A team of U.S. Navy SEALs huddles around a coffee urn at their firebase in Afghanistan after an exhausting firefight with the Taliban.

“How can you account for people doing something so … savage?” asks the team’s shocked and appalled medic.

“Easy,” replies the more jaded SEAL team leader. “They’re savages.”

Don Winslow’s crime thriller Savages (Simon and Schuster) opens with two words:

Fuck you.

This is pretty much Chon’s attitude. But Chon, formerly known as John, a former Navy SEAL and ex-mercenary, doesn’t have attitude, according to his friend Ophelia, he has “baditude.”

Chon, the son of one of the original California marijuana kings, was a bad kid, but he earned his GED, joined the Navy and became a SEAL.

“They taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H2O.

Then they sent him to Stanland.

Afghanistan.

Where…

You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.

The Taliban don’t surf.”

The above is the sort of free verse that Winslow sprinkles through out the novel.

(Note to author Winslow: The L in SEAL stands for land. The SEALs train and operate in the sea, in the air and on land — Sea Air Land — SEAL).

Chon is one of three good friends who live in Laguna Beach.

Ben is the second of the close-knit trio. Ben, the son of leftist, Jewish shrinks (both his mother and father have lucrative psychotherapy practices), is a wealthy environmentalist and philanthropist.

His good deeds are financed by his highly successful marijuana business. Chon, who provides the muscle, is Ben’s partner in the mostly mellow pot business.

Ophelia, known as O for her loud multiple orgasms, is the third friend. O is a slim, “pixie like’ slacker who lives to shop. She has serious issues with her mother, whom she calls “Paqu.” It’s an acronym, O explains, for Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.

Her mother is South Orange County rich and beautiful. “Blonde hair, blue eyes and BRMCB — Best Rack Money Can Buy (you have real boobs here, you’re, like, Amish)”

O is happily sleeping with both Chon and Ben and the three friends led an idyllic life on Laguna Beach.

And then the Mexican Baja Cartel made them an offer that they can’t refuse.

The notorious Mexican drug gang wants to take over Ben and Chon’s pot business and make them employees of the cartel. To help convince them of their serious intentions, the cartel sent along a video of several men being beheaded.

Chon wants to respond in the same manner in which he handled an earlier threat from an outlaw biker gang. He killed them.

Ben wants to negotiate with the cartel and he agrees to meet with them. The Mexicans don’t want to negotiate; they want to take over the pot business.

And this impasse begins the conflict in this fast-paced, violent, irreverent and very funny thriller.

I first became acquainted with Don Winslow when I read his crime novel The Winter of Frankie Machine. 

In the novel Frank Machiano, known as “Frank the Bait Guy,” runs a bait shop and laundry service in San Diego, California. Machiano, who is known in other certain circles as ”Frankie Machine” for his cold-blooded killing ability, is a retired mob soldier.

He is drawn back into the world organized crime after someone orders a hit on the retired hitman.

Like Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine is wickedly funny and a fast-paced thriller.

There is talk of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro making a film of the novel. The character of Machiano’s partner-in-crime would be a good role for Joe Pesci. I’d liked to see Scorsese once again team up with his Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino actors, De Niro and Pesci.

(I’m not so fond of Oliver Stone. There are reports that he has signed on to direct Savages).

I enjoyed Savages but I have two problems with the thriller. My main beef is the character Chon being a former Navy SEAL.

I suppose there are one or two former SEALs who have gone bad in real life, but I’m old enough to recall when every psychotic killer and nut job in novels, on TV and in the movies during the 1960s and 1970s was a Vietnam veteran.

This trend began to wane when Magnum P.I. came on TV in 1980. Magnum offered not only one, but three positive characters who were Vietnam veterans. Thomas Magnum, portrayed by Tom Selleck, was a former Navy SEAL.

Magnum’s two friends, Rick and TC, were also Vietnam veterans. Higgins, the major domo of the Robin Master’s estate, was an honorable World War II veteran.

Magnum P.I., an amusing, lighhearted crime show, was very popular throughout the 1980s. I believe the pro-military show was instrumental in curtailing the veteran as killer and criminal stereotype in novels and on the big and small screen.

I would hate to see that stereotype begin to grow in popular fiction once again.

I also had a problem with the ending of Savages. Of course, I won’t reveal the ending here, but I thought the conclusion of the novel was too pat.

But otherwise I enjoyed the novel, and if you like humorous, irreverent and fast-paced crime thrillers, then you’ll like Savages as well.  

Regarding John le Carre’s recent critical remarks  about fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond, the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold  and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  is right about one thing.

Le Carre is correct in stating that the Bond films have overtaken the books. Its true that the general public’s image of the fictional secret agent is that of the often silly, superman-like film character, rather than the darker, more complex and more realistic Bond character in the novels.

