Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service


Michael Bar-Zohar - 2010
    It is also the most enigmatic, shrouded in secrecy. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service unveils the defi ning and most dangerous operations that have shaped Israel and the world at large from the agency's more than sixty-year history, among them: the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the eradication of Black September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility, and the elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists.Through intensive research and exclusive interviews with Israeli leaders and Mossad agents, authors Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal re-create these missions in riveting detail, vividly bringing to life the heroic operatives who risked everything in the face of unimaginable danger. In the words of Shimon Peres, president of Israel, this gripping, white-knuckle read "tells what should have been known and isn't--that Israel's hidden force is as formidable as its recognized physical strength."

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down


Colin Woodard - 2007
    In the early eighteenth century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Blackbeard, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates—former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves—this "Flying Gang" established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote. They cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires, and for a brief, glorious period the Republic was a success.

The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union


Peter Savodnik - 2012
    

Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun


Erik Larson - 1994
    By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another.In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." In so doing, he not only illuminates America's gun culture -- its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists -- but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. The result is a book that can -- and should -- save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate.

The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History


Stephan Talty - 2017
    The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. The crimes whipped up the slavering tabloid press and heated ethnic tensions to the boiling point. Standing between the American public and the Black Hand’s lawlessness was Joseph Petrosino. Dubbed the “Italian Sherlock Holmes,” he was a famously dogged and ingenious detective, and a master of disguise. As the crimes grew ever more bizarre and the Black Hand’s activities spread far beyond New York’s borders, Petrosino and the all-Italian police squad he assembled raced to capture members of the secret criminal society before the country’s anti-immigrant tremors exploded into catastrophe. Petrosino’s quest to root out the source of the Black Hand’s power would take him all the way to Sicily—but at a terrible cost.  Unfolding a story rich with resonance in our own era, The Black Hand is fast-paced narrative history at its very best.

The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists


Tracy Walder - 2020
    In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for weapons of mass destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists - men who swore they’d never speak to a woman - until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks. Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate - and thus change the world. Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts--From FDR to Obama


Mel Ayton - 2014
    Presidents have been murdered at the hands of an assassin. In each case the assassinations changed the course of American history.But most historians have overlooked or downplayed the many threats modern presidents have faced, and survived. Author Mel Ayton sets the record straight in his new book Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts—From FDR to Obama, telling the sensational story of largely forgotten—or never-before revealed—malicious attempts to slay America’s leaders.Supported by court records, newspaper archives, government reports, FBI files, and transcripts of interviews from presidential libraries, Hunting the President reveals: How an armed, would-be assassin stalked President Roosevelt and spent ten days waiting across the street from the White House for his chance to shoot himHow the Secret Service foiled a plot by a Cuban immigrant who told coworkers he was going to shoot LBJ from a window overlooking the president’s motorcade routeHow a deranged man broke into Reagan’s California home and attempted to strangle the former president before he was subdued by Secret Service agents.In early 1992 a mentally deranged man stalking Bush turned up at the wrong presidential venue for his planned assassination attemptThe relationships presidents held with their protectors and the effect it had on the Secret Service’s missionHunting the President opens the vault of stories about how many of our recent Presidents have come within a hair’s breadth of assassination, leaving America’s fate in the balance. Most of these stories have remained buried—until now. Includes glossy photo signature of historic pictures and documents

The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605


Antonia Fraser - 1996
    Antonia Fraser, a popular historian, has delved into archives across Europe to unravel the true story of the plot by fanatical Roman Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I at the opening of Parliament in 1605.

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2021
    Anthony Fauci is a hero. He is anything but. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe. Fauci uses the financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals, and thousands of influential doctors and scientists—whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance, or reward. During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed a shocking story that obliterates media spin on Dr. Fauci . . . and that will alarm every American—Democrat or Republican—who cares about democracy, our Constitution, and the future of our children’s health. The Real Anthony Fauci reveals how “America’s Doctor” launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies. In early 2000, Fauci shook hands with Bill Gates in the library of Gates’ $147 million Seattle mansion, cementing a partnership that would aim to control an increasingly profitable $60 billion global vaccine enterprise with unlimited growth potential. Through funding leverage and carefully cultivated personal relationships with heads of state and leading media and social media institutions, the Pharma-Fauci-Gates alliance exercises dominion over global health policy. The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account


Miklós Nyiszli - 1946
    A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death" - Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capactity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months. Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give this horrifying and sobering account.

Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found


Gilbert King - 2018
    She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who was protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface.Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful, page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.

Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994


David Hepworth - 2017
    Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations.What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had.What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn’t stay the course.In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more.As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn’t just their story. It’s ours as well.

Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers


Gus Russo - 2006
    Presenting startling, never-before-seen revelations about such famous members as Jules Stein, Joe Glaser, Ronald Reagan, Lew Wasserman, David Bazelon & John Jacob Factor--as well as infamous, scrupulously low-profile members--Russo pulls the lid off of a half-century of criminal infiltration into American business, politics & society. At the heart of it is Sidney "The Fixer" Korshak, who from the 1940's until his death in the '90s, wasn't only the most powerful lawyer in the world, according to the FBI, but the enigmatic player behind countless 20th century power mergers, political deals & organized crime chicaneries. As the underworld's primary link to the corporate upperworld, his backroom dominance & talent for anonymity will likely never be equaled. As Supermob proves, neither will his story.Cast of charactersPrefaceThe lawyer from LawndaleFrom Lawndale to the Seneca to the underworldBirds of a feather Kaddish for CaliforniaThe future is in real estate"Hell, that's what you had to do in those days to get by"Scenes from Hollywood, part 1Jimmy, Bobby & SidneyForty years in the desert The kingmakers: Paul, Lew & Ronnie in CaliforniaThe new frontier Bistro days "He could never walk away from those people"Scenes from Hollywood, part 2"A sunny place for shady people"Coming under attack From Hoffa to HollywoodFrom Dutch sandwiches to Dutch ReaganAiring dirty laundry & laundering dirty money Pursued by the Fourth Estate The true untouchablesLegacies Appendices: A-Supermob investments/B-Pritzker holdings/C-Ziffren-Greenberg-Genis documentsNotesBibliographyIndex

My Life in the Mafia


Vincent Charles Teresa - 1973
    

Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down


Robert Fitzpatrick - 2012
    A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country's deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation's most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger.In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington who, in one way or another, blocked his efforts at every step. Even when Fitzpatrick discovered the very organization to which he had sworn allegiance was his biggest obstacle, the agent continued to pursue Whitey and his gang . . . knowing that they were prepared to murder anyone who got in their way.