issue of mass incarceration via an unpredictable, insightful and ultimately hopeful…
reflection on teaching teens while they await sentencing. Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, ALL DAY recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill-prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths. For the first time faced with full days teaching the rambunctious, hyper, and fragile adolescent inmates, "Ms. P" comes to understand the essence of her predominantly Black and Latino students as she attempts not only to educate them, but to instill them with a sense of self-worth long stripped from their lives. "I have quite a spirited group of drama kings, court jesters, flyboy gangsters, tricksters, and wannabe pimps all in my charge, all up in my face, to educate," Peterson discovers. "Corralling this motley crew of bad-news bears to do any lesson is like running boot camp for hyperactive gremlins. I have to be consistent, alert, firm, witty, fearless, and demanding, and most important, I have to have strong command of the subject I'm teaching." Discipline is always a challenge, with the students spouting street-infused backtalk and often bouncing off the walls with pent-up testosterone. Peterson learns quickly that she must keep the upper hand-set the rules and enforce them with rigor, even when her sympathetic heart starts to waver. Despite their relentless bravura and antics-and in part because of it-Peterson becomes a fierce advocate for her students. She works to instill the young men, mostly black, with a sense of pride about their history and culture: from their African roots to Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. She encourages them to explore and express their true feelings by writing their own poems and essays. When the boys push her buttons (on an almost daily basis) she pushes back, demanding that they meet not only her expectations or the standards of the curriculum, but set expectations for themselves-something most of them have never before been asked to do. She witnesses some amazing successes as some of the boys come into their own under her tutelage. Peterson vividly captures the prison milieu and the exuberance of the kids who have been handed a raw deal by society and have become lost within the system. Her time in the classroom teaches her something, too-that these boys want to be rescued. They want normalcy and love and opportunity.Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing
By Dave Grossman, Katie Miserany, Kristine Paulsen. 2016
The author of the 400,000-copy bestseller On Killing reveals how violent video games have ushered in a new era of…
mass homicide--and what we must do about it. Paducah, Kentucky, 1997: a 14-year-old boy shoots eight students in a prayer circle at his school. Littleton, Colorado, 1999: two high school seniors kill a teacher, twelve other students, and then themselves. Utoya, Norway, 2011: a political extremist shoots and kills sixty-nine participants in a youth summer camp. Newtown, Connecticut, 2012: a troubled 20-year-old man kills 20 children and six adults at the elementary school he once attended. What links these and other horrific acts of mass murder? A young person's obsession with video games that teach to kill. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who in his perennial bestseller On Killing revealed that most of us are not "natural born killers" - and who has spent decades training soldiers, police, and others who keep us secure to overcome the intrinsic human resistance to harming others and to use firearms responsibly when necessary - turns a laser focus on the threat posed to our society by violent video games. Drawing on crime statistics, cutting-edge social research, and scientific studies of the teenage brain, Col. Grossman shows how video games that depict antisocial, misanthropic, casually savage behavior can warp the mind - with potentially deadly results. His book will become the focus of a new national conversation about video games and the epidemic of mass murders that they have unleashed.A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life Unbound
By Kristine Gasbarre, Donna Hylton. 2018
A memoir of survival, redemption, hope, and sisterhood from a bold new voice on the front lines of the criminal…
justice reform movement. Like so many women before her and so many women yet to come, Donna Hylton's early life was a nightmare of abuse that left her feeling alone and convinced of her worthlessness. In 1986, she took part in a horrific act and was sentenced to 25 years to life for kidnapping and second-degree murder. It seemed that Donna had reached the end--at age 19, due to her own mistakes and bad choices, her life was over. A Little Piece of Light tells the heartfelt, often harrowing tale of Donna's journey back to life as she faced the truth about the crime that locked her away for 27 years...and celebrated the family she found inside prison that ultimately saved her. Behind the bars of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, alongside this generation's most infamous criminals, Donna learned to fight, then thrive. For the first time in her life, she realized she was not alone in the abuse and misogyny she experienced--and she was also not alone in fighting back. Since her release in 2012, Donna has emerged as a leading advocate for criminal justice reform and women's rights who speaks to politicians, violent abusers, prison officials, victims, and students to tell her story. But it's not her story alone, she is quick to say. She also represents the stories of thousands of women who have been unable to speak for themselves, until now.The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family
By Sylvia A. Harvey. 2020
From an award-winning journalist, a searing exposé of the effects of the mass incarceration crisis on families -- including the…
2.7 million American children who have a parent locked up.In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist Sylvia A. Harvey follows the fears, challenges, and small victories of three families struggling to live within the confines of a brutal system. In Florida, a young father tries to maintain a relationship with his daughter despite a sentence of life without parole. In Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has led to the increased incarceration of women, many of whom are white, one mother fights for custody of her children. In Mississippi, a wife steels herself for her husband's thirty-ninth year in prison and does her best to keep their sons close.Through these stories, Harvey reveals a shadow system of laws and regulations enacted to dehumanize the incarcerated and profit off their families -- from mandatory sentencing laws, to restrictions on prison visitation, to astronomical charges for brief phone calls.The Shadow System is an eye-opening account of the way incarceration has impacted generations of American families; it delivers a galvanizing clarion call to fix this broken system.We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance
By Jon Fasman. 2021
An investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the police and justice system use surveillance technology, asking…
the question: what are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety?As we rethink the scope of police power, Jon Fasman&’s chilling examination of how the police and the justice system use the unparalleled power of surveillance technology—how it affects privacy, liberty, and civil rights—becomes more urgent by the day. Embedding himself within police departments on both coasts, Fasman explores the moral, legal, and political questions posed by these techniques and tools.By zeroing in on how facial recognition, automatic license-plate readers, drones, predictive algorithms, and encryption affect us personally, Fasman vividly illustrates what is at stake and explains how to think through issues of privacy rights, civil liberties, and public safety. How do these technologies impact how police operate in our society? How should archaic privacy laws written for an obsolete era—that of the landline and postbox—be updated?Fasman looks closely at what can happen when surveillance technologies are combined and put in the hands of governments with scant regard for citizens&’ civil liberties, pushing us to ask: Is our democratic culture strong enough to stop us from turning into China, with its architecture of control?