Jake Adlestein, an American reporter working the police beat for a Japanese newspaper, begins his true crime story with a meeting he took with two members of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime group.

“Either erase the story, or we will erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die,” one of the yakuza members said to Adelstein.  

Adelstein writes that this seemed like a straightforward proposition.

“Walk away from the story and walk away from your job, and it’ll be like it never happened. Write the article, and there is nowhere in this country that we will not hunt you down. Understand?”

Adelstein understood. In Tokyo Vice:  An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, Adelstein notes that it is never a smart idea to get on the wrong side of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group. With about forty thousand members, Adelstein writes that it’s a lot of people to piss off. 

The yakuza, Adelstein explains, are the Japanese mafia and one can call them yakuza, but many of them like to call themselves gokudo, meaning literally “the ultimate path.”

“The Yamaguchi-gumi is the top of the gokudo-heap,” Adelstein tells us. “And among the many subgroups that make up the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Goto-gumi, with more than nine hundred members, is the nastiest. They slash the faces of film directors, they throw people from hotel balconies, they drive bulldozers into people’s houses. Stuff like that.” 

Although the history of the yakuza is murky, Adelstein explains that there are two major types: “There are the tekiya, who are essentially street merchants and small-time con artists, and bukuto, originally gamblers but now including loan sharks, protection money collectors, pimps, and corporate raiders. Another large faction is made up of dowa, the former untouchable caste of Japan that handled butchering animals, making leather goods, and doing other “unclean” jobs.”

Adelstein writes that the Japanese National Police Agency estimates that there are 86,000 gangsters in the country’s crime syndicates, making the yakuza much larger than theCosa Nostra or any other crime group in America.

Adelstein writes that the yakuza are organized as a neofamily, with each organization having a pyramid structure. The modern-day yakuza have moved into securities trading and they have infected hundreds of Japan’s listed companies.

“Goldman Sachs with guns,” is how Adelstein describes them.

Although the Japanese were my father’s brutal enemy in World War II, he was forgiving and he maintained a lifelong interest in all things Japanese. Like my father, I’ve long been interested in Japan. Although I am hardly an expert, I’m interested in Japanese history, literature, films and music. I’ve talked to a good number of Japanese men and women who have visited here over the years, and I visited Sasebo and Nagasaki many years ago when I was in the Navy. I have fond memories of my time in Japan.

And as a student of crime and a crime reporter and columnist, I’ve long been interested in the yakuza. Tokyo Vice is a good addition to my library.   

Tokyo Vice reads like a crime thriller, with Adelstein narrating the tale in a noir-style voice. The book also contains a good bit of self-deprecating humor. He is very open about his personal life, although parts of which I could have done without knowing about.

Adelstein tells an interesting story about a nice Jewish boy from Missouri who travels to Japan to study Buddhism and the marital arts and becomes the only American to write for the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper.

Adelstein’s father was a county coroner so he was always interested in crime and what he calls the dark side of the human condition. This interest led to his becoming a reporter covering Japan’s world of crime.

Adelstein covered many stories about murder, prostitution, the sex slave trade, drugs, and assorted crimes. He befriended a Japanese police officer who guided him through Japan’s complicated culture and the ways of the yakuza.

I found his stories about the Japanese cops, who lack the authority American cops have in fighting organized crime, to be the most interesting part of the book. His mentoring cop friend accompanied him to his meeting with the yakuza who threatened his life.

The story that led to his being threatened was a case concerning a yakuza boss named Tadamasa Goto. In Tokyo Vice we learn that this boss informed on his own organization to the FBI in order to receive a liver transplant in America, jumping ahead of American citizens on the waiting list. (So much for Japan’s universal health care. Look at the lengths a powerful crime boss went to come to America for our health care system).

Adelstein wisely did not publish the story in the Japanese press, but he left Japan and published Tokyo Vice in America.

Tokyo Vice is a fascinating book and I recommend it if you’re interested in Japan, Japanese organized crime, and a very good crime story.    

I was told that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was thrilled with being a naval intelligence officer back in 1964. James Bond-mania was in full swing and Fay was a big fan of the novels and films.

Fay was pleased to learn that his true-life hero, the late President John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, was also a fan of the novels and once dined with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming.

Fay, a thin, baby-faced young man of 28, was stationed in San Diego, California in 1964. His assignment was to coordinate intelligence with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police concerning a Mexican crime lord suspected of smuggling vast amounts of narcotics into the United States via a fleet of merchant ships.

Fay thought this was the stuff of thrillers. He loved traveling down to Tijuana, Mexico in his “civies,” his civilian clothes, for meetings with the FBN and the Federalies. He told friends that after the Friday meetings, he would drink in local bars, admire the senoritas, and dream of his budding naval career. 

According to the Navy’s investigating officer’s report, it was after one of these meetings that Fay stepped out of a Tijuana bar and was abducted.

Witnesses reported that Fay was accosted by two pistoleros as he left the bar. The two gunmen beat Fay into unconsciousness and pushed him into the cab of a truck. A FBN informant later reported that Fay was taken to a ranch outside Tijuana. He was tied and bound to a chair in a dark room and then revived. The two gunmen, identified by the informant only as Pedro and Alfredo, began to beat Fay.

Off to the side of the room stood a heavy, thick-set man with a large, flat face that Fay no doubt recognized from the numerous surveillance photos he had viewed the previous months. The man was Neron Rodrigo, the crime lord targeted by the FBN and the Mexican police. Next to Rodrigo stood the stunningly beautiful Mexican girl that Fay and the FBN agents often lusted over in the photos.

Fay’s beating was severe and he eventually answered all of their questions. With a nod from Rodrigo, the two men picked up Fay and dragged him out of the house and stood him against the fence of a bull pen.

“Do you like the bulls?” the informant reported that Rodrigo asked Fay. “Do you come to Mexico for the girls or the bulls?”

The two gunmen laughed loudly as they bound Fay’s hands tightly behind his back.

“Like most of you gringos, you no doubt call them bull fights, but it is not a fight. It is a “dance” - a dangerous dance with the bull,” Rodrigo explained patiently to the beaten and bleeding naval officer. “And you, my stupid young friend, chose to dance with the wrong bull - me. Now you must dance with this other bull.”

Rodrigo motioned towards the bull pen with his right thumb and the two gunmen lifted Fay and tossed him over the fence.       

With his hands tied behind him, Fay had difficulty getting to his feet, but despite his wounds from the beating, the young officer was up and moving as the powerful black bull charged. The bull slammed and tore into Fay’s back and Fay was spun violently and fell to the ground. He lay in a twisted heap, trying to catch his breath.

His abductors leaned on the fence and cheered the bull. Standing a few feet back from the pen, the girl was expressionless. Fay somehow summoned the strength to get on his feet and move, but the bull charged again and one of the ferocious animal’s horns tore into Fay’s left leg, splitting it open from ankle to knee. Fay let out a chilling scream and collapsed to the ground.

The bull loomed over Fay, pummeling him as he lay helpless and semi-conscious, his wounds bleeding profusely into the sand. With a wave from Rodrigo, the man called Pedro distracted the bull as Alfredo jumped in and dragged Fay out of the pen. Rodrigo cursed the young officer and delivered a severe kick to Fay’s head.

“Toss him in the street as a message,” Rodrigo told his pistoleros. “I want everyone to know that it will take a stronger man to dance with this bull.’  

Fay’s broken, bloody and torn body was thrown into the street from a speeding truck. The Tijuana police recovered the body and upon discovering his Navy dog tags, notified the U.S. Navy in San Diego.

In 1970, six years after Fay’s body was discovered, I was an 18-year-old enlisted sailor serving aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. The aircraft carrier was home-ported in San Diego and we were going to sea every Monday through Friday, performing sea trials, damage control drills and air operations in preparation of our upcoming combat cruise to Vietnam. When the carrier returned to port in San Diego for the weekends, many of the Kitty Hawk’s 5,000 men, myself included, ventured down to neighboring Tijuana for the wild and crazy nightlife.

There were at least a dozen cautionary tales circulating at the time that illustrated how Tijuana was truly a rough town. I recall one often-told, particularly gruesome and seemingly far-fetched story of a Navy officer who was gored to death by a bull and then dumped unceremoniously into the street.

The story was true, I recently discovered. I read the Navy’s investigation report and I heard the details of the decades-old murder directly from the Navy’s investigating officer. The Navy appointed an unusual officer to investigate the grisly murder in Mexico. The Navy sent a frogman.

Admiral Gordon Gray was walking history. Affectionately called “the old frogman,” Gray was a legend in the U.S. Navy. Over the course of a 50-year career, rising from seaman to admiral, Gray saw combat in three major wars and more than a dozen conflicts around the globe.

Gray was a pioneer in naval special operations and unconventional warfare and he was influential in the development of the U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air and Land). He was one of the first Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogmen in WWII and he was one of the first UDT men to be commissioned as a Navy SEAL.

Gray was the founder and first commanding officer of the Navy’s elite SEAL Special Security Team, code-named “Blue Moray.” Serving as a troubleshooter for the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Gray and his Blue Moray team performed a wide variety of special action missions.

I first heard of Gray from my late father, who was a Navy chief and UDT frogman during WWII. My father, who was medically discharged after the war due to combat injuries, often spoke proudly of his former teammate. He told me that he was very pleased when he read my letter describing a brief encounter I had with Gray when he came aboard the Kitty Hawk in 1971 when the carrier was anchored in Da Nang Harbor in South Vietnam.    

I became a writer some years after leaving the Navy. In addition to my crime column, I’m also a contributing editor to National Security, a national monthly magazine. While on assignment for National Security, I interviewed a good number of WWII UDT veterans and active duty Navy SEALS for a piece on the UDT frogmen of WWII and how those first frogmen influenced the modern-day Navy SEALs.   

One of the old UDT veterans told me that he served with both my father and Gray. He said he was still in touch with the retired and reclusive admiral, and although Gray did not grant interviews, he gave me the admiral’s e-mail address so I could contact him and attempt to draw him out.

I e-mailed Gray and requested an interview. I wrote that I felt he owed it to history and his former teammates to speak publicly about his career. I noted that many of the men he served with, like my father, had passed on.

It must have been a good pitch, as Gray called me a short while later. In an hour-long telephone conversation, he said he fondly remembered my late father. He told a couple of stories about serving under my father as UDT 5 hit the Japanese-held beaches of Saipan, Tinian and Leyte Gulf.

“We swam ashore, wearing swim trunks, facemask and coral shoes, and we went up against 40,000 enemy Japanese soldiers, armed only with a satchel of explosives and our K-Bar knives,” Gray said proudly.

He laughed when he also recalled my father getting him out of jail in Hawaii after he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

“My father told me that he knew every police sergeant in Hawaii,” I said.

Gray laughed at the memory of his old chief convincing police sergeants to let the frogmen out of jail so they could go back into combat. Gray also recalled visiting the Kitty Hawk in Vietnam many years later and talking to a number of young sailors, one of whom, I informed him, was me.  

Gray said he did not normally grant interviews, but he checked me out with friends and read some of my columns and my magazine pieces, including the story on UDT and the modern SEALs. So due to my Navy background and with respect for my father, Gray consented to a series of exclusive interviews with me. I looked forward to interviewing Admiral Gray about his amazing life, as I saw him as a modern-day Horatio Hornblower.  

We arranged to meet two weeks later in Washington D.C. where he was scheduled to address a terrorism conference. 

I took the train from Philadelphia to Washington and attended the conference, which was located in the main ballroom of a Washington hotel. I sat in the front row as Gray spoke before a group of military, law enforcement and security professionals. I saw that Gray maintained his military bearing and command presence despite his advanced age and civilian attire. The audience, I could see, were in awe of the legendary admiral. After his speech, Gray shook a few hands, briefly talked to a few old friends and then asked me to follow him.

We took an elevator up to his room. As I set up my tape recorder and laid my notebook and pen on a table, Gray called room service and ordered a pot of coffee. The admiral, a big man with short-cropped iron gray hair and a tanned and deeply lined face, looked fit and healthy for a man in his late 80s. He offered me a cigar in a deep, rich voice that a stage actor or military drill instructor would envy.        

Now I’m a proud Navy veteran, an unabashed patriot and a big supporter of the military, but even after all these years, I still possess my old enlisted man’s distrust of military brass. Yet, there was something genuine and down-to-earth about this old admiral.

Gray picked a box up from the floor and slid it across the table towards me. I opened it and saw that it contained records, files and photographs. The box, one of two dozen I would eventually receive, contained Blue Moray’s declassified official Command History during the years that Gray commanded the team. The box also contained various other declassified documents and reports. Gray said he cleared the records with the Navy and they could now be released to me.

I sat across the table from Gray, both of us smoking his good cigars and drinking good, strong, Navy-style coffee. I looked over a batch of photos that I pulled out of the box, some of which were marked ”Mexico, 1964″ and showed Gray as a younger, leaner, dark-haired and ruggedly handsome man.

I knew the public legend, but I asked Gray to begin our talks by providing a brief overview of his life and career before we concentrated on a specific time or incident in his life to cover in this initial session.

Admiral Gordon Gray looked uncomfortable talking about himself, but he took a long draw from his cigar and soldiered on to say that like me, he was born in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. His father, a Navy veteran who worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, instilled in him a love for the Navy and a love of country.

Gray went on to say that he enlisted in the Navy at 17 and was sent to serve on a PT boat in the Philippine Islands prior to the outbreak of WWII. During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Gray’s PT boat was hit with a shell during an engagement with a Japanese destroyer. Blown clear off the boat and into the night’s choppy, black water, Gray quickly recovered and discovered that he was the sole survivor of the PT boat crew. Gray, an all-round athlete who boxed for the squadron, was an excellent swimmer and he easily swam ashore. With only minor injuries, he sat on the beach and watched the naval battle rage.

Refusing to surrender to the Japanese occupying forces, Gray joined the American and Filipino guerrilla bands that were forming an active resistance. The young seafarer learned new skills such as guerrilla warfare and the art of espionage. The guerrillas harassed and spied on the occupying Japanese forces, providing vital information via the radio to the American forces in Australia.

Gray excelled in performing acts of sabotage as he became proficient with explosives. He earned a reputation as a fearless guerrilla fighter and a skillful intelligence operative. Gray grimaced when he noted that the American and Filipino guerrillas knew him as “Kid Tiger,” his nickname from his pre-war boxing bouts.

