Book picks similar to
Hell's Angels: Into the Abyss by Yves Lavigne
true-crime
crime
nonfiction
gangs
When the Dogs Don't Bark: A Forensic Scientist’s Search for the Truth
Angela Gallop - 2019
With ever-more sophisticated and powerful techniques at their disposal, forensic scientists have an unprecedented ability to help solve even the most complex cases. Angela Gallop has been a forensic scientist for over 40 years. After joining the Forensic Science Service, the first crime scene she attended was for a case involving the Yorkshire Ripper. As well as working on a wide range of cases in many countries around the world, she is now the most sought-after forensic scientist in the UK, where she has helped solve numerous high-profile cases.
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
Stop The Ride, I Want To Get Off: The Autobiography of Dave Courtney
Dave Courtney - 2000
Dave Courtney - the original behind Vinnie Jones's character in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - tells all in his no-holds-barred bestselling autobiography.From the streets of southeast London to bare-knuckle fights; from the funeral of Ronnie Kray to drug-deals turned sour in Holland - Dave Courtney's story is like no one else's.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Misha Glenny - 2008
No one would foresee that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. "McMafia" is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West. To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime's phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. "McMafia "will change the way we look at the world.
The Law Killers
Alexander McGregor - 2009
But only when their rage explodes and unspeakable crimes are committed do we realise we hold them in our midst. Some are unpredictable psychopaths, others achieve notoriety after a moment of madness when a single out-of-character act changes their lives forever. One thing is for certain, homicide comes in many guises - the only thing most have in common is a corpse. In The Law Killers, journalist Alexander McGregor examines some of the people and deeds, which have terrorised Dundonian communities. Having reported on many of them first-hand, he has unique insight into the cases and they are as chilling as they are compelling. The father who wanted to go one better than his double-killer son...and did. The groom who promised to love, honour and cherish both his brides...before he strangled them. The thirteen-year-old who was almost as much a victim as the child she killed. The trail of slaughter that started with a break-in and ended hundreds of miles away after an escaped convict killed again...and again and again.The unsolved murder of the wealthy spinster who led a secret life. The trail of dead women in the life of a social worker who thought he could outwit the police...and nearly did
A Conspiracy of Crowns: The True Story of the Duke of Windsor and the Murder of Sir Harry Oakes
Alfred de Marigny - 1990
Its portrayal of the Duke of Windsor as a Nazi sympathizer--who would stop at nothing to hide it--is sure to make headlines. Black-and-white photographs.
My Mother, a Serial Killer
Hazel Baron - 2018
Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring. The officers at the local police station found Dulcie witty and charming, and looked forward to the scones and cakes she generously baked and delivered for their morning tea.That was one side of her. Only her daughter Hazel saw the real Dulcie. And what she saw terrified her.Dulcie was in fact a cold, calculating killer who, by 1958, had put three men in their graves - one of them the father of her four children, Ted Baron - in one of the most infamous periods of the state's history. She would have got away with it all had it not been for Hazel.Written by award-winning journalist Janet Fife-Yeomans together with Hazel Baron, My Mother, A Serial Killer is both an evocative insight into the harshness of life on the fringes of Australian society in the 1950s, and a chilling story of a murderous mother and the courageous daughter who testified against her and put her in jail.
Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti
Gene Mustain - 1988
As he battles terminal cancer in a federal prison in Illinois, John Gotti, still the acting head of the Gambino Mafia family, is constantly in the news. Once Mr. Gotti ascends to Mafia heaven, he will be worldwide news--and Alpha will have the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on the subject.
Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings: Legends Never Die Updated
Les Macdonald - 2013
Hollywood has so many stories to tell and, unfortunately, so many of them do not have happy endings. From Marilyn Monroe to posthumous Oscar winner Heath Ledger, this book lays bare some of the myths and gets to the heart of some of Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings.
Wicked Intentions: The Sheila LaBarre Murders -- A True Story
Kevin Flynn - 2008
A series of young men had come and gone from the farm over the years, all seeming to vanish into thin air. Now LaBarre was on the run. Eventually she would be caught and would plead insanity. But was she indeed insane — an "avenging angel sent to kill pedophiles," as she claimed — or a vicious, calculating serial killer? Wicked Intentions explores the case in depth, from investigation to trial. As the Emmy award-winning television reporter who first broke the story of the Sheila LaBarre murders, Kevin Flynn is uniquely positioned to unveil the details of the bizarre chain of events that culminated in one of America's most sensational murder stories — a spellbinding true story of obsession and vigilantism carried to a deadly extreme.
Happy Like Murderers
Gordon Burn - 1998
As the true horror of what happened there unfolded it became clear that this was the most infamous series of murders in Britain in the 20th century.'With his first forensic commitment to get behing the tabloid headlines Burn brilliantly reinvents reportorial writing ... Startlingly original.' - Matt Seaton, Esquire'Long, brilliant, horrifying ... Burn researched with great care every detail (my God, the detail) of what went on in the Wests' household over decades.' - Libby Purves, The Times'Brilliant, bleak, unflinching ... Layer after layer, level after level, deeper and deeper, until, at last, a pricture is constructed ... His interpretations make sense. They feel right. They explain the inexplicable.' - Deborah Orr, Guardian
The Last Stone
Mark Bowden - 2019
On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages ten and twelve, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware. The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.
The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia
Sal Polisi - 1994
Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values. And by guys like Sal Polisi. He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power. Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat. In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists. *** I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special. A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory. John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out. From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go. Here’s how it all happened.
A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders
Gary M. Lavergne - 1997
He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. In addition to promoting the rise of S.W.A.T. teams to respond to future crises, the murders spawned debates over issues which still plague America today: domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, military indoctrination, the insanity defense, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and public safety.
Billy the Kid: An Autobiography
Daniel A. Edwards - 2014
Jesse walked out of prison a free man and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Never, that is, until 1949 when he came out of hiding after almost 60 years to claim his inheritance. In the course of proving his identity to a court Jesse told some amazing stories of his time when he was an outlaw but his biggest revelation of all was that his good friend Billy the Kid was still alive. Jesse led a young lawyer to an old man named not William H. Bonney but William H. Roberts who after some consideration finally agreed to come forward and reveal himself as Billy the Kid only if he would help him obtain a pardon from the Governor before his death so he could die a free man. You see, Billy the Kid was still wanted for murder and was condemned to hang. To come forward and reveal himself was to risk being arrested and put to death. This was a risk that William H. Roberts was willing to take. He sat down with the young lawyer and told his story. That story is the one true autobiography of Billy the Kid and told only one time, to one man. This is his story.