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.

Head Over Heels: A Story Of Tragedy, Triumph and Romance in the Australian Bush


Sam Bailey - 2006
    After months of struggle, he learned how to resume his life as a farmer, running a sheep and cattle property in northwest New South Wales. then he met and fell in love with Jenny Black, an ABC Rural journalist, proposed to her on air, and the rest is history. Jenny tells Sam's story in his own laconic, wry style. By turns romantic, funny and moving, it affirms the strength of iron-willed determination and the power of love.

You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish


Jimmy A. Lerner - 2002
    You wake up in an 8' x 6' concrete-and-steel cell designated "Suicide Watch #3." The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, formerly a suburban husband and father, and corporate strategic planner and survivor, is about to become a prison "fish," or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to begin serving a twelve-year term for voluntary manslaughter, this once nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika engraved on his neck and a serious set of issues. And if he dares complain, the guards will bluntly tell him, "You got nothing coming."Bringing us into a world of petty corruption, racial strife, and crank-addicted neo-Nazis, Jimmy Lerner gives us a fish’s progress: a brash, compelling, and darkly comic story peopled with characters who are at various times funny, violent, and surprisingly tender. His rendering of prison language is mesmerizingly vivid and exact, and his search for a way not simply to survive but to craft a new way to live, in the most unpropitious of circumstances, is a tale filled with resilience, dignity, and a profound sense of the absurd. In the book’s climax, we learn just what demonic set of circumstances–a compound of bad luck and worse judgment–led him to the lethal act of self-defense that landed him in a circle of an American hell.Electrifying, unforgettable, bracingly cynical, and perceptive, You Got Nothing Coming is impossible to put down or shake off. What the cult favorite Oz is to television, this book is to prose–and all of the events are real.From the Hardcover edition.

A Prayer Before Dawn: A Nightmare In Thailand


Billy Moore - 2014
    Billy Moore travelled to Thailand to escape a life of drug addiction and alcoholism. He managed to overcome his inner demons for a time but relapsed after trying ya ba – a highly-addictive form of methamphetamine. Moore’s life quickly descended into chaos, drug dealing and violence until he was eventually arrested and imprisoned in Klong Prem, a place where life has no value. A Prayer Before Dawn is no ordinary prison memoir; it’s the story of one man’s struggle to survive in one of the world’s toughest prisons. It’s also a story of redemption in the most unlikely of places.

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster


Stephen L. Carter - 2017
    When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s, her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who ― together with his friend Dashiell Hammett ― would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed.Moving, haunting, and as fast-paced as a novel, Invisible tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson’s remarkable book, her long forgotten story is once again visible.

Bronson


Charles Bronson - 2000
    During more than a quarter of a century inside, he has gained a fearsome reputation as the prison system's only serial hostage taker. He has spent 23 of the last 26 years in solitary confinement. He has been locked in dungeons, in iron boxes concreted into the middle of cells, and, famously, in a cage like Hannibal Lecter. Yet Bronson lives by a strict moral code and is respected and admired by many prison officers as well as prisoners. In this updated edition of his memoirs, Bronson reveals the happiness behind his controversial marriage to his wife Saira.

John Lennon, My Brother


Julia Baird - 1988
    

The Hard Way Out: My Life with the Hells Angels and Why I Turned Against Them


Jerry Langton - 2017
    He was sergeant-at-arms for Toronto’s notorious Downtown chapter of the Hells Angels, and he saw it all: the drug trafficking, the violence and the structure of the organization. First his involvement with the gang cost him his career in personal security, and then it threatened to cost him everything.Atwell opted to work with the police, becoming the highest-ranking Hells Angel in history to co-operate with law enforcement. Wearing the gang’s colours as a soldier among the men who called him a brother, Atwell reported the Hells Angels’ activities to law enforcement. He risked his life providing valuable information aimed at taking down the club.In the harrowing and revelatory The Hard Way Out, Atwell retraces his days living a dual life as both biker and informant, surrounded by major drug trafficking and the violent, paranoid and increasingly suspicious bikers who stood to lose their livelihoods and potentially their freedom unless they found the rat they knew was hidden in their midst. Written by bestselling crime author Jerry Langton, this is a high-octane true story that will have you on the edge of your seat.