In his last act as a guerrilla in the Philippines, Gray dropped silently from a fishing boat, swam ashore and penetrated deep inside an enemy garrison. Once inside the garrison he sought out a particularly vicious Japanese Colonel. Armed only with his K-Bar knife, Gray took the brutal Japanese officer in swift and close combat, killing him soundlessly. He then escaped back into the sea and swam to the fishing boat without alerting the Japanese guards.

The Japanese mounted a massive manhunt for the Colonel’s executioner. Gray hid out, but he was betrayed by a close Filipino friend in the guerrilla band and he was captured by the Japanese. Defiant in the face of torment and constant beatings, Gray was shipped back to Japan as a special prisoner on a Japanese ship.

Only a chance torpedo from an American submarine spared him the fate of being executed in Japan or spending the rest of the war as a prisoner. Once again, Gray found himself in the Pacific Ocean, amid wreckage and debris, alive and treading water.   

Gray was picked up by the American submarine and after he changed into dry clothes, he was examined by a medical corpsman and then given dinner. After dinner he had coffee with a naval intelligence officer that happened to be a passenger aboard the submarine. Considering Gray’s skills and experiences with swimming and explosives, the intelligence officer recommended that Gray volunteer for a new, classified, elite outfit he heard was forming back in Florida.

“That elite outfit was UDT,” Gray said.       

Gray served as a UDT frogman in the Pacific for the rest of WWII. Twenty-four hours before General McArthur waded ashore in triumphant return to the Philippines, Gray, along with my father and other members of UDT 5, swam in and performed night reconnaissance of the shoreline and later planted explosives to clear the way for the forthcoming amphibious landings. Gray had made this swim once before, but this time he was at the spearhead of a mighty invasion force.

Gray remained in UDT after the war and he later fought in the Korean War, where he earned an officer’s commission as an Ensign. In later years he served as an advisor to the Philippine military during the Huk rebellion and served as an advisor to the South Vietnamese early in the Vietnam War.

While serving on the CNO’s staff in the late 1950s, Gray, like a number of other special operations veterans, recommended expanding the mission of the UDT frogmen. When President Kennedy, the Ian Fleming fan, later ordered the Navy to develop a Special Forces outfit akin to the Army’s Green Berets, some of Gray’s ideas were adapted in the formation of the SEALs (Sea, Air and land).

In 1961 the Navy selected a small group of UDT officers and enlisted men and commissioned them as SEALs. The men were formed into SEAL Team One on the West Coast and SEAL Team Two on the East Coast. Gray and another small group of UDT men were also commissioned as SEALs and they formed the SEAL Special Security Team - Blue Moray - with Gray in command.  

Gray returned to Vietnam with his new team and served several tours-of-duty. Blue Moray would go on to target terrorists, guerrillas, criminals and spies around the world for the next four decades under Gray. All though its current missions are highly classified, I knew that Blue Moray remains active today under another commanding officer.

Despite his often grim and hazardous duty, or perhaps because of it, Gray was typical of the young men in the Navy at the time. He had a reputation as a fun-loving, hell-raising, hard-drinking, and girl-chasing sailor. Gray modified his personal behavior when he married late in his life. He and his wife had a son who was now a serving naval officer.

Although Gray did not mention it, I knew that among his many medals and citations, he was awarded the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars.      

Concluding the overview of his career, Gray said that he wanted to begin our interview sessions with a story of an operation in Mexico in 1964. He spoke of being sent to Tijuana, Mexico in response to the murder of a young Navy officer

“Our target was an international criminal with his own private navy.” Gray said.

Gray began to recount a meeting he attended at the Pentagon in 1964. Gray, then a lieutenant commander, was called to the meeting by Captain James Moore, a special assistant to the CNO. Moore, a short, thin, gruff former combat submariner, told Gray that the CNO wanted him to attend a meeting with a FBN official. 

The federal drug agent came to the Pentagon to brief Moore on the vicious murder of Fay in Mexico. The CNO was furious about the murder and wanted action. His order to send for “the frogman” was a clear indication of that.

Fay provided valuable assistance to the FBN by coordinating the tracking of the drug smugglers’ ships at sea by the U.S. Navy’s ships and aircraft, FBN Special Agent Tom Cobb told Moore and Gray.

Cobb, a stocky man with short brown hair and a tight-fitting, rumbled black suit, looked every bit like a hard-nosed, world-weary cop. Cobb began the briefing, occasionally glancing at the folder in front of him.   

“We know that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Neron Rodrigo,” Cobb told the two naval officers sitting across from him. “Rodrigo is an international shipping magnate, but we also believe he is a major drug smuggler and a psychotic killer.”

Cobb went on to say that Rodrigo’s shipping line provided cover for his crime empire. He was well known in the criminal world for his strength, deadly skills and a bull-like physique. Rodrigo made wide use of murder, violence, intimidation, bribery and corruption to protect his growing legitimate and criminal enterprises.   

Rodrigo had criminal partners all over the world and the FBN received information from confidential informants that Rodrigo was in the process of establishing a partnership with Carlos Mendez, a major drug supplier in Mexico and American organized crime in the Western United States. This partnership, if established, Cobb explained, would flood the U.S. with heroin. Heroin addiction, the agent explained to the naval officers, was a growing national crisis.      

Cobb helped himself to a class of water from the pitcher on the table. He took a huge gulp as if to wash down the distasteful story he had to tell the Navy officers. 

“Rodrigo was a Tijuana street urchin with a nasty reputation for targeting American sailors,” Cobb explained. “His mother worked the bars and entertained sailors and when Rodrigo became a teenager he would rob and assault sailors at knife-point, often stabbing them simply for his pleasure.” 

According to the Mexican police, Rodrigo hates Americans in general and American sailors in particular due to one young sailor who refused to be a victim. Although the sailor had been staggering drunk when he left a Tijuana bar, closely followed by Rodrigo, the sailor was able to quickly disarm Rodrigo and knocked him out.

“He dragged Rodrigo back to the bar and dropped him in the doorway like a sack of mail,” Cobb said bluntly.

Rodrigo was deeply humiliated and he soon extracted his revenge by targeting an unfortunate American sailor who was walking tipsily down a back street. Rodrigo, ever-armed with a knife, savagely murdered the sailor. The Mexican police went all out to arrest Rodrigo, but thanks to a rising young drug kingpin - his future Mexican partner, the Mexican police suspect - he was spirited away on a cargo ship heading to South American ports-of-call.    

Rodrigo became a merchant seaman and over the years he became involved with criminal organizations in several countries, acting first as a smuggler and later as a paid contract killer for the various crime syndicates. His reputation steadily grew and he invested his considerable criminal earnings into a small shipping line. His shipping holdings were now so clouded in foreign registries and fronts that investigators did not know exactly what he owned or controlled, but they believed his holdings to be vast.   

Cobb passed out surveillance photos to Moore. Moore glanced at them with a disdainful look and passed them to Gray. Gray saw that Rodrigo was in his early 50s and was a big, thick and heavy man. His powerful arms and torso stretched against his shirt. He had a flattened face, slicked back black hair and pitted-olive skin. He was by no means handsome, but with him in nearly every photo was a stunning, raven-haired beauty. Gray wondered who she was.  

“Her name is Adoncia Prado,” Cobb offered, reading Gray’s mind. “She is Rodrigo’s girlfriend.”

According to their sources, Cobb continued, Rodrigo reacted angrily to the news that American narcotic agents brought in the U.S. Navy to perform naval and air surveillance of his ships. Rodrigo, the sources say, personally supervised the torture and murder of Fay. He bragged about the murder to his chief lieutenants. Although FBN sources were willingly to provide information about the crime, they could not, or would not, testify against Rodrigo in a Mexican or American court.

Cobb said that America had a strong ally in Mexico with Commandante Gregorio Alvero of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. Alvero was an incorruptible police officer who supervised a small, tough squad of drug raiders.

Cobb said that Alvero was a fearless career policeman with a keen sense of humor that infuriated the criminals he pursued, such as Rodrigo.

As Gray listened, he stole another glance at the young woman’s photo. She possessed an angelic face, but Gray also detected an underlying toughness.  

When the briefing ended, Captain Moore was clearly angered. He slapped the wood table and stood up. He chewed on a wet, slim cigar for a moment, as if he were chewing on his next words.

“This man - this murderer,” he said slowly, spitting out bits of cigar leaf that hit the table top. “He is a clear threat to American national security. Why, he’s a damn criminal with his own damn navy!”

Moore ordered Gray to assist the FBN and the Mexican police in the murder investigation and take-down of Rodrigo. Another officer had been assigned to provide naval surveillance support to the federal drug cops, but he would remain safely in San Diego.

Cobb thanked the captain. Cobb handed Gray his business card and asked him to call later in the day. Cobb then gathered up his files and left the conference room. 

Moore handed Gray his signed orders, which read, “You are appointed as an investigating officer and charged with inquiring into all the pertinent facts and circumstances leading to and connected with the murder of Lieutenant Edwin Fay, USN.” 

“He may have gotten away with killing one American sailor when he was a teenage Tijuana street rat,” Moore told Gray. “But he sure as hell will not skate on Fay’s murder. You make sure of that.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

As they left the conference room and walked down the Pentagon passageway, Moore advised Gray to remember the Barbary War.

“The American Navy has fought pirates before,” Moore growled.

End of Part One

Back in the early 1970s I was stationed in Southern California while serving in the Navy. Although I’m a die-hard South Philly guy, I loved my time on the West Coast.

I particularly loved my weekends in Los Angeles, a city I read about as a teenager in the novels of Raymond Chandler and was at that time reading about the city in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh. I had also seen LA as a backdrop in a good number of movies and TV shows growing up. From crime stories to tales of Hollywood, LA was almost a mythical place to me.

I was not disappointed. As a young guy, I liked the wild night life and the happening - to use an expression from the time - atmosphere of the city. The 1960s had technically ended, but one still sensed that the era of free love, rock music and cool movies was still alive in LA. It was a great city to visit when you’re young, free and have a few bucks in your pocket.

So with my fond memories of Los Angeles I looked forward to reading L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City by John Buntin (Harmony).

Buntin hit upon a clever way to tell the story of Los Angeles. Bunton offers a history of the city through the classic rivalry of LA’s police chief, William H. Parker, and mobster Meyer “Mickey” Cohen.

Taking us back to the early and mid-20^th Century, Buntin recounts Los Angeles’ sordid history of hoods, crooked cops, crooked politicians, newspaper tycoons, and assorted movie stars and entertainers, along with parallel biographies of Cohen and Parker.

Buntin casts his book like a Hollywood movie, with Cohen and Parker as the stars and the era’s other colorful and larger-than-life people as supporting actors. Of course, the city was not molded by Cohen and Parker alone, so Buntin throws nearly all of the historical characters in, stretching their connections to the little mobster and the inflexible police chief.

Cohen, a street urchin-turned-featherweight boxer-turned racketeer, was physically a small man, but he was a tough guy. He was a ruthless killer and served for a time as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s top enforcer in Los Angeles. He was, as Buntin notes in his book, Hollywood’s favorite gangster and Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Robert Mitchum were his drinking buddies in Los Angeles’ nightclubs.

Cohen was a gambler, extortionist and murderer. He was a fanatic about his clothes and his personal hygiene, often taking several long showers each day.   

Cohen also has the distinction of being the only organized crime boss who admitted on national TV that he murdered people. He answered ABC’s Mike Wallace’s direct question about murder with the statement, “I have killed no men that in the first place didn’t deserve killing.”  

Cohen also became friends with evangelist Billy Graham and he came close to becoming a Born Again Christian. Before he died he penned an autobiography, which Buntin used as one of his sources.       

William H. Parker hailed from a pioneering law enforcement family from the frontier town of Deadwood, South Dakota. He began his police career as a patrolman in Los Angeles in the 1920s, a decade dubbed as the “Roaring Twenties.”

Parker saw first-hand the corruption and how the “Combination,” a triumvirate of greedy tycoons, crooked politicians and murdering mobsters, ran the city. His mission in life was to mold the police department into a force free of corruption and political influence. Despite his personal failings, he made the Los Angeles Police Department a first class organization.

He hired many military veterans of World War II like himself, and those veterans set the course for a new era of policing. He made the police department independent but his critics attacked him for his lack of attention to the city’s minorities and for police brutality.

The city, like many cities, had a reputation for rough cops. Buntin notes that many cops were rough because they knew the system was corrupt. He quotes from Leslie White’s 1936 classic Me, Detective, “Good men would not serve on juries, nor would they take time from their private interests to act as witnesses in court trials - if they could get out of it,” White wrote. “Business men and good citizens did not want their homes robbed and their daughters raped, but they did want liquor for themselves, and prostitutes and gambling were good for business.”

As a result, Buntin writes, some officers took it upon themselves to dispense justice. As Detective White put it, “a smart lawyer can keep a crook out of jail … buy or bamboozle a jury, but he cannot prevent the cops from beating the hell out of a crook.”

The LA police had an intelligence squad run by Captain James Hamilton. The squad staked out the airport, train station and bus stations, looking for known hoodlums who may try to enter the city. When the squad spotted one of the hoodlums, the squad roughed up the mobster and put him back on the plane, train or bus. This practice kept the outsider hoodlums from setting up shop in LA, but Cohen was already there. After Siegel was killed, Cohen took over much of the city’s rackets.

Parker died in 1966. He served on the LA police force for 39 years and there was an outpouring of grief and public statements. Mayor Sam Yorty said, “Los Angeles and America will sadly miss our courageous and beloved Police Chief Parker. He was a monument of strength against the criminal elements.’

Despite Buntin’s set-up with Parker and Cohen as arch-rivals, the federal government, not the LA police, put Cohen away. Like Al Capone, Cohen was convicted of not paying his taxes. In jail, the tough guy killer was struck in the head with a blunt instrument by a crazed prisoner. He was crippled and his general health failed after the bashing.

Cohen died in 1975. Told he had months to live, he managed to tell his life story to writer John Peer Nugent and the book was called In My Own Words.

Buntin noted that Cohen died owing the U.S. government $496,535.23.

LA Noir is an interesting book and if you’re interested in history and cops and crooks, then I suggest you read John Buntin’s book.

My wife and I recently watched Donnie Brasco on cable TV. We’ve seen the film about four or five times, but we like it so much we watch it again every couple of years.

The 1997 film, stars Johnny Depp as Donnie “the jeweler” Brasco, aka Joseph Pistone, the FBI special agent who went undercover in 1976 in the New York Bonanno Cosa Nostra crime family, and Al Pacino as mobster Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero. In my view, the film is one of the two most realistic films, along with Goodfellas, about organized crime.  

