Book picks similar to
In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System by Frank Kane
true-crime
crime
biography
non-fiction
The Twins: Men of Violence
Kate Kray - 2000
Married to Ron, she was granted unique access into the shadowy world they inhabited, and was entrusted with some of the darkest secrets they possessed—secrets that could never be revealed until they were both dead. Now with the help of thoughts and anecdotes from the people who knew the twins best, Kate has documented once and for all the life of the world's most famous gangsters, and filled in the gaps with the facts that could not be revealed until now. Gangsters, actors, East End faces—everyone who is anyone in the Firm is here, thanks to Kate's unique access and influence. And in this remarkable book, the Krays' chief torturer, the man who was with them on the night they were arrested, has broken his silence for the very first time.
Street Justice
Chuck Zito - 2002
From Hells Angel to celebrity bodyguard. The revealing autobiography of an American man.Chuck Zito comes by his reputation honestly as one of the toughest, most uncompromising men ever to sit astride a Harley. Now, with tales both hilarious and chilling, violent and truthful, Zito tells his life story in his own words.From growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where fighting was a way of life, to becoming president of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels, to the wild and crazy life of protecting some of the world's biggest celebrities, Zito might be seen as a latter-day outlaw, the last of a dying breed of men. But throughout his tempestuous days, one thing defined him: his unfailing sense of justice, of what's really right and what's really wrong. That's how Zito found himself facing his biggest challenge: refusing to cooperate with a federal investigation into his brothers, the Hells Angels, and in the process losing the very thing he cherished most-his freedom.Zito's astonishing recovery from this experience, and the unique kind of stardom he forged based on hard work and sheer will, is a testament to his courage, his ambition, and his indomitable heart-a testament now recorded unflinchingly in Street Justice.
Smuggler's Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia
Richard Stratton - 2016
A clean-cut Wellesley boy who entered outlaw culture on a trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He became a member of the Hippie Mafia, traveling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favor of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, Smuggler’s Blues tells Stratton’s adventure while centering on his last years as he travels from New York to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine, and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza as his fortunes rise and fall. All the while he is being pursued by his nemesis, a philosophical DEA agent who respects him for his good business practices.A true-crime story that reads like fiction, Smuggler’s Blues is a psychedelic road trip through international drug smuggling, the hippie underground, and the war on weed. As Big Marijuana emerges, it brings to vivid life an important chapter in pot’s cultural history.
Nobody's Child
Michael Seed - 2007
On a daily basis both Michael and his mother would fall under the man’s wrath, and one awful night Michael’s father began sexually abusing his son, a trend that would continue for years. Worse still, the abuse did not stop at home. Once he began school, Michael fell victim to terrible bullying and a teacher who violated him repeatedly. Despite the horror of these years, Michael was ultimately saved by his own will to live, which inspired him to seek a better life as a friar. This is the remarkable story of an individual who, against all the odds, managed to preserve his own dignity and finally escape the horrors of a stolen childhood.
The Hurt Artist: My Journey from Suicidal Junkie to Ironman
Shane Niemeyer - 2014
His struggles with heroin addiction led him to jail, and he eventually hit rock bottom. Soon, his two pack a day cigarette habit was the healthiest thing he did. One dark night in jail, his suicide attempt failed. What happened next transcends the term recovery.The Hurt Artist is the searing yet luminous travelogue of Shane's powerful journey from suicidal addict to Ironman. He vividly depicts the landscape of pain in which he's lived his life—emotional and physical pain inflicted upon him and that he inflicts upon himself, pain that pulls him down, and, in detailing his training, the pain he harnesses to lift himself up. Ultimately, Shane's story is one of redemption and triumph, a lesson in the value of second chances and a clear reminder that nobody, regardless of how seemingly desperate their circumstances, is beyond the reach of salvation.From inmate #71768 to Ironman Triathlon World Championship competitor #1419, Shane paints a stirring self-portrait in this hilarious, horrifying, and hopeful account that is sure to hook readers of edgy sports biographies.
From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054
Bernard B. Kerik - 2015
His résumé as a public servant is long and storied, and includes honors from President Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, and the NYPD’s Medal for Valor for saving his partner in a gun battle. In 2004, Kerik was nominated by President George W. Bush to head the US Department of Homeland Security. Now, he is a former Federal Prison Inmate known as #84888-054. Convicted of tax fraud and false statements in 2007, Kerik was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Now for the first time, in this hard-hitting, raw and oftentimes politically incorrect memoir, he talks candidly about his time on the inside: the torture of solitary confinement, the abuse of power, the mental and physical torment of being locked up in a cage, the powerlessness. With his newfound perspective, Kerik makes a plea for change and illuminates why our punishment system doesn’t always fit the crime. In this extraordinary memoir, Kerik offers a riveting, one-of-a-kind perspective on the American penal system as he details life on the inside with the experience of an acclaimed Correction Commissioner from the outside. With astonishing candor, bravery, and insider’s intelligence, Bernard Kerik shares his fall from grace to incarceration, and turns it into an impassioned and singularly insightful rallying cry for criminal justice reform in a nation that he devoted his life to serving and protecting.
Panzram: A Journal of Murder
Thomas E. Gaddis - 1970
Panzram was born in 1891 on a Minnesota farm and died in 1930 on the gallows at the U.S.Penitentiary, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Imprisoned for most of his life from the age of twelve and brutally punished, Panzram's keen insight into the arbitrary cruelty of his fellow human being is graphically illustrated with a litany of prison abuses, as well as the details of his own sordid, tragic life. Panzram arrives as a gripping warning from America's past to new prison-industrial complex era. The authors add an historical and sociological framework for Panzram's words.
Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland
Amanda Berry - 2015
. . . I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for ten years.” A horrifying story rapidly unfolded. Ariel Castro, a local school bus driver, had separately lured Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to his home, where he kept them chained. In the decade that followed, the three were raped, psychologically abused, and threatened with death. Berry had a daughter—Jocelyn—by their captor. Drawing upon their recollections and the diary kept by Amanda Berry, Berry and Gina DeJesus describe a tale of unimaginable torment, and Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan interweave the events within Castro’s house with original reporting on efforts to find the missing girls. The full story behind the headlines—including details never previously released on Castro’s life and motivations—Hope is a harrowing yet inspiring chronicle of two women whose courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness ultimately delivered them back to their lives and families.
3,096 Days
Natascha Kampusch - 2010
Hours later she found herself in a dark cellar, wrapped in a blanket. When she emerged eight years later, her childhood had gone. In "3,096 Days" Natascha tells her incredible story for the first time: her difficult childhood, what exactly happened on the day of her abduction, her imprisonment in a five-square-metre dungeon, and the mental and physical abuse she suffered from her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil. "3,096 Days" is ultimately a story about the triumph of the human spirit. It describes how, in a situation of almost unbearable hopelessness, she slowly learned how to manipulate her captor. And how, against inconceivable odds, she managed to escape unbroken.
Midnight Express
Billy Hayes - 1977
A classic story of survival and human endurance, told with humor, honesty, and heart, it became a worldwide best-seller and the Academy Award-winning blockbuster film of the same name. In 1970 Billy Hayes was an English major who left college in search of adventures to write about, like his hero Jack London. He had a rude awakening when he was arrested at the airport in Istanbul trying to board a plane while carrying four pounds of hashish, and given a life sentence. After five brutal years, relentless efforts by his family to gain his release, and endless escape plotting, Hayes finally took matters into his own hands. On a dark night, in a wailing storm he began a desperate and daring escape to freedom... This is the astounding journey, told in Billy Hayes's own words, of those five years of living hell and of the harrowing ordeal of his time on the run.
Handsome Devil (Kindle Single)
Jeff Maysh - 2016
His confidence games and sleight-of-hand scams relieved the filthy rich of their cash during America’s depraved Jazz era. He evaded the law like a figure from fiction, slipping into disguise, leaping from jail cell windows, and leaving sneering letters for his enemies at the Secret Service. In Handsome Devil, acclaimed journalist Jeff Maysh brings to life one of the 20th century’s most unforgettable public enemies, "Count" Victor Lustig, a dashing criminal mastermind and counterfeiter whose fake banknotes threatened to topple America’s economy. Written in staggering detail and culminating in a desperate manhunt led by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Handsome Devil reveals the real man behind the myth: A genius who applied his talents to crime, and who kept a loving wife and daughter in the dark for most of his storied career. Set during America’s original financial “bubble,” Lustig’s tale, from petty thief on the streets of Europe, to the most wanted man in the world, is the ultimate parable of American greed.Jeff Maysh investigates outrageous criminal plots and urban legends. His deeply immersive stories have appeared in publications including the Atlantic, Playboy, and Cosmopolitan. His story about the rise and fall of the “Bombshell Bandit” for the BBC was named the best crime story of 2015 by Longform.org. He is British, and lives in Los Angeles.Cover design by Adil Dara.
Stay With Me, Rhys: The heartbreaking story of Rhys Jones, by his mother. As seen on ITV’s new documentary Police Tapes
Mel Jones - 2018
‘Please stay with me. I love you.’
There was still no expression in his eyes. I was talking and talking to him, desperate to let him know I was there, but there was no flicker in his face. In hindsight, it was like he’d already gone.
It's a Wednesday evening in Liverpool in the summer holidays, and Melanie is expecting her Everton-mad eleven-year-old son back from football practice very soon. She turns on Coronation Street and sets about stripping the wallpaper off the walls in the lounge, which is long-overdue a makeover. Suddenly she receives a frantic knock at the door. Rhys has been shot on his way home.From that fateful day when Melanie cradled her child as he lay dying, repeating to him ‘Stay with Me, Rhys’, to the day in court when his killers were finally sent down, this is a story of a family in trauma, of a community united behind them and of how a notorious local gang who terrorised the neighbourhood was brought to justice.In 2017, more than 7 million people watched the drama unfold in the highly-acclaimed ITV series Little Boy Blue. And now Melanie Jones tells the family's unbelievable story for the first time.Melanie, her husband Steve and Rhys’s brother Owen have been through unimaginable pain. The grief doesn’t go away, but the strength they’ve found within it is an inspiration.
In Pursuit of the Truth
Clive Driscoll - 2015
For Clive, it was the pinnacle of a 35-year career with the world’s most famous police force, the Metropolitan Police Service.Clive’s prodigious rise through the ranks of the Met saw him front some of the most high-profile units at Scotland Yard. He was put in charge of their policy for sexual offences, domestic violence, child protection and the paedophile unit before heading up the Racial and Violent Crime Task Force tackling their backlist of cold cases. From action-packed moments chasing down criminals to more tender occasions, like gaining the trust of a murder victim’s family, to making crucial legal history, and unearthing huge national scandals,
In Pursuit of the Truth
is the definitive account of modern day policing, its successes and failings included, seen through the eyes of a man who has dedicated his life to making a difference. This is a book that every part of society can learn from.
Cold Cases: Solved Volume 2: 18 Fascinating True Crime Cases
Robert Keller - 2021
In Plain Sight: A True Story of Kidnapping and Rape
Anna D. Stoddard - 2020