The Diary of a Single Parent Abroad


Jill Pennington - 2012
    Shortly after the move, she discovered her husband had been having an affair and had no intentions of staying in Italy. Despite being in a foreign country with no income, limited language skills, a house that needed rebuilding and three young children to care for, she never once considered returning to the UK. With strength and determination she accepted any challenge, dismantling a derelict house to ground level, digging out a three metre deep well with her hands to get free water and overcoming her fear of the chainsaw to cut the winter wood. When there was very little money for food she made risotto with nettles collected from the roadside. She overcame many problems learned new skills and discovered that money is not important, and the only things in life that matters are health, happiness and her children. Jill's story is delivered with an ever present hint of humour, because, she says, "Without laughter life wouldn't be funny!"

High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler


Brian O'Dea - 2006
    Among the advertiser's references was the U.S. district attorney who was responsible for his arrest in 1990. The O'Dea family is well known in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, where Brian's father owned the local brewery before going into politics. But the family's prominence could not protect their middle son. Abused as a child by his local priest, Brian turned to using and selling drugs for the escape and excitement they offered. By the early 1980s, he was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986, he quit the trade - and the drugs - and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and Brian was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor. A born storyteller, Brian O'Dea candidly recounts his incredible experiences in the streets of Bogota with a false-bottom suitcase lined with cocaine, to the engine compartment of an old DC-6 whose engines were failing over the Pacific, to the cell blocks overcrowded with small-time dealers who had fallen victim to the justice system's perverse bureaucracy of drug sentencing. Weaving together extracts from his prison diary with the vivid recounting of his outlaw years and the dawning recognition of those things in his life that were worth living for, High tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man in the late-1980s drug business.

The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison


Warren Fellows - 1998
    He was consequently sentenced to life in Bang Kwang prison, known as the Bangkok Hilton. This is the story of his 12 years behind bars, the abuse of human rights and the squalid conditions he endured.

A Life of Crime: The Memoirs of a High Court Judge


Harry Ognall - 2017
    Sir Harry Ognall. For many years, Harry Ognall enjoyed a formidable reputation as an advocate at the criminal Bar. As counsel, and later as judge, he was involved in numerous high-profile trials, both in Britain and abroad.Among many cases as a QC, he prosecuted Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. He successfully defended six officers of the Air Force of Zimbabwe at their trial in Harare, where they faced a charge of treasonable sabotage.As a judge, he presided over the trial of Colin Stagg (the alleged ‘Wimbledon Common murderer’), the trial arising from the Lyme Bay canoe tragedy and the trial for the first time in the United Kingdom of a doctor’s alleged involvement in euthanasia.Thoughtful and provocative, Sir Harry has advice for the aspiring young advocate, and invests this penetrating memoir with warmth, humour and understanding. His frank portrait of a lifetime in the criminal law offers unique perspectives on some of the most notorious cases of the twentieth century, as well as fascinating insights into a colourful professional life and the burdens and responsibilities that come with the privilege of high judicial office.

Still So Excited!: My Life as a Pointer Sister


Ruth Pointer - 2016
    When overnight success came to the Pointer Sisters in 1973, they all thought it was the answer to their long-held prayers. While it may have served as an introduction to the good life, it also was an introduction to the high life of limos, champagne, white glove treatment, and mountains of cocaine that were the norm in the high-flying '70s and '80s. Ruth Pointer’s devastating addictions took her to the brink of death in 1984. Ruth Pointer has bounced back to live a drug- and alcohol-free life for the past 30 years and she shares how in her first biography. Readers will learn about the Pointer Sisters’ humble beginnings, musical apprenticeship, stratospheric success, miraculous comeback, and the melodic sound that captured the hearts of millions of music fans. They will also come to understand the five most important elements in Ruth’s story: faith, family, fortitude, fame, and forgiveness.

Defending The Guilty: Truth And Lies In The Criminal Courtroom


Alex McBride - 2010
    A memoir of the author that takes us behind the scenes of Britain's criminal justice system - in barristers' chambers, in the courtroom, in the cells and on the streets - introducing us to its outlandish personalities, arcane eccentricities and its many moving stories of triumph and defeat.

Al Capone: A Life From Beginning to End


Hourly History - 2018
    While opinions of the infamous mob leader varied from group to group, Capone was at one point seen by many as a lovable outlaw and modern Robin Hood. How could this man who ran the most vicious criminal organization in the country become so beloved by the general public? Was it the rags to riches tale of an immigrant that rose from the bottom to make it to the big time that transfixed the nation? Or is it something else entirely? Let us discover just what is it about the life of Al Capone that seems to spark both disgust and admiration in those that hear it.