Depp is very good as Pistone. Who can forget Depp’s explanation of the New York all purpose term ”fugettaboutit” to his fellow FBI agents. Al Pacino, a great actor but one who often play characters way over the top, is understated and dead on in this role of a not particularly bright, low level mob guy. This role is the other end of the crime structure from the brilliant and evil mob boss Michael Corleone Pacino portrayed so well in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. 

I would have cast another actor in the important role of “Sonny Black” Napolitano, the Bonanno captain of the crew Pistone infiltrates. Michael Madson and his perpetual scowl gives him a look of being constipated rather than tough. Imagine what a fine actor like Robert De Niro could have done with this role?

The film, like Pistone’s 1987 book the film was based on, accurately portrays organized crime at the street level and debunks the popular myths surrounding the mob. There is little glamor or honor here. The film also accurately portrays the stressful and dangerous life of an undercover agent.

Pistone chronicled his extraordinary six years undercover in the book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, written with Richard Woodley. Pistone successfully infiltrated the mob using the cover of Donnie Brasco, a jewel thief. He went on to become an associate member of the Bonanno crime family and in the end he was offered the opportunity to commit murder and become a full “made” member. He was subsequently pulled out by his FBI bosses and his evidence and testimoney was responsible from more than 100 organized crime members going to prison.       

I reviewed Pistone’s second book, The Way of the Wisguy, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. As I wrote in the review, The Way of the Wiseguy is an insider’s guide to the world - or perhaps one should say, the underworld - of organized crime. With stories and anecodotes that revel how wiseguys get their nicknames, how and why they are murdered and such minutiae as how they treat woman and what they eat, the book is everything you ever wanted to know about wiseguys, goodfellas mob guys and gangsters. Pistone’s blunt and colorful language adds to the book’s gritty realism.

“When you’re a wiseguy, you can steal, you can cheat, you can lie, you can kill people - and it’s all legitimate,”  Lefty Ruggiero said to Pistone, explaining the tangible benifits of being a wiseguy.

I spoke to Pistone over the phone a few years ago and I met him when he came to Philadelphia on a book tour. He told me that he has many Philadelphia connections, including his close friend, actor Leo Rossi, who is from Philadelpha. Pistone also worked for the Naval Investigative Service (now called NCIS) down at the old Navy Yard in South Philly and he also knows FBI agents assigned to the Philadelphia office.

Pistone, who still looks like he can handle himself in a tough situation, comes across as regular neighborhood guy. He grew up in Paterson, New Jersey and he knew wiseguys growing up, but law enforcement officers interested him far more.

“I knew a couple of cops and detectives and their lives intrigued me,” Pistone told me.

He said he became an FBI special agent because of the officers he met and not by the influence of TV or films.

Pistone said that Cosa Nostra has lost much of its power because of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Act and the strict federal sentencing guidelines.

“At one time, you’d get 3 to 5 years in prison,” Pistone explained. “The standard line among wiseguys was I need to go on vacation - three squares a day, I work out and get back in shape. Now, with the guidelines, the judges don’t have much wiggle room in their sentences and they get 15 to 20 years. And you’re going to the time in the federal system.”

Pistone noted that in the Commission Case they convicted all of the New York mob bossess and they received 75 to 100 year sentences. Now, he said, when wiseguys are convicted they know they will never see the light of day again, so they make deals with prosecutors.

I mentioned to Pistone that being part-Italian and having grown up in South Philly, the hub of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob, I can recall when mob guys looked at their time in prison proudly, in much the same way I view my time in the U.S. Navy. Their time incarcerated was considered a right of passsage and they were proud that they didn’t become a rat and they did their time “like a man.”

Pistone said that one does not see that attitude too often with today’s wiseguys.

Many people look at the mob and see a sense of glamor in the criminal lifestyle with their money, girls, clothes and cars. I asked Pistone if during his six years undercover he saw this as a glamorous life.

“No,” he replied. “You see the cars, the nice clothes and the guys don’t work, but what you don’t see is the inter-workings of mob life, the killings and stuff.”

“Every day is spent scamming, scheming and wondering how are they going to make money,” Pistone explained in his gruff, street-wise voice. “It’s a stressful life. The two things these guys worry about are going to jail and getting killed.”

Pistone went on to explain that there is a lot of tension in mob life, especially when there is a war going on in the family. A mob guys worries about getting killed or who who they they will have to kill.

“What kind of life is that?” Pistone asked. “Every day is a struggle. You’re worried about money coming in, money going out, who’s cheating you and who are you going to cheat.”

I told Pistone that what I especially liked about his book and the film was the accurate portrayal of the scheming and the tension he mentioned, and I also liked that the protagonist - thinking Pistone might be uncomfortable witht the term hero - was a law enforcement officer rather than a criminal like Henry Hill, Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone. I further liked that the protagonist was an Italian-American law enforcement officer.

I recalled that in 2004 TIME reviewed Pitone’s earlier book and Henry Hill’s book (a slap-dash effort to cash in on the success of the film Goodfellas) together. The reviewer stated that Pistone “ratted out” the Bonanno family. For the record, Pistone was not a rat. He was an FBI special agent on offical duty. Hill, on the other hand, was a creepy, criminal informant. TIME did not see the distinction between the two.

“They didn’t see the difference between an undercover agent doing his job and an informant, a criminal,” Pistone said. “I get that all the time in interviews and I have to correct them.”

I asked Pistone what he believed his primary accomplishment as an undercover agent and he replied that he was able to show that the mob could be penetrated by law enforcement.

“We broke the myth about the mob being honorable and all these other fantasies.”

I mentioned the TV program Wiseguy  (1987-1990) to Pistone and I said that I truly liked actor Ray Sharkey, who looked and acted like many of the guys I grew up with. The undercover FBI agent in the show, Vinnie Terranova, portrayed by Ken Wahl, came to be fond of Sharkey’s character Sonny. Terranova knew he was a wild and violent criminal and murderer, yet he saw likeable human qualities as well.

I asked Pistone if he, like his TV undercover FBI counterpart, had those same conflicting feelings for any of the mob guys he knew.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” Pistone replied. “I felt that way with Sonny Black Napolitano and even Lefty Ruggiero, who was a hardcore mobster. You see these guys every day for 10-12 hours and you see a side of them with their kids and grandkids. Yet, here is a guy who loves his grandkid, but a half hour later he goes out and whacks a guy he has known for 15 for 20 years.”

“This is the subculture and mindset of mob guys,” Pistone said. “One of the questions you’re asked when you get made is would you kill your brother or cousin if you had the contract? The answer has to be yes or you’re out.”

In addition to Donnie Brasco and The Way of the Wiseguy, Pistone has also written another good book on organized crime called Unfinished Business: Shocking Declassified  Details from the FBI’s Undercover Operation and a Bloody Timeline of the Fall of the Mafia.

If you’re interested in organized crime, I recommend all three books, as well as the film Donnie Brasco.

As a crime reporter and writer of a regular column, I was compelled to look into a report of a burglary of an unemployed construction worker on Christmas Eve in South Philadelphia.

The burglar or burglars broke into the home early on the morning of the 24th. They stole the family’s TV and other household goods. They also took a dozen or so wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree that were intended for the family’s two children.

I interviewed the victim, who was so devastated by the burglary that he could hardly speak. I also spoke to a detective who said he presently had no leads on the case but he planned to keep working it, and I spoke to a local priest who told me that the church was collecting donations for the poor family.

Lastly, I spoke to a man of great wisdom and experience. The jolly old fella was kind enough to pause during his special night out to talk to me about crime.

I interviewed Santa Claus as he was packing up his sleigh and getting ready to head off on his magical trip, bringing toys and goodies to good children around the world.

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow and the beard on his chin was white as snow. His eyes twinkled and his dimples were merry. His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry. He looked like a candidate for a heart attack.

And he smoked. The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth and the smoke encircled his head like a wreath (the Surgeon General would not approve). He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot (PETA would not approve) and his clothes were tarnished with ashes and soot (Mrs. Santa would not approve). With a lumpy sack over his shoulder, he looked like a homeless person.

I asked Santa Claus if the public’s fear of crime had changed how he did his job.

“The increased use of car and home burglar alarms has made my journey tougher, I must say,” Santa said. “As you know, my miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer make such a clatter, they set off every car alarm on the block.”

Santa also said that home burglar alarms has made his surreptitious entry, via the fireplace, most difficult. When he slides down the chimney, he sets off alarms, which wakes the household and brings the police.

Santa went on to say that the alarms ruin the surprise for the children and he is often detained by the responding police officers, who demand identification and administer alcohol tests.

Fortunately, Santa looks like a right jolly old elf, so the police officers have to laugh, in spite of themselves. A wink of his eye and a twist of his head give the people who thought they were being robbed the knowledge that they had nothing to dread.

“I once had my sleigh and reindeer stolen while I was in a home setting up the toys, and I must admit that I paused to enjoy the milk and cookies that a child left me,” Santa said. “But with some kindly police officer’s help, I was able to recover the sleigh and reindeer rather quickly. You see my lead reindeer has a bright red nose and we were able to spot him from about three blocks away.”

Santa said his brush with crime made him understand why families were installing burglar alarms and why they were more concerned about a strange old fat man in red entering their home in the middle of the night. He told me that he was looking into some kind of security system for his sleigh as well.

I asked him about the burglary that occurred that morning in South Philly and he replied he was well aware of the sad incident.

“I plan to visit the house tonight on my rounds and with a little magic I’ll leave them some special gifts under their tree,” Santa explained. “I also did a little investigative work to find the crooks, as I have powers the police lack.”

Santa said he discovered who the crooks were and he tipped the police off. He also plans to leave the crooks lumps of coal in their stockings, which will be hung with care in the local jail.

“Don’t they know I’m watching?” Santa asked. ”I know when they have been naughty or good. My surveillance techniques are finer than the FBI’s.”

“This should be a joyful time of year as we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” Santa said. “This should be a time of love, charity and good cheer.”

The interview concluded, he sprang to his sleigh and to his team gave a whistle and away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!”

(With apologies to Clement C. Moore and my best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all)

As any cop will tell you, the full moon brings out the crazies. And if you are working the streets of Hollywood, California - well, the moon makes them even crazier.

Joesph Wambaugh, a former LAPD detective Sergeant, is the master of tales about cops, crooks and crime. He once again offers us a novel with stark realism, blunt language and abundant humor. Hollywood Moon is the last in a trilogy of novels that began with Hollywood Station and continued with Hollywood Crows.

Wambaugh’s three novels cover the lives of the police officers assigned to the Hollywood police station. Wambugh takes us out on patrol with the officers and we encounter the crazies, the criminals, and the victims of crime on the mean streets of Hollywood. These stories are, in turn, dramatic, funny and sad.

One can read Hollywood Moon without reading the first two novels, but I recomend that you read all three.  The two young surfer cops known as Flotsam and Jetsom, ”Hollywood” Nate Weiss, a cop who yearns to be an actor, and other characters from the previous novels return in Hollywood Moon. 

We also met new police officers and a creepy cast of criminals. We encounter an odd pairing of street criminals with a smooth-talking black hustler in “dreads” and a “crazy-eyed,” tattooed, big and fat biker. There is a strange young man who is attacking older women, and a pair of criminals for our age; an out of work actor who dons disguises and characters and hires the aformentioned street criminals to pull a variety of scams and thefts, and his overbearing and abusive wife who works on several computers in their apartment, committing identity theft and other high-tech white collar crime.

And the cops have to work the streets under a full moon. As a Hollywood Station sergeant duly notes, the full moon brings out the beast - rather than the best - in Hollywood.   

Wambaugh, who said he exhausted his personal experience as a police officer in his first three novels, approaches his novels like a reporter. Before each novel he meets with police officers and allows them to tell their stories to him. I interviewed Wambaugh last year after the publication of Hollywood Crows and he explained his process to me.

“I start out with nothing and I start interviewing the cops at drinks and dining sessions, four at a time, until I get enough anecdotal material, dialogue and ideas to begin writing a story,” Wambaugh said. “I have no outline. I have nothing in mind when I sit down with these cops. Nothing at all. They act, I react.”

Wambaugh said that cops pick up good material in their line of work as they are out on the street, seeing people, doing things, and he quoted his character ”the Oracle’ - the wise old sergeant in Hollywood Station - who said, “Doing good police work is the most fun you’ll ever have in your life.”

Wambaugh’s Hollywood Moon is a thrilling, heart-wrenching and hilarious novel.      

I have a couple of unread books on my nightstand next to my bed and about a dozen more on a table in my basement office.

Instead of reading these new novels and nonfiction books, I’m rereading Raymond Chandler’s classic crime thrillers. As I recently read a newspaper piece about Robert Altman’s somewhat loose film adaptation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, I had the urge to read the novel again for what is perhaps the 12th time since I first read all of his novels as a teenager so long ago. Chandler is that good, in my view.

The first detectives of popular fiction were gifted amateurs who solved murders like a parlor game, often to the dismay of the clueless, bumbling police. Hard-boiled detective fiction took a somewhat more realistic approach when Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton private detective, wrote short stories for Black Mask  magazine in the 1930’s. Hammett would go on to write The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and other classic crime novels.

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish,” Raymond Chandler wrote of his fellow Black Mask contributor.

“He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”                       

Chandler, in my view, surpassed Hammett to become the best crime writer America has produced. He has influenced several generations of crime writers and a good case can be made that he is the single most influential crime writer. I recall a Dick Cavett TV program in the 1970’s that had Ed McBain, Robert Parker, P.D. James and Mickey Spillane as guests.

Cavett asked the best-selling crime writers who had been their main influence and all save Spillane immediately answered Chandler. (Spillane named a comic book writer whose name escapes me).

 - Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food  - from Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely.

Chandler admitted that Philip Marlowe, his Los Angeles wisecracking, incorruptible, hard drinking, tough guy private detective was not realistic. He said that a man like Marlowe would no more be a private detective than he would be a university don.

“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man,” Chandler wrote in an essay. “He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”

But Chandler also stated that crime fiction should be realistic in its character, setting and atmosphere. Chandler’s realism also clearly comes through in his observations, descriptions and dialogue.

 - The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives - from Chandler’s novel The Little Sister.

Chandler led an unusual life. Born in Chicago and raised in Kansas and Ireland, he was educated in England, France and Germany. he worked as a reporter, poet and essayist before joining the Canadian Army to serve in combat during World War I.

He later became a successful oil executive but his heavy drinking caused him to be fired. He began writing crime stories for Black Mask when he was in his forties and at the age of 50, he published his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep.

