The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade


Alfred W. McCoy - 1972
    government complicity in global drug trafficking, The Politics of Heroin includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun


Paul M. Barrett - 2012
    police departments, glamorized in countless Hollywood movies, and featured as a ubiquitous presence on prime-time TV. It has been rhapsodized by hip-hop artists, and coveted by cops and crooks alike.   Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, and swiftly adopted by the Austrian army, the Glock pistol, with its lightweight plastic frame and large-capacity spring-action magazine, arrived in America at a fortuitous time.  Law enforcement agencies had concluded that their agents and officers, armed with standard six-round revolvers, were getting "outgunned" by drug dealers with semi-automatic pistols. They needed a new gun. When Karl Water, a firearm salesman based in the U.S. first saw a Glock in 1984, his reaction was, “Jeez, that’s ugly.” But the advantages of the pistol soon became apparent. The standard semi-automatic Glock could fire as many as 17 bullets from its magazine without reloading (one equipped with an extended thirty-three cartridge magazine was used in Tucson to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others). It was built with only 36 parts that were interchangeable with those of other models. You could drop it underwater, toss it from a helicopter, or leave it out in the snow, and it would still fire. It was reliable, accurate, lightweight, and cheaper to produce than Smith and Wesson’s revolver. Made in part of hardened plastic, it was even rumored (incorrectly) to be invisible to airport security screening. Filled with corporate intrigue, political maneuvering, Hollywood glitz, bloody shoot-outs—and an attempt on Gaston Glock’s life by a former lieutenant—Glock is at once the inside account of how Glock the company went about marketing its pistol to police agencies and later the public, as well as a compelling chronicle of the evolution of gun culture in America.

Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor


Ron Felber - 2004
    Felber (a doctoral candidate at Drew U.) recounts the doctor's early ties to criminals during his childhood in the Bronx, his participation in a

Secret Lessons


Don W. Weber - 1994
    . . until his sexual manipulations of his young female students were exposed. This gripping insider's account tells of a popular sixth-grade teacher in Illinois who took advantage of his female students in the darkest case of serial sex abuse ever told. 8 pages of photos.

A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite (Kindle Single)


Adam Higginbotham - 2014
    A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history—and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains. “Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb,” the letter warned. “It will explode.” The bomb maker was one Janos “Big John” Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, California—only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvey’s. And he had roped his two teenage sons—who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of him—into a plot to get the money back. But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasn’t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineering—an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birges’s co-conspirators—as well as never-before-released FBI records—to tell the true story of the race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged. Praise for A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite: “A simple plan and a hell of a lot of explosives pay off in a galloping true crime tale that speaks in the language of ’70s SoCal dirt-bags, dreamers and G-men. Stranger still, beneath the pyrotechnics lies a poignant story of family. Higginbotham’s skills as a journalist and storyteller left me banging the plate for more.” —Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse “Of all the spectacular crimes that plagued America at the tail end of the Me Decade, none was more bizarre or more ambitious than the plot to bomb Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. Adam Higginbotham brings this bonkers caper to vivid life in A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, a tale that explores the very fine line between criminal genius and criminal insanity. You’ll devour this rollicking yarn in one sitting, then spend the next few months regaling your friends with all the astonishing details.” —Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us

Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami


Roben Farzad - 2017
    The wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami's cocaine cowboys heyday--and an inspiration for the blockbuster film, Scarface...

Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland


Jason Lucky Morrow - 2015
    Two days later, the son of one of the most powerful men in the state walked into the sheriff's office with his lawyer and surrendered. The killer's name, and who his father was, would shock the entire nation and make news around the world. In a convoluted story, the mentally unstable genius claimed he killed in self-defense and to protect wealthy debutante Virginia Wilcox-the object of his unrequited love. But prosecutors claimed their star prisoner was actually the mastermind of a diabolical plot in which he would emerge as the hero, win Virginia's heart, and gain acceptance into the Wilcox family by her mega-rich father. Tulsa's high-society murder scandalized the Oil Capitol of the World when the investigation churned up unsubstantiated reports of rich kids wildly out of control. Looking out over their Christian, conservative city, adults imagined sex-mad teens driving dangerously over their streets to get to hole-in-the-wall gambling joints and breast-bouncing dance parties where they would plan big crimes-all while high on marijuana and drunk on 3.2 beer. A tornado of rumors and gossip tore through town, stirring up mass hysteria and igniting a moral crusade to save the souls of Tulsa's youth. When a key witness was found dead in his car under similar circumstances, it only confirmed their worst fears. In a notable year for famous criminals, this case from the Oklahoma heartland received nationwide coverage each step of the way. This true story is not a "whodunit," but rather, a "will he get away with it?" The answer to that question is still up for debate after the killer did something only the bravest of men would ever do.

The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde


John Treherne - 1984
    This history cuts through hype and mythology and examines the outlaws' liberal and dysfunctional sex life, their astonishing ability to elude a 1000-man posse, the contradictory accounts of the mythic ambush that resulted in their deaths and the extraordinary growth of Bonnie and Clyde legend.

Unabomber: How the FBI Broke Its Own Rules to Capture the Terrorist Ted Kaczynski


Jim Freeman - 2014
    When a new team of hand- picked, investigators, devised a different strategy to crack the genetic code that protected the Unabomber’s anonymity, the first task was to begin blasting away the layers of bureaucratic constraints that had plagued the earlier efforts to retrace the trail of crimes. As the rules broke and the bureaucratic restraints crumbled, the puzzle pieces of earlier bombings that the terrorist left behind were found and the puzzle collapsed around the Unabomber like a deck of cards. This is the story, told in the narrative, by the three FBI Agents who led the chase, of how, they broke the Bureau’s own rules and finally captured the notorious Unabomber who had led the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the longest chase in its century- old history.

Accused (Kindle Single)


Paul Alexander - 2011
    The district attorney had boasted, "Anyone can convict a guilty person, but it takes someone really good to convict an innocent one." Did Harris apply a naked choke-hold, or did the district attorney and his forensics team set up Harris?

The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice


Bernard B. Kerik - 2001
    A portrait of the 40th Police Commissioner of New York City details his mission to fight the injustice around him and to solve the mystery of his own mother, who abandoned him forty-one years ago, and includes an afterword about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Last Place You'd Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them


Carole Moore - 2011
    She covers parental abductions, intentional disappearances, stranger abductions, the missing and mentally ill, runaways, foul play, and other situations where people go missing. In addition, the criminal justice approach to missing persons is discussed, as Moore looks at the science of missing persons (DNA, forensic dentistry, etc.), resources for family and friends, national organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and other groups involved in searching and recovering loves ones. Here, readers will discover how people are found, how missing persons' cases are treated, and how and why some stories have happy endings and others do not.

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars


Paul Collins - 2011
    On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio — a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor — all raced to solve the crime.What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale — a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

The Bridge at Chappaquiddick


Jack Olsen - 1970
    First time in ebook. And on its surface, the Chappaquiddick Incident (as it has infamously become known) was a simple but tragic traffic accident. However, its political fallout caused it to become the most speculated-upon car accident until Princess Diana's fatal ride, some 28 years later: Was Kennedy drunk? Was he trying to conceal an affair by deliberately killing Kopechne? Why did he wait for so long before reporting the accident? And who else was involved? Olsen tells the tale with as much detail as was made available to him. Though there is apparently only a single living eye-witness to the accident (Kennedy himself, who described having the "sensation of drowning" on live television a week later), Olsen tracks down the incongruous statements made by others who were indirectly involved... and comes to a potential conclusion which would be difficult to refute. There is no legal evidence of this conclusion, of course, but his alternate explanation of events turns much of the circumstantial evidence into a logic-of-sorts.

Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs


Peter Walsh - 2005