A terrorist attack on Australian soil. For seventeen hours Islamic State-inspired gunman Man Haron Monis held his captives in a terrifying drama that paralysed Sydney and kept a nation glued to its television screens. Two hostages were killed and three seriously wounded. The others would have their lives changed for ever.Despite the police leadership declaring it was well prepared for a terrorist attack, many shortcomings on the night revealed a response that fell seriously short of that promise. Deborah Snow lays bare what happened behind the scenes in the cafe as the hostages tried to keep themselves alive while waiting for a police response that didn't come. She also takes us into the police command posts as communications, equipment and decision-making structures broke down. Hurtling towards its inevitable and tragic conclusion, Siege draws us into a vortex of police missteps, extraordinary bravery and profound grief to reveal what happened during that awful day. Shocking, compelling and revealing Siege will take its place as the classic account of these events.

    

    1962 LEROY "NICKY" BARNES walks out of Green Haven State Prison. There are an estimated 153,000 heroin abusers in the United States.1977 Two million junkies score $100 million worth of Barnes's smack a year. Sporting flashy suits, riding in a Citroën with a Maserati engine and satisfying a wife while pleasuring a harem of mistresses, Barnes presides over a staggering multinational dealership that pushes dope and launders money with the efficiency of a Fortune 500 company. Despite President Nixon's creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration and New York State's adoption of the no tolerance Rockefeller drug laws, Barnes's operation seems impregnable.How does a small-time hustler and heroin addict end up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as MR. UNTOUCHABLE, the one gangster the Feds can't touch? And how is the future Mayor of New York City Rudolf Giuliani involved? With Machiavellian pragmatism matched with biblical fury, Barnes lays bare his life's remarkable trajectory--a rise, fall and resurrection defined by brutality, brotherhood and betrayal.

    But now in "Shadow of My Father," the real story of the King of the Volcano is revealed for the first time. John A. Gotti, who survived four trials and a parole violation hearing, in four years, without a guilty verdict, now takes up his pen to tell the story of his father’s unwavering dedication to the street, and how, as his son, he entered that life, and then, with his father’s permission, left the life of crime, and put the “Family” behind him to live a legitimate life with his real family. It is a saga of betrayal and redemption, and an insider’s view of how, at times, those who are tasked with upholding the law readily broke it to further their careers.

    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.

    From Simon & Schuster comes an unforgettable autobiography from Mark Arax: In My Father's Name.Mark Arax recounts the incredible events that transpired twenty years after his father's unsolved murder, during which he returned to Fresno under an assumed name and uncovered the startling disclosure that preceded his father's tragic death.

    

    

    16 pages of photos.

    The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and “Lefty” Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge.After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America’s greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the 5, 25, and 100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

    He became one of the ten richest men on the planet and controlled 80 per cent of the global cocaine trade before he was shot dead in 1993.In 1965, a secret mission by Colombian Special Forces, led by an MI6 agent, to recover a cash hoard from a safe house used by a young Pablo Escobar culminates in a shoot-out leaving many dead. Escobar and several of his men escape. Only a baby survives, Roberto Sendoya Escobar. In a bizarre twist of fate, the MI6 agent takes pity on the child, brings him home and later adopts him.Over the years, Pablo Escobar tries, repeatedly, to kidnap his son. The child, unaware of his true identity, is allowed regular meetings with Escobar and it becomes apparent that Roberto’s adopted father and the British government are working covertly with the gangster in an attempt to control the money laundering and drug trades.Many years later in England, as Roberto’s father lies dying in hospital, he hands his son a coded piece of paper which, he says, reveals the secret hiding place of Escobar’s ‘missing millions'. The code is published in this book for the first time.

    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.

    Rick Porrello writes about the important connection with mega-mobsters Charles Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the Cleveland mob's move to Las Vegas, and the first top-level national meeting of the Sicilian-American Mafia.

    Pistone carried out the most audacious sting operation ever, working undercover for six years to infiltrate the flamboyant community of mafia soldiers, "connected guys," captains, and godfathers. Now his unforgettable eyewitness account brings to pulsating life the entire world of wiseguys—their code of honor and their treachery, their wives, girlfriends and whores, their lavish spending and dirty dealings.With the drama and suspense of a high-tension thriller, Joseph Pistone reveals every incredible aspect of the jealously guarded world he penetrated...and draws a chilling picture of what the mafia is, does, and means in America today.

    MacKenzie, Jr., “Eddie Mac,” was a drug dealer and enforcer who would do just about anything for Bulger. In this compelling eyewitness account, the first from a Bulger insider, Eddie Mac delivers the goods on his one-time boss and on such former associates as Stephen ''The Rifleman'' Flemmi and turncoat FBI agent John Connolly. Eddie Mac provides a window onto a world rarely glimpsed by those on the outside.Street Soldier is also a story of the search for family, for acceptance, for respect, loyalty, and love. Abandoned by his parents at the age of four, MacKenzie became a ward of the state of Massachusetts, suffered physical and sexual abuse in the foster care system, and eventually drifted into a life of crime and Bulger's orbit. The Eddie Mac who emerges in these pages is complex: An enforcer who was also a kick-boxing and Golden Gloves champion; a womanizer who fought for custody of his daughters; a tenth-grade dropout living on the streets who went on, as an adult, to earn a college degree in three years; a man, who lived by the strict code of loyalty to the mob, but set up a sting operation that would net one of the largest hauls of cocaine ever seized. Eddie's is a harsh story, but it tells us something important about the darker corners of our world.Street Soldier is as disturbing and fascinating as a crime scene, as heart-stopping as a bar fight, and at times as darkly comic as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Martin Scorsese’s Good Fellas.