- I was wearing my powdered blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display hankerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaven and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars - from Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep.

Chandler was devoted to his wife Cissy, a one-time beauty who was 18 years his senior. They moved frequently to different locations in Southern California and they rarely socialized. Chandler was an avid letter writer and he corresponded with friends, other writers, editors and fans. I find his letters to be as brilliant as his novels. An editor working on a collection of his letters, asked her publisher — has Chandler ever written a dull line?

Chandler was hired by Hollywood to write the screenplay for the film Double Indemnity. Working with Billie Wilder, whom he disliked, Chandler produced a screenplay that was superior to the Cain novel in my estimation. With his screenplays and the films made from his novels, Chandler was a major film influence.

Tom Hiney, in his book Raymond  Chandler: A Biography, quoted the movie journal Sequence, “Just as Chandler has many literary imitators, so has his work exercised a considerable influence on the treatment of crime in film. He helped to bring back to the cinema some of the healthy realism lost so carelessly in the 30’s to the demands of a minority censorship. What is certain, at any rate, is that since 1944 his work has done much to form the basis of a school of film making as indigenously American as the Western, the social comedy, the musical, and the gangster film.”

Chandler wanted Cary Grant to portray Philip Marlowe (think of Grant’s tough guy role in Mr. Lucky), but Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Eliot Gould, Powers Booth and others would take a turn playing Marlowe in films. Clive Owen is preparing to portray Marlowe in the film Trouble is my Business.

James Garner, who played Chandler’s detective in 1969’s Marlowe, is my personal favorite. Garner was big, handsome, tough, and he delivered the wisecracks very well. When Garner sat at his desk and pulled out his pipe, I saw the Marlowe that I envisioned from the novels.

Based on the Chandler novel The Little Sister, the film had a contemporary setting (in 1969). Had the film been properly set in the 1940’s, I think it would have been a near perfect adaption.

- It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window - from Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely.

Chandler never fully recovered from the loss of his wife. He said she was the center of his life for 30 years. During Chandler’s final years, he drank heavily and traveled aimlessly. He died on March 26, 1959 at the age of 70.

But Chandler’s influence lives on in crime novels and films. In his oft-quoted essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler presented his definitive view of the private detective in fiction.

- Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. 

I’ve been watching the very interesting Mob Scene videos on Philly.com that feature George Anastasia, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s ace organized crime reporter. 

Anastasia has been covering organized crime in Philadelphia and South Jersey for more than 25 years. He has also written several books on organized crime, such as Blood and Honor , The Last Gangster and his latest, Mobfiles: Mobsters, Molls and Murder.

I recall venturing to Borders book store more than ten years ago to hear Anastasia talk about his book The Goodfella Tapes. 

The true crime book is about how the FBI secretly recorded an internecine mob war and brought down a crime boss. Like his previous organized crime books, South Philadelphia is featured so prominently inThe Goodfella Tapes, it’s practically a character. Being part Italian and born, bred and still living in South Philly, I’m familiar with the territory.    

Anastasia read passages from his book and fielded questions from a crowd of about 30 people. He also talked about his distress of recently learning from a source that there had been a plot to kill him.

“The Philadelphia mob family is probably the most dysfunctional crime family in America,” I recall Anastasia telling the crowd. “It’s kind of The Simpsons of the underworld.”

How it got that way, he said, is what the book is all about. Anastasia talked about the 1993-95 mob war in and around South Philadelphia. Anastasia explained that on one side of the conflict was an old world Sicilian boss and on the other side was a group of born and bred South Philadelphians who were the off-springs of the previous leadership of the local mob. 

Anastasia spoke of when one failed hit man used the wrong size shells in a shotgun (similar to Jimmy Breslin’s great comic crime novel, The Gang  Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight), how another mob guy called off a hit because he had to report to his parole officer, and other comical, yet deadly serious acts during the mob war.     

And the Feds got it all down on tape. A minor gambling investigation led to the FBI placing listening devices in a lawyer’s office in New Jersey. The mob guys met there secretly, and they believed securely, as they were under the mistaken idea that the FBI could not plant bugs in a lawyer’s office. But the FBI convinced a federal judge that criminal activity was taking place in the office and he approved the audio surveillance. 

The mob guys met in the lawyer’s office to discuss mob gossip, tactics and philosophy. Over the course of two years, the FBI recorded 2,000 conversations. 

“Goodfellas don’t sue goodfellas… goodfellas kill goodfellas,” explained one mob guy to a mob associate and potential litigant as the FBI listened in. Anastasia, who had access to the FBI’s tapes, offers a good many other fascinating and insightful conversations in his book.

Anastasia said he became interested in covering organized crime as he was the descendant of Sicilian grandparents who settled in South Philadelphia. Anastasia said he began covering crime when he was assigned by the Inquirer to cover Atlantic City at the time of the gambling referendum in 1976. There was much talk about keeping the mob out, but Anastasia said that the mob was all ready deeply entrenched. He began to cover more and more mob stories.

“I was fascinated because it’s the dark side of the Italian-American experience,” Anastasia explained.

I asked Anastasia how he responded to criticism from Italian-Americans that his extensive coverage of ”the dark side,” as he put it, offered a negative image of Italians. After all, only a very small number of Italian-Americans were involved in organized crime.

“One, these guys are taking the positive values of the Italian-American experience - honor, family and loyalty - and bastardizing them for their own end,” Anastasia replied. “I think you should shine a light on that.

“I don’t worry about people who buy into stereotypes. We could talk for hours about the contributions that Italians and Italian-Americans have made to this country and the world,” Anastasia said. “I take pride in that.”

So if you want to take a walk on the dark side and learn about organized crime in South Philly and South Jersey, pick up one or more of George Anastasia’s true crime books.

Last year was the centenary of Ian Fleming (1908-1964). It was a very good year for the creator of Bond, James Bond.

To celebrate his life and work, a good number of events took place in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and around the world.

As his family-run web site, www.ianfleming.com, noted, the year’s highlights included the publication of Devil May Care, the new Bond novel written by Sebastian Faulks (I gave the book a mixed review in the PhiladelphiaI Inquirer) and a major exhibition celebrating Fleming’s life at the Imperial War Museum in London. More than 100,000 people visited the exhibition, which was called For Your Eyes Only - Ian Fleming and James Bond. The exhibition will run until April of this year.

The United Kingdom issued Royal Mail stamps in Fleming’s honor last year and events, books, and numerous articles in newspapers, magazines and Internet publications praised Fleming and celebrated his life, legacy and the impact of his fictional character James Bond.

The year 2008 also saw the release of the Bond film Quantum of Solace. Although I was not totally thrilled with the non-stop slam-bam action, I was glad that the producers have returned to making Fleming/Bond thrillers, rather than the camp action-comedies of earlier years.

Since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953 more than than 100 million Bond novels have been sold. Last year Penguin published new hardback editions of Fleming’s books. Also last year, Queen Anne Press published a limited high quality edition of Fleming’s complete works.

Fleming wrote 17 books: 12 Bond thrillers, two volumes of Bond short stories, a book of travel journalism, Thrilling Cities; a nonfiction account of the diamond trade, The Diamond Smugglers; and the children’s book, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. The publisher also added Talk of the Devil, a posthumous collection of rarely seen material, including some unpublished material. The title, according to the publisher, was taken from a list that Fleming kept in his notebook.

Fleming’s travel book Thrilling Cites, a collection of pieces on the most interesting cities in the world that originally appeared in the Sunday Times, was reprinted this year. The introduction was written by travel writer Jan Morris.

“The essays inThrilling Cities were originally written as journalism, but display the kind of patrician literary defiance, peculiar I think to himself, that gave the Bond novels their style,” Morris wrote in the introduction.

“They are a very unorthodox kind of travel writing; Fleming was rich, he was fashionably connected, he was famously successful, he was a man of cultivated and urbane tastes and he didn’t give a damn,” Morris wrote.

 ”He was not out to thrill his readers, most of them Bond addicts by then, with his evocations and often severe critiques of places around the world; he was out to inform and entertain himself. Not often for him the museum or the guided tour: he traveled in the spirit of 007, with an eye for the slinky and the significant, in places where the martinis were shaken not stirred (or was it vice versa?), and all life could be viewed with a cool raised eyebrow.”

With his interest in crime and espionage, Fleming interviewed Charles “Charlie Lucky” Luciano, the exiled prince of American organized crime in Naples. In Berlin, he interviewed a Cold War spy and in other cities he interviewed detectives, crooks, journalists, authors and other interesting people. This is not your typical travel book.

I carried a paperback copy of Thrilling Cities with me throughout my time in the U.S. Navy in the early and mid-1970s. I was thrilled that I was able to visit many of the cities Fleming wrote about two decades before me.

“All my life I have been interested in adventure, and, abroad, I have enjoyed the frisson of leaving the wide, well-lit streets and venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden, authentic pulse of towns,” Fleming wrote in his introduction. “It was perhaps this habit that turned me into a writer of thrillers and by the time I made the journeys that produced these essays, I had certainly got into the way of looking at people and places and things through a thriller-writer’s eye.”

The Diamond Smugglers, a nonfiction account of a smuggling ring, was also reissued. The book’s introduction was written by Ian Fleming’s nephew, Fergus Fleming.

““The Sunday Times had acquired a manuscript from an ex-MI5 agent named John Collard who had been employed by De Beers to break up a diamond smuggling ring,” Fergus Fleming wrote in his  introduction to the book.

“Fleming, whose Diamonds are Forever had been one of the hits of 1956, was invited to bring it to life. Treasure, travel, cunning and criminallity: here were the things he loved. Flying to Tangier - home to every shade of murky dealing - he spent ten days interviewing Collard, for whom he had already prepared the romantic pseudonym “John Blaize” and the equally romanticized job description of “diamond spy.”

Fergus Fleming goes on to describe Ian Fleming’s disappointment in the book, noting that De Beers wanted material to be cut from the book and they threatened legal action if it were not. “It was a good story until all the possible libel was cut out,” Ian Fleming said at the time.

“Yet if The Diamond Smugglers was a disappointment to its author it still contains flashes of Fleming-esquemagic,” Fergus Fleming wrote in the introduction. “More than forty years later it remains something of a conundrum: a journalistic chore that its author disliked but which nevertheless became a best-seller and very nearly his first film; a book that is neither travelogue nor thriller but contains the discarded hopes of both; a tale of international intrigue…”

Fergus Fleming took note of a sentence his uncle wrote in the opening paragraph: “One day in April 1957 I had just answered a letter from an expert in unarmed combat from a cover address in Mexico City, and I was thanking a fan in Chile, when my telephone rang.”

And now in 2009, his nephew writes “If you’re given a line like that you can only read on.”

I contacted Fergus Fleming and asked him about his uncle’s life and work.

DAVIS: Would you explain your personal and professional relationship with Ian Fleming?

FLEMING: Personally, I am his nephew. Professionally, I am a Director of Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), the company which manages his literary estate. Also, with my cousin Kate Grimond, I am the co-publisher of Queen Anne Press, the firm of which he was once Managing Director. I’m the son of Richard, Ian’s younger brother. My cousin and co-publisher Kate is the daughter of his older brother Peter.

DAVIS: Are you old enough to have known him? 

FLEMING: I  don’t remember meeting Ian - he died when I was five years old - but his books were on the family shelves and of course every new Bond film was a must-see.

DAVIS: Can you tell us about your professional background?

FLEMING: My background is unglamorous. Having trained as an accountant and barrister I worked as a furniture maker before becoming a writer and editor at Time-Life Books. Since the 1990s I have written several works of narrative nonfiction, including Barrow’s Boys, Killing Dragons  and Ninety Degrees North.

DAVIS: Please tell us about the Queen Anne series of Fleming’s novels and the compilation of Fleming’s jounalistic pieces, Talk of the Devil?

FLEMING: Talk of the Devil is a collection of rarely seen material, some of it unpublished. The contents are mainly journalistic but they also include two short stories. One of them, A Poor Man Escapes, is Ian’s earliest known attempt at fiction. The other, The Shameful  Dream, was written in 1951 and has as its hero a journalist named Bone - a year and a letter-change later the hero would be Bond. For fuller details, see our web site, www.queenannepress.com The book is restricted currently to the Centenary Edition but it will be available as a single volume sometime in the future.

DAVIS: I read The Diamond Smugglers andThrilling Cities again and I enjoyed them. I thought the new editions and covers were smart-looking. Would you please tell us about the genesis of these non-fiction books and why they’ve been reprinted again.?

FLEMING: They are pieces of extended journalism that were first published by the Sunday Times in the late 1950s. of the two, Thrilling Cities is probably the most entertaining but The Diamond Smugglers was something of a hit at the time - remarkably, it was the first of Ian’s books to be optioned (by Rank). They have been reissued by IFP not only to mark the centenary but because they are good books in their own right which have been overshadowed by the more glamorous Bond novels.

DAVIS: Ian Fleming’s Centenary, 2008, was a good one, I thought. What were the highlights for you?

FLEMING: Yes, the Centenary Year was excellent, its highlights many and varied. The Ian Fleming Gala evening was outstanding. My personal favorite was the launch of Sebastian Faulkes’ Devil May Care.

DAVIS: Considering Ian Fleming’s WWII service as a naval intelligence officer and his father’s death in WWI and his brother’s death in WWII, do you think he would have been pleased with the Imperial War Museum tribute to him?

FLEMING: Ian would definitely have been pleased with the Imperial War Museum exhibition. He was brought up in the shadow of WWI, served in WWII and created a fictional spy for the Cold War. He never forgot that his father and brother had died defending their country. The Imperial war Museum was therefore a perfect place to celebrate his life and works.

DAVIS: I believe thrillers are an art form, with thrillers being like jazz to literary fiction’s classical music. I also believe that Fleming was a first-class thriller writer. Although he said numerous times that he unabashedly wrote the Bond books as entertainment and wrote primarily for money and personal pleasure, he was also a serious craftsman who took thriller-writing seriously. Do you agree?

FLEMING: I couldn’t comment on the jazz/classical analogy! I agree that Ian wrote for a living and avoided any hint of pretentiousness. He drew a sharp line between those who called themselves “authors” and those who called themselves “writers,” numbering himself in the later. In a 1960s Who’s Who entry he described himself as having written “several novels of suspense.” In my view he wrote novels not of suspense but sensation. In this respect he took his job seriously and at the same time made money and had a lot of fun.

DAVIS: Has a new writer been selected to pen a new James Bond novel? Do you have input into the selection? If so, may I suggest that you pick a thriller writer this time. Frederick Forsyth would be my pick.

FLEMING: No comment on the next Bond author. But Frederick Forsyth is an interesting idea.

DAVIS: I first read Fleming’s thrillers when I was about 11 or 12 in the 1960s after I saw the first couple of Sean Connery-Bond films. I became a Fleming aficionado then and I remain one today. When did you first read the Bond thrillers and what did you initially think of them?

FLEMING: Like you I first read the Bond books aged 11-12, but in the early 70s. I thought they were excellent (naturally) and re-read them constantly for the next four years. Then  didn’t them up again until 2005. What struck me the second time around was how colorful, vibrant and dramatic they were.

DAVIS: What do you think of the Bond films?

FLEMING: The films are very good and very entertaining but after a while one tends to assume they are the be-all and end-all of Bond. This is probably why the books seemed so fresh on a second approach.

DAVIS: In re-reading The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities I was struck by Ian Fleming’s droll sense of humor. One criticism I always see of Fleming is that the Bond books lack humor. Granted that the book Bond does not have the sophomoric, flippant sense of humor of the movie Bond, but there are pieces of humor in the books. For example, From Russia With Love has a character named Darko Kerim who has a good sense of humor. And when Tatiana asks Bond why British men don’t use perfume like Russian men, Bond replies “We wash.” What can you tell us about Fleming’s sense of humor in the thrillers and in his nonfiction? 

FLEMING: Yes, he had a sense of humor. But he had to keep it low-key lest he compromise the seriousness of Bond’s profession. His nonfiction is more humorous but equally dry and self-deprecating.

DAVIS: I’ve read that an Ian Fleming film biography is in the works. Do you know anything about the film? I understand that Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company owns the rights. I hope he is not planning on portraying Fleming. What actor would you pick?

FLEMING: A Fleming film biography is news to me. It would be interesting if he was played by a complete stranger.

DAVIS: If Ian Fleming were alive today, what do you think he would think of his still-growing popularity?

FLEMING: If Ian was alive today he would be amazed an delighted to find he had such a large body of fans. many thanks on his behalf - and keep turning the pages.

Andrei Chikatilo is not as well known as his fellow serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and if the Soviets had their way, no one would have ever heard of him.

According to the Soviets, crime did not exist in their worker’s paradise. But as the dead bodies piled up, the killer who came to be known as The Rostov Ripper  was finally caught and convicted of brutally murdering 52 women and children between the years 1978 and 1990.

Chikatilo told the Soviet court that he performed a service for the Soviet system by eliminating what he called “worthless people.” Chikatilo was executed in 1994.

HBO made a good film about Chikatilo called Citizen X  and Tom Rob Smith has written a good fictional account of the Chikatilo case, called Child 44.

The 30-year-old writer said he was researching a screenplay when he came across the Chikatilo case.

“The more I dug into the case, the more clear it became that he evaded capture not because he was ingenious but because the Soviet criminal system was reluctant to admit he even existed,” Smith wrote in his web page http://tomrobbsmith.com.

“Their preconceptions about their society were as important, if not more important than stopping these terrible murders,” Smith continued. “Reading the nonfiction account of the investigations was incredibly frustrating. My reaction was so strong I knew I wanted to tell my own version of the story.”

Smith wrote that he moved the story back in time, from the 1980s to the 1950s, reasoning that the pressure on the hero would be greater under Stalin’s regime.

The hero in Child 44 is a war hero turned MGB officer named Leo Demidov. The MGB, which later became the KGB, was the state security service that the Soviet people justifiably feared. As an MGB officer, Demidov was a privileged man in Stalin’s 1953 Soviet Union. He lived with his beautiful wife Raisa, who is a teacher, in a comfortable apartment (by Soviet standards). Demidov, his wife and his parents all ate well, shopped in MGB stores and lived a much higher standard of living than the average Soviet worker.

But hero may be the wrong word for Demidov, as he routinely arrests people for political crimes such as owning a Western book or speaking critically of the state. The unfortunate people that Demidov arrest are often tortured and then executed or shipped off to the Gulags, the cruel and inhuman prison system run by the Soviet state.

When a young boy is found dead on train tracks outside Moscow, apparently hit by a train, the boy’s father, a low-ranking MGB member, insists that his son was chopped up and murdered. Demidov is assigned to explain to the grieving father and his family that they are mistaken. For a brutal crime like that would not, could not, happen in the Soviet Union.

Demidov also has a problem with another MGB officer who claims that a traitor has named Raisa as an associate. To save his career, Demidov has to denounce his wife or risk becoming a suspected traitor as well.

Although his marriage is complicated and strained, Demidov refuses to denounce his wife and he is demoted to a lowly position in the Militia and sent to a small industrial town.

While on duty in this small town he comes across two children who have been mutilated and murdered just like the boy near Moscow. Against the orders of his bosses, Demidov begins to investigate and discovers that the boy killed outside Moscow was the 44th victim of a serial killer.

Demidov fights his former MGB officers and the Soviet system as he tracks down the serial killer.

In Smith’s follow up novelThe Secret Speech Demidov has been allowed to form a homicide unit in Moscow. The year is 1956. Stalin is dead and the new Soviet ruler, Nikita Khrushchev, delivers a speech condemning Stalin for his use of state murder and other atrocities. The secret speech is leaked to the West and within the Soviet Union the people are hearing something new and fresh — criticism of Stalin and the Soviet state.

When former MGB officers are found dead and other MGB officers are threatened by packages that contain photos and records of their past actions, Demidov begins to investigate. Demidov is also left a package that contains evidence of his former work as an MGB officer.

The deaths appear to be in reprisal against Stalin’s secret policemen. Demidov’s investigation leads him to the Vory, the criminal gangs that will later evolve into the Russian Mafia.

Demidov goes undercover as a prisoner and he is transported by a prisoner ship to an isolated and very cold Gulag. He eventually ends up in Hungry during the uprising against the Soviets in 1956.

Smith’s novels bring to mind Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park and his series of thrillers with Militia investigator Arkady Renko, but Smith gives a nod to Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow , a classic book about the Soviet Union’s forced famine of the Ukraine, as a book that influenced him.

I enjoyed both Child 44 andThe Secret Speech. They are good crime thrillers and the historical backdrop will perhaps introduce younger readers to the inner working of the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union. Younger readers might even learn to be thankful that the United States and the West won the Cold War.

After reading Smith’s thrillers, one should go on to read Conquest’s book and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Cancer Ward.                                    

My late father enjoyed the repeated telling of old, corny jokes to his children. I, in turn, often told the same old jokes to my children.

One of the old jokes was about an armed robber who confronted a man in an alley and said “Stick ‘em down.”

“Don’t you mean stick ‘em up?” the would-be-victim asked the robber.

“Don’t confuse me,” the robber said. “This is my first job.”

I thought of this old joke as a friend told me about a rather inept trio of armed robbers who attempted to rob his bar.

Frank Tamburro owned and operated a corner taproom in South Philly. Tall, lean, with a beer belly from tasting too much of his own product, Tamburro was an outgoing and jovial barkeep in the old tradition of neighborhood “tapies.” His bar had a small dining room in the back where they served great food. Accompanied by my wife and friends, I often went there to drink, eat, listen to music and gab.

I was leaning on the bar and sipping a Vodka on the Rocks when Tamburro came up to me and said he had to tell me about what happened in the bar the day before.

Tamburro said there were only a half-dozen customers in the bar on a Thursday night when two guys came in just before closing time at two. Tamburro described the first man to the police as a young white guy, about 25, who wore a blue baseball cap with the peak turned sideways, a long white t-shirt, worn-out jeans and white sneakers. He entered the bar sheepishly, sat at the bar and quietly ordered a beer.

Less than a minute later, a young black guy came in. He was wearing an outfit identical to the white guy at the bar. instead of sitting at the bar or taking a seat at one of the tables, the black guy stood at the bar entrance with his arms folded across his chest.

“We were all looking at this odd couple, wondering what the fuck they were up to, when the white guy pulled out this big, silver revolver and turned it sideways - you know, like the gangbangers do in the movies - and screamed he was holding up the place,” Tamburro recalled.

The man at the door also brandished a gun. Slanting the large black automatic, the man pointed it towards the people at the tables.

“We were sort of shocked, you know, because we’d never been robbed before,” Tamburro explained. “Poor Ginny, my bartender, was told to open the cash register by the white guy, but she was so scared she couldn’t open the damn thing.”

The armed robber didn’t believe her and he shouted threats at her.

“Ginny was pounding away at the cash register, trying to get it open, and she looked like she was playing a fuckin’ piano,” Tamburro said, laughing at the memory of the scene.

The white robber fired off a shot over the bartender’s head and she screamed and fell to the floor behind the bar. Tamburro threw his hands up and ran behind the bar, saying he would open the register and hand over the money.

One of the customers sitting at a table and watching the crime go down was a 72-year-old bookmaker named Joe Hess. He didn’t fear the young man waving the gun wildly, as Hess ran in tough gambling circles all of his life and he was a veteran of a half-dozen mob wars. After the shot went off, Hess bolted out of his chair, picked up  another chair, and hurled it at the shooter.

The shooter collapsed when the chair hit him across the back. Hess rushed up to the young man and began kicking and stomping him. The gun flew across the floor. Several of the young guys pounced on the robber at the door, punching and kicking him. He dropped his gun and tried to scramble out the door.

Despite the severe beating the two robbers received, they were able to get out the door and run towards their getaway car, which was double-parked outside the bar. When the driver of the getaway car saw his two partners being pursued by a small, angry mob, he gunned the car and took off in a lurch down the small street, sideswiping several parked cars as he sped away. The two robbers ran franticly after the car, as Tamburro and his customers stood on the sidewalk laughing.

“They were like the Three fuckin’ Stooges!” Tamburro said,

I wrote about the botched armed robbery in my column. I later ventured to the police station at 24th & Wolf Streets, which housed the 1st Police District and South Detectives. I went there to meet and interview the detective who was handling the armed robbery as I planned to write a follow-up column.

Ernie Pine was a veteran detective. He was a short, burly, tough-looking black cop, but he was also calm, soft-spoken and had a keen sense of humor.

Pine said he believed the three men who held up Tamburro’s bar were the same armed robbers who were engaged in a wild crime spree across South Philadelphia. They held up several bars and stores over the course of a three-week period. Had they not been heavily armed and nearly killed a man in one of their robberies, the trio would be amusing.

“We’ve identified the trio of armed robbers,” Pine told me as I sat next to his desk. “Two of them are John and Joseph Allen, twin brothers with a long history of robbery and other violent crimes, even though they are only 26-years-old. John Allen was only recently released from prison.”

Pine said the third bad guy was identified as William O’Brian, another young knucklehead with a long arrest record.

“Together they have an IQ of about 50,” Pine said, laughing softly. “We have warrants out for the three of them.”

Pine described O’Brian as a white “wanna-be-gangsta.” O’Brian grew up poor and dumb and he teamed up with the black Allen brothers before the three of them dropped out of high school.

Although I didn’t know O’Brian, I knew nitwits like him. They acted, dressed and spoke more street-black than the blacks themselves. Although these clueless kids thought they were accepted, most of the black kids thought of them as fools.

So did Pine, who chuckled and said “Dopey white boys like O’Brian are a bit of pay-back for slavery and years and years of racial discrimination.”

The Allen brothers, who were not too bright either, according to Pine, were amused by O’Brian and they took him under their criminal wing.

Pine told me about some of the robberies they believed the trio committed. They hit several bars and fast food restaurants, mostly scoring small amounts of cash, which they quickly blew on drugs.

They also attempted to rob a drug store the day after their beat-down at Tamburro’s bar. They were stuffing money and allergy and cold medicine into a large brown bag when a patrol officer happened to walk into the drug store. One of the Allen brothers barreled out the door, shoving the cop aside and leaving O’Brian holding the bag - literally.

O’Brian turned his gun sideways and fired two shots at the cop. Naturally, he missed. But his wayward shot hit an unfortunate 68-year-old customer.

O’Brian dashed out the door with the cop in hot pursuit. O’Brian attempted to dive into the open car window and onto the back seat of the getaway car - just like they do in the movies - but his head hit the top of the car door and he fell violently back into the street, blood gushing down from his head.

One of the Allen brothers laid down a wild field of fire from the front passenger seat and the cop took cover behind some parked cars. Allen grabbed O’Brian and the car took off, dragging the bloodied robber alongside the fast-moving car.

The cop called the crime incident in and then he recovered the paper bag with the cash and the drugs from the street. The police found the getaway car illegally parked five blocks from the drug store. As they suspected, the detectives learned that the car had been stolen that morning.   

Pine said they had a task force working the trio and they had stake-out units covering stores and bars the armed robbers might hit in the future. Pine told me that he would be in touch if anything broke on the case.

A few days later I received a call from Detective Pine.

“We got ‘em,” Pine said.

I met Pine at Tamburro’s bar. I sat next to Pine at the bar and he told me that John Allen, apparently the smartest of the three, came forward and offered to turn himself in. He said he was willing to lead the police to his brother and O’Brian, providing he could get a deal for a lesser prison sentence. Pine said Allen did not want to return to prison for a long period, so he was willing to give up his twin brother and his childhood friend.

“We moved in on Allen and O’Brian, who were laid up in this shithole house and we took them wthout a struggle,” Pine explained. “O’Brian was passed out from his head injury and Allen was so high he could not keep his eyes open. They came along nice and quiet.”

In celebration of the arrest of the armed robbers, Tamburro set up drinks on the house.

“Here’s to dumb criminals.” Pine said as he raised his glass.

I’ve been a student of crime since I was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia in the early 1960’s. As a teenager I read crime fiction and thrillers and that led to my closely following crime stories in newspapers and magazines. I also read books about true crime and crime history.

I began covering crime as a crime reporter and columnist for the South Philadelphia weekly papers some years ago and I later moved my crime column to other newspapers and finally to the Internet.

And after all of these years, I’m still interested in the crime beat. Crime stories are dramatic, tragic and funny. They are the stuff of thrillers.

I spend a good bit of my time talking to prosecutors, federal agents, police commanders, detectives and patrol officers. Cops are very good story-tellers. I also go out on ride-alongs with the Philadelphia police, which enables me to get a first-hand look at crime, crime victims, criminals and the cops who have to deal with it all. I’ve seen people at their worst and cops at their best.

I’ve recently read a couple of true crime books that offer the reader a sense of the police ride-along.

“Crime is by turns comic and tragic,” Otto Penzler wrote in his introduction to The Best American Crime Reporting, 2008  (Harper Perennial). “This year’s Best American Crime Reporting reflects these critical extremes, along with much that lies in between.”

Penzler is the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, the founder of the Mysterious Press, the creator of Otto Penzler Books, and the editor of a good number of books and anthologies, including the annual Best American Mystery Stories, and along with Thomas H. Cook, the Best American Crime Reporting.

This latest book on crime reporting is edited by crime fiction writer Jonathan Kellerman. Kellerman, who received is Ph.D in psychology when he was 24, has written 27 bestselling crime novels, including Compulsion.

“A small proportion of human beings - perhaps 1 percent of any given population - is different from the rest of us in ways that wreak havoc on the rest of us,” Kellerman wrote in his introduction to the book. ”The cardinal traits of this bunch include superficiality; impulsiveness; self-aggrandizement to the point of delusion; callousness; and, when it suits, outright cruelty.”

Kellerman goes on to state that truth and principle don’t intrude upon the world of these disrupters.

“When they don’t lapse into tell-tale glibness, the more socially adroit among them come across as charming, somtimes overwhelmingly charismatic,” Kellerman explained.

Kellerman calls this book a page-turning look a the myriad faces of evil. I agree. Writers from Mark Bowden to Calvin Trillen offer truely interesting true crime stories in this book. 

“This is the new face of quality true crime,” Kellerman wrote. “Bad guys at their worst, writers at their best.” 

Another good collection of true crime stories is The Playboy Book of True Crime (Playboy Press/Steerforth Press). Edited by the editors of the men’s adult magazine, the book offers great stories by great crime writers on organized crime, outlaw biker gangs, and serial killers.

I grew up reading Playboy. Yes, I looked at the photos of the girls - once or twice - but I also read the Playboy interview, the fiction, the features and the true crime stories. Although I don’t think the magazine is as good as it used to be, this collection shows that the top crime writers - from Jimmy Breslin to George Anastasia  - are still contributors to the magazine.

So if you want to sit in a comfortable chair and go on a ride-along to learn about the dark side of life and crime, you should read these two collections of true crime stories.

Newsweek, it goes without saying, is a tedious, dreadful rag which nobody on earth should buy unless threatened with death or — at the very least — castration. A week or so back however I made the foolish error of purchasing a copy, seduced as I was by the cover story on ‘America’s obsession’ with True Crime, a genre for which I have some enthusiasm. Even before getting the mag home however I knew I had made a mistake, and lo and behold, when I did open it, it was full of the usual hackery explaining things I already knew, could have guessed or didn’t need to know. Particularly awful was Walter Mosley’s banal yet pretentious essay purporting to explain that the reason Americans read True Crime is because ‘we need to cleanse the modern world from our souls’. (Yes indeed Walter — that’ll be why I felt so nauseated and filthy after reading Tim Cahill’s Buried Dreams about John Wayne Gacy.) Worst of all, however, nowhere in this special issue was there mention of Fred Rosen.

Not that I was surprised. You see, Fred Rosen is the kind of True Crime author who doesn’t get glowing write-ups in prestigious magazines such as Newsweek. Although he won an award for The Historical Atlas of American Crime he still specializes in the kind of salacious, tawdry narratives that clutter up the shelves of supermarkets and thrift stores, which is where I first discovered his horrific Lobster Boy, the true story of the murder of Grady Stiles III. Stiles was a sideshow performer with ‘lobster claws’ instead of hands and feet who terrorized his family for decades before his wife paid a couple of teenage stoners to shoot him in the head. One of the most squalid and depressing narratives ever put to paper, it is – as I have argued before — full of grim truth, and in a world of tedious, pseudo- cult books that strive towards subversion, Lobster Boy is a work of genuine, fiendish anti-literature which you should buy now if you have the stomach for the tale of a man who rips his wife’s IUD out with his claw before beating her black and blue.

Since then Rosen has written many other books, all about horrible things, among them Gang Mom and the magnificently titled Body Dump. His most recent, Deadly Angel, the True Story of Alaska’s Stripper Killer was published in May of this year. Here Rosen inflicts upon the reader the grim story of Mechele Hughes a sociopathic stripper unable to spell her Christian name who spent a few years in the 1990s exposing her skin to needy males at the Great Alaskan Bush Co. strip club in Anchorage in exchange for cash and presents. One of her patrons, Kent Leppink eventually became her fiancé, but she had him shot so she could claim his $1 million life insurance policy. Well actually it’s not that simple. Evidently some kind of sexual sorceress, Hughes seems to have had at least three fiancés, and sometimes they all lived together under one roof, until she persuaded one of these dupes to kill Leppink on her behalf. Alas for Hughes, Leppink had suspected she was going to murder him, and had arranged for her name to be removed from his insurance policy before his death. With the police on her trail, Hughes fled Alaska in 1996 to start a new life as a soccer mom and all round upstanding member of the community in Olympia, Washington. Arrested ten years later, she was extradited to Alaska, where she was found guilty of Leppink’s murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. (The ex-fiancé who had pulled the trigger was also sent down, and was later murdered in jail.)

Deadly Angel, although filled with unpleasant details, is nowhere near as grotesque as Rosen’s masterpiece Lobster Boy. Even so, there are some strikingly bizarre, subterranean elements. For example, the book opens with an eerie letter Hughes’ victim Kent Leppink wrote to be opened in the event of his death, in which he fingers Hughes and her accomplice for his murder; thus his ghost has a role in directing the investigation throughout the book. Deadly Angel also contains a condensed history of strip clubs in Anchorage, precisely the kind of marginal knowledge that you only find in the sleaziest (and thus best) true crime. Hughes fled Alaska with a pet toucan in tow. Finally and perhaps most shockingly of all, the ubiquitous Sarah Palin manages to infiltrate the narrative. Fresh from her role as the butt of the joke for semi-corpse David Letterman and ten thousand other lazy-as-shit comedians, here Palin appears in her incarnation as mayor of Wasilla, where Hughes was living at the time of Leppink’s offing. Fortunately for those such as myself suffering from Sarah Palin exhaustion syndrome, those pages can be skimmed over quite quickly.

One of Rosen’s major themes in the book is the interplay between film and real life. He cites two movies in particular — Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a classic film noir about a femme fatale who persuades an insurance agent to kill her husband and The Last Seduction, in which Manhattanite Linda Fiorentino manipulates a provincial yokel into murdering her spouse. While the parallels with Double Indemnity are coincidental, it is a very different matter with The Last Seduction. According to a stripper colleague named Lora Aspotis who watched the film with Hughes: ‘She… told me that was her heroine and that she wanted to be just like her.’ The prosecutor even attempted to introduce the film as evidence against Hughes during her trial, although he was overruled.

The truth however is that while Hughes may have seen herself as a master manipulatrix and all-round sexual supervixen a la Fiorentino’s character, she was sorely mistaken. If she’d been that clever she’d never have wound up in a book written by Fred Rosen, who aptly quips in the book ‘most criminals are nowhere near as bright as they think they are.’ Indeed, Deadly Angel is a crime story entirely without mystery, in which the dead man reveals at the very beginning precisely whodunit; after that it’s just a matter of time. Pace Walter Mosley and his NPR-ready platitudes, what True Crime books such as Deadly Angel give us is not cleansing but anti-catharsis. Sure, the killer gets sent to jail, but there is no redemption, no meaning, just a profound plumbing of the astounding shallows of the human soul. Rosen confronts us with the lesson-free story of sad lives gone hopelessly wrong, and rubs our noses in the depressing rubbishness of crime. It is little surprise then that Rosen at times sounds more than a little weary. Although his prose is usually deadpan, even at times flat, occasionally a burst of contempt escapes him, such as when he describes Hughes’ transition from sociopathic stripper to model mother:

‘She gyrated her way into a new life with a combination of pelvic thrust and pole slithering…’

Or:

‘In between showing her bush at the Bush, Hughes had allegedly worked as a volunteer in various Alaska charities. Apparently, none of the men in her Alaskan life knew she was a closet humanitarian and intellectual, anxious to gain academic honours.’

However if that all sounds a little harsh, at the end of the book Rosen provides us with the details of an alternate reality in which Mechele Hughes (now Linehan) is the loving mother she reinvented herself as, tragically found guilty of a crime she did not commit. Entrance is free: all you need do is click on this link to be transported to ‘A positive place to share in the journey of bringing Mechele Linehan home.‘ You can even buy ‘Free Mechele’ merchandise, including bibs, boxer shorts and T-shirts for dogs. As for Rosen, he’s already moved on. In November he will publish Body Count: On the Murder Trail of Bayou Red, the Record Setting Serial Killer Who Terrorized the Deep South. Apparently Bayou Red killed loads of people but hardly anybody noticed. I look forward to an exceedingly grim read.

In Ellery Queen’s Book of Mystery Stories, first published under the title The Literature of Crime, the crime stories presented in the collection are written by writers generally not recognized as crime, mystery or thriller writers.

Edited by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of the writing team of Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe, as well as the name of thier fictional detective character, the book offers crime stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and a dozen other writers.

Included in the collection is a classic crime story by Ernest Hemingway called The Killers. The short story is one of my favorites and it is perhaps Hemingway’s best short story.

“Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers is one of the best known short stories ever written and no volume dedicated to the literature of crime would be complete without it,” the editors wrote in the introduction to the story.

“It is revealing nothing new about Hemingway to point out that essentially he is preoccupied with doom - more specifically, with death. It has been explained this way: ‘The I in Hemingway stories is the man that things are done to’ - and the final thing that is done to him, as to all of us, is death. No story of Hemingway illustrates this fundamental thesis more clearly than The Killers; nor does any story of Hemingway’s illustrate more clearly why he is a legend in his own lifetime. Here, in a few pages, is the justly famous Hemingway dialogue - terse, clipped, the quintessence of realistic speech; here in a few pages, are more than the foreshadowings of the great literary qualities to be found in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls…”

Hemingway covered crime as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. The following year he volunteered to be an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I after being rejected by the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight. He was wounded, returned home and he soon after began covering crime and other subjects for the Toronto Star Weekly. Hemingway credited his sparse, tough style of writing to his working for those newspapers with their quick deadlines. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway offers a good collection of his newspaper and magazine pieces.

In his journalism, novels and short stories, Hemingway covered crime, love and war, hunting, fishing and bull-fighting. In addition to The Killers, he wrote other short stories about crime and he also wrote a good, tough crime novel called To Have and Have Not.

Humphrey Bogart portrayed Hemingway’s tough-guy hero, Harry Morgan, in the film version of the novel. Bogart, of course, also portrayed crime fiction’s iconic characters Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’sThe Maltese Falcon.

I heard Elmore Leonard, one of our best contemporary crime writers, tell his audience at the Philadelphia Free Library a few months ago that Hemingway had been a main influence on him (although he lamented that Hemingway lacked a sense of humor). Many other crime writers, as well as writers of all stripes, list Hemingway as a major influence. I do as well.

I devoured crime fiction and thrillers as a teenager. I read Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain, to name but a few. I also read literary fiction and Hemingway’s novels were a favorite of mine.

After serving two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, I was stationed on a Navy tugboat at the U.S.nuclear submarine base in Holy Loch, Scotland for two years. I was in my mid-20s then and I discovered Hemingway’s short stories, which I liked even better than his novels. I was pleased that some of them, like The Killers and The Battler  were first-rate crime stories.

I traveled throughtout Europe during those years, visiting Italy, France and Spain, which were the settings for many of Hemingway’s stories. While traveling across Europe I always carried what we called in the Navy an “AWOL” bag. In the carry-all bag, among my toilet articles and a change or two of clothes, were several Penguin paperbacks books.

I loved those classic orange and white paperbacks and I still have many of them today. I bought and read Penguin’s Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess novels, Mark Twain’s travel books, and many other classic books. I carried several of these paperbacks in my AWOL bag, along with Hemingway’s Penguin paperback short story collections, such as Men Without Women and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Except for his tragic end, Hemingway led my idea of the ideal writer’s life. He was successful, wealthy and popular. He had the freedom to travel the world and hunt and fish and drink and talk in bars. He covered wars, crime, sporting events and other happenings - and then returned home to write about it.

Hemingway truly loved the sea and he lived near the ocean in Key West, Florida and later in Cuba. I visited his home in Key West and I hope to one day visit his home in Cuba once the communists are finally kicked off the island.

Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 but he lives on with his novels and stories. His family is releasing a newly-edited version of A Moveable Feast and there are two major film productions in the works about his work and his life. Hemingway is influencing yet a new generation of writers and readers.

“Courage is grace under pressure,” Hemingway once wrote. He also wrote “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’

David Ignatius wrote this book before the eruption of street protests in response to the rigged elections in Iran and the Iranian government’s subsequent violent crackdown on the protestors.

The Increment (Norton), a political novel as much as it is a spy thriller, concerns an Iranian scientist, “Dr Ali,”  who contacts the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via their public web site and offers to provide information about Iran’s nuclear program.

The responsibility for handling the “virtual walk-in” agent falls to Harry Pappas, a veteran CIA officer who is the chief of the agency’s Iranian Operations Division, known within the CIA as the “Persia House.” Pappas, described by Ignatius as a big man in what has become a little institution, is a somewhat burned-out officer. His greives for his son, a marine who died in combat in Iraq, and for the current sorry state of the CIA.

Pappas must share the handling of Dr. Ali with Arthur Fox, the chief of the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Fox, who has political connections in the White House, sees Dr. Ali as a “smoking gun,” which he hopes will push the president towards war with Iran to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.

Pappas, the old field intelligence officer, wants to move slow and he states that they don’t know who Dr. Ali is, nor do they know what he knows. Without CIA officers or local agents operating in Iran, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to learn more about Dr. Ali and his access to nuclear weapons development.

The CIA director, a Navy admiral more suited for the bridge of a ship than the leadership of an intelligence agency, acknowledges that Fox has the upper hand with his White House connections, but he allows Pappas to pursue an avenue with his contacts in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Pappas knows that SIS, also known as MI6, the British equivalent to the CIA, has “assets” on the ground in Iran. Pappas sets out to use those assets to contact Dr. Ali.

His contact in SIS is Adrian Winkler, the chief of staff. Winkler, a poster boy for upper class Brits, was Pappas’ old friend and colleague. They served together in Moscow and Iraq while each represented their respective intelligence service. Winkler tells Pappas that they do indeed have agents in Iran, and they have much more - they have the Increment.

“We use soldiers from the Special Air Service, mostly,” Winkler explained. “Black ops people, highly trained. Many of them are from the - forgive the term - former colonies. Indians, Paks, West Indians, Arabs. Theya all speak the languages fluently, like natives. They can operate anywhere, and more or less invisible. Or so we like to think. They are seconded to SIS for certain missions where we have to get into a denied area, do something unpleasant, and get out. They have the mythical 007 “license to kill,” as a matter of fact. I like to think of them as James Bond meets My Beautiful Launderette. They give us certain capabilities that we would not have, even under our own rather expansive rules. You don’t know abou the Increment because, strictly speaking, there is no such organization.”

Winkler provides Pappas with a trio of operators from the Increment and they are dispatched to Iran to make contact with Dr. Ali.

David Ignatius, 58, is a columnist for the Washington Post. He writes about politics and international affairs for the national newspaper. He has also written six previous novels. Body of Lies, his previous novel, was made into a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

Ignatius has covered the Middle East and the CIA for more than 25 years and he knows both well. Much of his new novel is based on facts, including the Increment.

Having performed security work as a young sailor in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee, I’ve had many dealings with the CIA. I’ve attended CIA briefings and I’ve been trained by CIA officers. As a writer, I’ve interviewed retired and current active duty CIA officers.

I know them to be patriotic public servants. I believe they have been poorly portrayed in books, films, and on TV. The Bourne film series, for example, portrays CIA officers who spend countless time and effort trying to track down and kill one of their own officers. What nonsense. Have we run out of terrorists and criminals to serve as bad guys in this world?

Ignatius offers us believable characters and realistic situations. This is an interesting novel. I only wish he had written more about the Increment in action.

Ignatius, who is to the left of me politically, is against military action to thwart a nuclear Iran. He subscribes to the wait and see school of thought. I’m waiting to see if Israel will launch an attack on Iran, just as they attacked Syria and Iraq when they attempted to develop nuclear weapons in the past.

With protestors on the streets in Iran in the news, this is a good time to read The Increment, even if you don’t agree with Ignatius’ world view.

“Bond,” said the dark, cruelly handsome man in a tuxedo as he lit a cigarette languidly. “James Bond.”

And so film-viewers in 1963 were introduced to the suave yet rugged fictional British secret agent James Bond. Portraying Bond in the film, Dr. No, was a young Scottish actor named Sean Connery.

Dr. No and the subsequent Connery-Bond films in the 1960’s inspired millions of film-viewers to go on and read Ian Fleming’s thrillers. I was one of them.

According to a recent Conde Nast survey, since the first Fleming thriller, Casino Royale was published in 1953, Bond has generated nearly $14 billion from the books, movies and video games. Bond is the world’s most enduring, and profitable, fictional character.

I recently watched the latest Bond film, Quantum of Solace again on DVD. Although I was pleased that the film producers made a thriller rather than a silly, action-comedy, I have to give the film a mixed review. It’s a well-made film, but it lacked character and Ian Fleming’s classic trademarks. Daniel Craig is fine, although he does not look like Fleming’s Bond. I would have casted Clive Owen in the role.

The title of the film baffled many viewers. The title comes from a Fleming short story and the film makers took the title but chose to write an original screenplay for the film.

After viewing the film I picked up my copy of Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories (Penguin Books) and reread the story. Penguin’s soft cover edition features Fleming’s nine short short stories about Bond, some of which were originally published in a 1960 collection called For Your Eyes Only and others were published after Fleming’s death in a 1966 collection called Octopussy.  

One short story, 007 in New York, appeared in Thrilling Cities, Fleming’s 1963 collection of travel pieces he wrote in 1959 and 1960 for the London Sunday Times. 

According to Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the Times of London and the author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, Fleming’s short story Quantum of Solace is the strangest of all his James Bond stories.

“In place of the traditional Bond fare of spying, violence, women and dry matinis,” Macintyre wrote in his column, “Fleming served up a profound reflection on longing, marriage, society and passion. The “quantum of solace” to which the title refers is, bizarrely, a mathematical measurement of love.”

The quantum of solace, Macintyre explains, is a precise fiqure defining the comfort, humanity and fellow feeling required between two people for love to survive. If the quantum of solace is nil, than love is dead.

The story is set in the Bahamas after Bond has completed an assignment. Bond attends a dinner party where he finds the people boring. Bond has an after-dinner drink with his host who goes on to tell him a story about a failed marriage.

Macintyre wrote that the short story was Fleming’s attempt to write a more serious story in the manner of Somerset Maugham, but it was also a reflection on his own turbulent marriage.

Although the story is not a traditional Bond story, I found it interesting. The other stories in the Penguin collection are about crime and espionage, Fleming’s tradtional fare. The stories in the collection include:

From a View to a Kill

For Your Eyes Only

Risico

The Hildebrand Rarity

Octopussy

The Property of a Lady

The Living Daylights

007 in New York

Some of the story titles may sound familiar as the film producers cherry-picked titles, characters, and plots from the short stories for the film series.

Bond in the short stories, as well as the novels, is more human, less promiscuous and less flippant than the film character. Bond is an extraordinary character in the stories and he encounters extraordinary people and lives through extraordinary events, but his not Superman or a cartoon character.

Fleming wanted Bond to simply be a blunt instrument in the hands of the government and let the action of the book carry him along, but Fleming also infused Bond with his own ”quirks and characteristics.”

“Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed, the Russian Mafia, as well as the nightmarish idea that some such fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapon-grade plutonium,” Christopher Hitchens wrote.

Ian Fleming (1908-1964) was a British naval intelligence officer in WWII and a journalist before and after the war. He often told friends that he was going to write “the spy story to end all spy stories.” And he did.

Raymond Chandler, perhaps our greatest crime writer, was a friend of Fleming’s and a fan of Bond.

“Bond is what every man would like to be,” Chandler wrote in a review in the Sunday Times. “And what every woman would like to have between her sheets.’

So if you only know James Bond from the movies, you might want to read the short stories and then move on to Ian Fleming’s novels.

Many years ago when I was a young bachelor I brought home to my apartment a young girl I met in a bar.

While I was preparing a couple of drinks for us she looked over the books in my library.

“You have a lot of books on death,” she said in a questioning tone, noting the numerous titles of books on crime history, true crime and crime fiction, as well those on espionage, terrorism and military history.

Well, I tried to explain, I have books on a wide variety of subjects, as well as classic literature, but as a student of crime and an aspiring crime writer, I of course own a good number of books on crime.

She nodded and sipped her drink, but she soon made her excuses and left my apartment. I finished my drink and had a good laugh.

Michael Connelly’s fictional character Jack McEvoy would have understood. According to Connelly, McEvoy specializes in death.

McEvoy is the Rocky Mountain News crime reporter we met in Connelly’s earlier crime thriller, The Poet, where he investigated the suicide of his twin brother, a homicide detective. Teaming up with an FBI Special Agent he later becomes romantically involved with, McEvoy hunts a serial killer that leaves poetry and phrases from Edgar Allen Poe at his victim’s crime scenes.

In what his publishers describe as a “continuation,” rather than a sequel, McEvoy is back on the hunt, investigating another serial killer in The Scarecrow  (Little, Brown and Company).

Having achieved some fame and written a bestselling true crime book on the Poet serial killer, McEvoy has moved up from the Rocky Mountain News to a coveted position on the Los Angeles Times.

Unfortunately, as a highly-paid crime reporter, he is on the list of laid off staff as the newspaper downsizes. He is allowed to remain on for two weeks, providing he trains his replacement. His replacement is a young woman fresh out of journalism school, but she is much more technology-savvy than McEvoy - and she is paid far less than McEvoy.

Hoping to leave the newspaper with a big story, McEvoy investigates the case of an exotic dancer found dead in a car trunk. The police have arrested a 16-year-old gangbanger, but McEvoy connects the murder of the dancer to other murders committed elsewhere.

The killer this time is less artistic than the Poet. The “Scarecrow,” so called because he is hired to prevent intrusions to law firm and corporate computer files, is a crazed computer genius. Being an expert on system intrusions, he is able to both track McEvoy’s actions and thwart his investigation via system hacking.

McEvoy calls in FBI Special Agent Rachel Walling, his partner and girlfriend from The Poet, to assist him in what he believes will be the biggest story he’s covered since the Poet. Like the Poet story, McEvoy becomes part of the story rahter than just covering it. The hunter becomes the hunted and McEvoy realizes that he has is being targeted by the Scarecrow.

The story’s backdrop features both the shrinking world of daily newspapers and the growing world of digital technology. Connelly, a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, knows the world of newspapers well and he laments the current state of the business.

In The Scarecrow McEvoy notes that since most of the news has been posted on the Internet, the newspaper might as well be called the Daily Afterthought.

“At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work,” McEvoy explains in the novel. “A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse as Los Angeles. Now thousands of pages of editorial content were being cut each year and soon the paper would be like the newsroom, an intellectual ghost town.”

Connelly is less knowledgable about computers and technology, but like a good reporter, he has researched this area and he presents a chilling account of the mayhem a person with extraordinary computer skills can cause.

While some fear the government’s intrusion into our lives with security cameras and electronic surveillance  (all in the cause of preventing crime and acts of terrorism), I tend to be more wary of the hacker who wreaks havoc on our lives for reasons of larceny or a perverse sense of humor.

Connelly’s hacker-killer manipulates McEvoy by intercepting his e-mails, forging other e-mails from him and by canceling his cell phone service and credit cards. By hacking into various systems the killer learns all about McEvoy.

Connelly’s latest novel is fast-paced, suspenseful and interesting. If you’re interested in crime, you will enjoy this crime thriller.

“They put Foley and the Cuban together in the backseat of the van and took them from the Palm Beach County jail on Gun Club to Glades Correctional, the old redbrick prison at the south end of Lake Okeechobee,” my friend and former editor, Frank Wilson, read to the audience at the Central Library in Center City Philadelphia prior to introducing crime writer Elmore Leonard on May 14th.

“That sentence, which happens to be the first one in Road Dogs , will signal to any reader who’s been there before that he is once again entering “Elmoreland,” a region whose inhabitants speak a language not taught in the schools — American.”

Wilson, who also writes a column here at When Falls the Coliseum, retired as the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and runs Books, Inq (http://booksinq.blogspot.com), a popular literary blog that the Times in London named as one of the 100 Best Blogs 2009. 

Wilson told the audience that once you find yourself in Elmoreland you also find yourself hanging on those inhabitants’ every word.

“You just can’t help noticing that what they say and the way they say it is smooth and tangy, like good Bourbon,” Wilson said.

I ventured to the library to hear Leonard, who is one of my favorite crime writers. I enjoy his fast-paced and character and dialog-driven novels. His violent , quirky, often dim, but always human characters are always interesting. And they are, in a dark way, very amusing. Leonard is a very funny writer.

Leonard, 83, the author of 42 novels and two story collections, told the gathering at the library that night that his current novel puts together three of his favorite characters from previous novels.

There is Jack Foley, the handsome and charming bank robber from Out of Sight, which was played by George Clooney in the film version, and Cundo Ray from LaBrava, who is a diminutive and wealthy Cuban career criminal. The two become “Road Dogs” - friends and allies who have each other’s back in prison.

We are also reintroduced to Dawn Navarro, the beautiful con artist and “ordained” psychic from Leonard’s earlier novel Riding the Rap. Ray thinks of Navarro as his common-law wife and he is obsessed with her faithfulness to him while he is prison.

“I wasn’t sure if Cundo Ray was alive,” Leonard said. “I had to look through LaBrava and came to the scene where Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times, but he has to leave quickly for some reason, so no one says he’s dead.”

“A couple of emergency guys find he’s still breathing and so they take him to the hospital and he’s in a coma for 60 days,” Leonard said. “Actually, he’s faking the coma while he looks around and finds out what’s going on.”

Leonard went on to explain that Ray eventually moves to Venice, California, invests in property at the right time and makes a lot of money. Then he is convicted of second-degree murder and he is in prison at the same time as Foley.

“So this was my opportunity to get a couple of characters that I thought needed a little bit more time on the page,” Leonard said.

Road Dogs also offers Little Jimmy, a homosexual Cuban criminal that Ray protected when they were in prison together. Jimmy now oversees Ray’s property and bookmaking interests in Venice. There is also Lou Adams, an FBI agent who is obsessed with placing Foley back in prison and then writing a true crime book about the bank robber who has robbed more than 100 banks.

Adams coerces a former gangbanger named Tico to watch Foley, who was released early from prison thanks to Ray’s $30, 000 payment to a sharp lawyer. Foley moves to Venice and stays at one of Ray’s homes across a small canal from another of Ray’s home where Navarro is living. This larcenous cast of charactors comes together and waits for Ray’s release from prison.

Leonard read passages from the novel and he spoke of his beginnings as a writer, getting up at 5 AM to work on his stories for two hours before going to work in an ad agency. He also spoke of his early success and the film adaptations of his novels (the good ones and the very bad ones), and he spoke of his novel-in-progress.

Leonard listed several writers he reads and said that his all time favorite was Ernest Hemingway. He said he learned about being spare and showing restrain from Hemingway, but he added that Hemingway did not have a sense of humor.

Leonard said he learned how to use humor from Richard Bissel. He also liked the dialog-driven The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. Leonard believes the novel is the best crime book ever written.

Leonard, unlike most crime writers, said he was not at all influenced by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Unlike these two giants of crime fiction, Leonard does not write in the first person of a private detective, and he does not, like Chandler, use similes.

An audience member noted that Leonard didn’t use similes and asked when he figured out he didn’t want to use similes. Leonard replied with his usual dry wit, “When I realized I’m not good at it.”

Leonard went on to say that he believes similes interrupt the story, especially the way Chandler used them, but he acknowledged that many people (me included) still read Chandler because of his language.

Chandler’s similes work very well, it seems to me, because Chandler wrote in the first person. The similes would perhaps not work as well for Leonard, as he writes in the third person. Also, Leonard’s street criminals are generally not the type of people who use similes.

Leonard is as clever and amusing a speaker as he is a writer, so I truly enjoyed hearing him speak that night. You too can hear him by visiting the event podcast at http://elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/weblog/road_dogs_tour_-_free_library_of_philadelphia/

I also recommend you return to Elmoreland and read Road Dogs.

Robert Leuci, the former New York City detective who was the subject of the book and film Prince of the City, is a crime writer who lives in Rhode Island, far from the mean streets of New York.

Robert Daley’s Prince of the City  was a first-rate true crime book and Sidney Lumet’s film based on the book with Treat Williams portraying Leuci when he was a young detective and a member of the elite narcotics Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was brilliant and haunting.

The SIU narcotics detectives had city-wide jurisdiction and little supervision over their selected cases, which was unusual in a bureaucracy like the New York Police Department (NYPD). These “princes of the city” were the most aggressive and talented detectives in the war on drugs in the 1960s and 1970s. And some of them were corrupt.       

Leuci, as he recounts in his memoir All the Centurions: A New York City Cop Remembers His Years On the Street, 1961-1981 (Harper), committed acts of corruption, but he came forward and volunteered to make cases for the prosecutors (including a young Rudolph Giuliani) against corruption in the criminal justice system.

He was not, he stresses, caught in a criminal act and forced to do, which is the path taken by so many crooked cops and assorted criminals.

And he was not an oddball and outcast like Frank Serpico, the NYPD undercover narcotics cop who was the subject of both the book and film Serpico. Leuci said he was all cop. He belonged.

He wanted to go after corrupt lawyers and judges, but tragically for Leuci; he was ultimately forced by prosecutors to also testify against his former partners and other cops.     

Leuci, now 68, retired from the NYPD in 1981. In addition to his memoir, he writes crime novels.

I contacted Leuci and talked to him about drugs, organized crime, crime fiction, and his life as a cop and a writer. Below is my Q & A with him:

Davis: I read two of your novels, Odessa Beach and Captain Butterfly and I read your memoir All the Centurions. I thought they were very good.

Leuci: Odessa Beach and Captain Butterfly are my early books. My later books are much better.

Davis: I’ll have to read them as well.

Leuci: My favorite is Fence Jumpers. It’s a bit autobiographical.

For Odessa Beach I spent about nine months at Brighten Beach among the Russian immigrants. That was fun.

Davis: Was that as a detective or later as a writer?

Leuci: It was after I retired. I wanted to write something about these Russian immigrants, whom I found fascinating. I lived down there and wrote the book.

Russian guys have been around since 1979. They left the old Soviet Union and were allegedly going to Israel, but they never got there. They are mostly Jews, but they were not Jewish in any sense. They knew nothing about Judaism and they knew nothing about Karl Marx. They were not communists, they were just Russians. They were tough guys. A lot of them were ex-prisoners who had been in jail for all sorts of different reasons.

The first wave that first came here were some of the toughest guys you would want to meet. They are very violent and they are into almost everything. They are much more powerful today than the Italians.

Davis: Have the Russians become the bigger organized crime element in the country?

Leuci: For a hundred years Italian organized crime held sway in the streets in all the big cities, especially in eastern cities, and some in the west. New York alone had five major crime families. They were all over the place and they controlled drugs, gambling, prostitution, and a lot of stuff. But they’re done, pretty much.

Davis: Italian organized crime is still active around the country, including here in Philadelphia – I’m part-Italian and I live in South Philly - but you’re right, their influence has greatly diminished.

Leuci: I know a lot of people like to say that organized crime kept crime down, and without organized crime, disorganized crime would take over the streets, but these guys were responsible for most of the drugs that were in the streets. They were responsible for a lot of that street crime. I write about this in Fence Jumpers.

Davis: Have you written about anything other than crime?

Leuci: No, I’ve thought about it, but crime is what I know.

Davis: I find crime to be one of the most interesting of human endeavors.

Leuci: There can be a lot of really good things in a crime novel.

Davis: I truly liked The Prince of the City, both the book and the film. Were the book and film accurate? Is there anything that you would change if you could?

Leuci: I had a certain amount of input there, but not a whole lot. The book was written by Bob Daley, who is a wonderful writer and a good friend, and then it was turned into a film by Sidney Lumet, who is a wonderful film director who made Serpico and Network and other wonderful movies. But you know it was not exactly an uplifting movie.

I’ve never sat through the entire movie, but I saw bits and pieces of it - it’s too hard for me. People still say to me why did you do this? What was the reason?

It’s not really explained very well in the book and it’s not explained at all in the movie. I mean it sort of gives you an idea of why I got involved in that investigation, but it was hard to do it, I suppose. In All the Centurions, I really do explain what brought me to that place and why I did what I did. I’m not sure it was a great decision, by the way.

Davis: That’s my next question. Do you think you did the right thing by coming forward?

Leuci: Certainly at the time. I was probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown and I didn’t even realize it. I was a bit loony and all kinds of things were going on in my life. I was very depressed about the work I was doing in the police department.

I went into the police department because I very much wanted to be a cop. I found myself within a short period of time, after five or six years, behaving in ways that were foreign to my nature. I was behaving in ways that were much like the people I was investigating. It mad me sick and it started to make me crazy. The people I cared most about were the other cops I worked with, and most of them were great guys, but they were crooks.

We all rationalize our behavior. It made sense to me at the time, but when I really thought about it and really took it all apart, I realized it was so hypocritical and so opposed to anything I believed in.

I should have quit or transferred to another unit, but I didn’t do that and I got caught up in this crazy investigation that was a horror in many ways.                     

It was a decision that changed my life certainly, and maybe changed it for the better in some ways, but the price I paid and the price that other people paid for my fucking feeling sorry for myself, was way too high.

Davis: Are there different levels of corruption? Is there a difference between a cop taking a meal and a cop taking drug money?

Leuci: For years many cops believed there was “clean money” like gambling, and “dirty money” like drugs, but the problem with that kind of mentality is that most of the money really comes out of drugs.

It ends up in one big circle. I would never sell drugs. I would never sell to an informant. I had a line that said I would never cross. A lot of guys I worked with said they would never cross that line, but a lot of guys did.

You can’t draw those lines; it’s beyond your control. You shouldn’t do that. Once you do it you’ve screwed yourself. It’s a sensual world you’re working in. It really rubs off on you. There is no cop born, ever, that changed the street. But the street has changed every single cop.     

Davis: Drugs are rampant today, and they fuel many other crimes. Can you tell us what it was like to a narcotics detective in your day in New York?

Leuci:  There was a heroin epidemic in the 1960s, 1970s, and part of the 1980s. The drug of choice was heroin, not cocaine or crack cocaine. Heroin killed thousands of drug addicts. The 60s and the 70s were a crazy time, and when you added this drug it made the whole world seem topsy-turvy.

But there was less violence as that drug doesn’t produce violence. People go out and rob to get the drug, but heroin is an opiate. It makes people tired, it makes them sleep. Heroin addicts are not threatening people. When the drug of choice changed to crack cocaine it became extremely violent. That drug produces violence and paranoia. Meth is another violent drug.

Davis: I’ve long been interested in your era, as I was a young guy then, and I read Robin Moore’s The French Connection in 1969, and went on to read a lot books and see a lot of films about crime in New York, including Prince of the City, and your books.

In your era the SIU produced many legendary detectives like Eddie Egan, Sonny Grosso, and Joe Nunziata. Nunziata was an interesting man who came to a tragic end with his suicide. Even though he was apparently corrupt, my heart went out to him and his family when I saw Prince of the City.

Leuci: Joe Nunziata looked like Dean Martin. He was a very handsome, very gregarious guy. He was all those things. There were a lot of good things about him and I was one of his big admirers. Joe made some big mistakes. We all did. I think the film did him justice. I talk to his son every now and again.

Papa’s Game is a great book that tells the story of that time and the French Connection rip-off. That was the most horrendous thing imaginable.

Davis: Yes, after confiscating all that heroin in the French Connection case, the biggest drug bust at the time, someone simply stole it from the NYPD property room. Did you know the people written about in Papa’s Game, the criminal Vincent Papa and Detective Frank King?

Leuci:  I knew Frank King pretty well. Frank King was a good cop in a lot of ways, but he was thoroughly corrupt. He was a gangster as a cop.

Davis: How are you treated by law enforcement officers today?

Leuci: It depends on where they are and who they are, what generation they are from. I lecture at every police department in the country, with the exception of New York, on corruption, ethics and morality. The cops are very nice.

But what old school guys say, and it’s true, is that you violated something that can’t be forgiven. When you turn in a cop for whatever reason, it’s unforgivable. I understand it as I come from that generation.

That has changed nowadays. It exists in cases of police brutality, but I think that if there is a cop out there who is going off on his own and doing corrupt things, other cops will report it. Police today have different kinds of education, background and world views. I don’t think you can get away with that kind of stuff today.

Davis: I have one last question about your era. Did you see the film American Gangster? It has been reported that the corrupt detective was based on you.

Leuci: I won’t go see it. I read the magazine piece and this guy has got to be kidding. Josh Brolin called me up and said he was playing me in a movie. I said you’re not playing me.  

Davis: Did you know the Black heroin dealers Frank Lucas or Nicky Barnes?

Leuci: I never worked in Harlem and I didn’t know Lucas. I worked in Brooklyn.

Davis: I talked to a retired DEA agent who worked in New York at the time and he said the movie was false and Lucas is a liar. Lucas never did any of that stuff he claimed. When he was caught he ratted out his gang and family members, but he never made any cases against corrupt cops or DEA agents. The writers and filmmakers naively believed everything Lucas told them.

Leuci: The people who wrote that spent no time doing any kind of research on it. They had this great story and they turned it into a movie. This guy Jacobson, who wrote the magazine piece and wrote the screenplay, is totally full of shit.

I had federal protection during the time he was talking about. I know the detective he was talking about, a guy named Albano. He was a real bad guy who worked Harlem. He was involved with the French Connection case.

But if they didn’t spend any time trying to get it straight, if they didn’t get my story straight, how can they get the rest of that movie straight?

Davis: Do you think Lucas used your name because you are known?

Leuci: Yes, of course. My daughter wanted to sue, but I said no.

Davis: They didn’t use your name, but they used your street name “Babyface.”

Leuci: No, when he gives Lucas his card, that’s my name on it.

Davis: I didn’t catch that.

Leuci: I’ve never seen it, but people told me about it. I was working for Giuliani at the Southern District of New York, and if any of that was true, Giuliani would have crucified me.

Those guys should be ashamed of themselves. It’s all bullshit.

Davis: One of the things I liked in your memoir was your portrayal of Sean Connery, one of my favorite actors. You wrote that at a party people were smoking pot and Connery told them to respect you and stop. “This man is a police officer.” I can hear his commanding voice. 

Leuci: Sean Connery is a very straight shooter. He was very kind to me when I was out of my level in Hollywood with these characters. He was very supportive. Some guys started smoking pot in front of us and he got pissed off.

Davis: Who influenced you as a writer?

Leuci: Robert Stone is a big influence and he is my mentor. I like Joseph Wambaugh, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price. There are so many writers that I really like.    

Davis: Any last thoughts?

Leuci: I’ve written seven books, taught at the University of Rhode Island for ten years, and I’ve lectured around the world. I’m a much more complicated character than you see in the movie.

In my first column here I noted that as a teenager in the 1960s I devoured crime fiction and thrillers. I bought hardbacks from the book clubs and I purchased a good number of paperbacks books.

I recall a second-hand bookstore where I picked up scores of vintage pulp paperbacks dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. With their lurid covers depicting guns, gore and girls, the novel’s atmosphere was established well before you turned to page one.

So I was pleased to discover that entrepreneur and author Charles Ardai, along with fellow author Max Philips, established Hard Case Crime, which publishes a line of affordable paperback crime novels that hearken back to that golden age of tough guy heroes, femme fatales and brutal bad guys.

Hard Case Crime offers the old classics of crime, from Philadelphia’s own David Goodis to Ed McBain, to modern crime writers like Lawrence Block and the recently deceased Donald E. Westlake. I love the book  covers, which feature pulp art from the post-WWII era.

Crime novels were enormously popular from WWII to the 1960s, “but the pulp novels that first captured the public’s imagination weren’t hardcovers,” Hard Case Crime states on its web site www.HardCaseCrime.com. “They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one’s published books like that in years — until now.”

One of the Hard Case Crime novels I read was E. Howard Hunt’s House Dick. Although today Hunt is known primarily as one of the Nixon White House “plumbers” who engineered the botched Watergate Hotel burglary, he was also a prolific writer of crime stories and spy thrillers.

Hunt served in the U.S. Navy and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in WWII, and he later joined the CIA when it was created to replace the wartime OSS. He served in a variety of outposts around the world and he was involved in many of the CIA’s history-making actions.

After he retired from the CIA Hunt went to work for Nixon’s special investigation unit. The unit was tasked with “plugging” the many leaks to the press — hence the name “the White House plumbers.”

Along with G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, Hunt hired a handful of Cuban-Americans to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D. C. and plant listening devices. They were caught in the act and the rest is history. (I recall a Red Foxx joke from the 1970s — “I call my wife Watergate because she bugs me.”)

Hunt served 33 months in federal prison and he died in 2007. His last book was a memoir called American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond.

There has been much speculation about Hunt’s involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination and that conspiracy theory was fueled by none other than Hunt’s old adversary, the KGB.

According toThe Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the KGB fabricated a letter from Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (yes, Virginia, Oswald killed Kennedy), to Hunt. The New York Times authenticated the letter (ha!) and even Oswald’s widow believed it was his handwrtting. But we now know the KGB wrote the letter, as they wanted to foster the conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the murder of the president, rather than a nitwit who admired Castro and had defected to the Soviet Union for two years.

The Mitrokhin Archives, written by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, is the official history of the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police, the KGB. Mitrokhin was the KGB’s chief archivist and he smuggled copies of the files out, several sheets at a time wrapped in his socks and other hiding places. He eventually defected to the British, bringing his mother load of KGB files with him.

Hunt didn’t have anything to do with President Kennedy’s murder, as he was too busy writing about murder and high crimes. While serving in the U.S. government Hunt wrote some 50 novels, including his crime novel House Dick in 1961.

Originally published under the name Gordon Davis (like a good spy), Hunt wrote a novel about a Washington D. C. hotel detective named Pete Novak. In the course of his duties in the hotel (no, not the Watergate), Novak encounters a small time hood, his beautiful and tough ex-wife, a rich couple from out of state, and a sham-doctor who pushes herbal tea laced with mind-altering drugs.

When the rich wife reports her jewels stolen from her hotel room, Novak becomes involved in mystery, romance, robbery and murder. He comes to the aid of the hood’s ex-wife when he believes she has been framed for murder.

When she questions whether his actions bend his professional ethics, Novak replies “After what I did for you last night, my ethics show more curves than a pretzel.”

Novak works with, and sometimes ducks, a tough, world-weary homicide detective, who calls the hotel “a mattress factory.”

Hunt is a good crime writer, but he falls short of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. No crime in that, I suppose. 

So if you want to read a good, vintage crime novel, along with some soft jazz and hard liquor, check out Howard Hunt’s House Dick, as well as some of the other Hard Case Crime books.