Le Carre is wrong about everything else.

Le Carre, aka former British intelligence officer David Cornwell, upon reviewing a 1966 BBC broadcast in which he was highly critical of Ian Fleming, calling his character James Bond “a neo-fascist gangster,” noted that he would be “much kinder” in his remarks today.

The 78-year-old, bitter leftist spy novelist then went on to state that Bond “would have gone through the same antics for any country if the girls had been so pretty and the martinis so dry.”

So much for being kinder.    

“I dislike Bond,” le Carre told the BBC in 1966. “I’m not sure that Bond is a spy. I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in that category.’

“It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States or the Union of Soviet Republics.”

It was a pity that Fleming, who died in August of 1964, was not alive to respond. 

I suggest that le Carre, like millions of thriller readers around the world, re-read the Fleming stories.  

Although Fleming wrote the James Bond thrillers unabashedly for entertainment (the public’s as well as his own), the novels portray a character based on the secret agents and military commandos Fleming met while serving as a naval commander attached to British naval intelligence in World War II. He also added a good bit his own likes, dislikes and personality to the character.

The Bond character was driven primarily by a love of adventure and a strong sense of patriotism. He was all Queen and Country. He fought the good fight against communists, terrorists and criminals. He was a modern day knight.

As for le Carre’s comment that Bond was not truly a spy, if he were to re-read the novels, he would discover that the character was a senior intelligence officer in the British Secret Service - the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), often referred to as MI6.

Although he did not perform traditional intelligence officer duties, such as recruiting and controlling agents, Bond was sent out on missions to “spy” on potential enemies of the Crown. Bond was a special intelligence operative who undertook what is called in the trade ”direct action.”      

Although the double-00 license to kill was a fictional device, there are in reality special operatives in the intelligence services of both the U.S. and the U.k who have special operations backgrounds and have skills in guns, knives, unarmed combat and explosives. These men, and some women, are hunting al Qaeda today.  

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming said. 

Although his thrillers had fantasic elements, many of his plots and characters were inspired by true events. A case in point is the plot of Goldfinger, in which a gold-crazed criminal mastermind plans to rob Fort Knox.

Ben Macintyre recently wrote a good piece for the London Times in which he informs us that a German spy in WWII named Gustav Steinhauer planned to blow up the gold reserves of the Bank of England. Macintrye wrote that Fleming liked the interplay between truth and fiction.

In 1966, when le Carre recorded his disparaging remarks, Fleming was dead but the Bond-mania was in full bloom. Although le Carre’s novels sold well and he was critically acclaimed, Fleming’s thrillers were well on their way to selling 100 million copies world-wide. James Bond was a house-hold name around the world.

As for le Carre’s realism, I’ve interviewed a good number of former and current CIA and military intelligence officers who object strongly to the moral ambiguity found in his novels. Most Cold War intelligence officers were, like Bond, patriots who were dedicated to fighting communism.  

British, American and other Western intelligence officers were certainly not like their utterly ruthless KGB and Eastern bloc counterparts who were defending a totalitarian, evil empire. There was a moral distinction between the Cold Warriors that you will not find not in a le Carre novel. 

William F. Buckley Jr, the late author, columnist and political talk show host, noted that films and novels in the 1960s and 1970s often portrayed CIA officers as no better than the KGB.

Having served briefly as a CIA officer, he objected. Buckley, who wrote his own series of spy thrillers, believed the CIA and the Western intelligence services were a force for good in the Cold War. I agree.

Despite the moral ambiguity, I used to like le Carre’s novels. But his most recent novels have been marred by his increasing anti-Americanism and leftist opinions.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a first-rate spy thriller, but so is Fleming’s From Russia With Love.   

Lastly, it should be noted that Fleming lost his father in combat in World War I and his younger brother in World War II. Ian Fleming was a British patriot, as was his creation, James Bond.

To learn more about Fleming, you can read some of my previous posts here 

As I’ve noted here before, I believe thrillers are an art form. Thrillers are like jazz to literary fiction’s classical music.

I devoured thrillers when I was a teenager and I still read and love them today.  

So I was very interested in reading Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (Oceanview), edited by thriller writer David Morrell and critic Hank Wagner.

The book offers interesting essays by noted thriller writers on 100 selected thrillers deemed “must-reads” by the International Thriller Writers (ITW) organization. With each selection, the essayist offers a short biographical passage on the thriller’s author and provides an historical and literary perspective to the selected thriller. 

Any list of best (or worst) of anything is open to debate, and this list of must-read thrillers is no exception. But the essays here are well written and thought provoking, even if I didn’t agree with the writer or the selection.

Storytellers were thrilling their audiences before we learned to write, David Hewson, a British thriller writer, notes in his introduction to the book.

“Today, thrillers provide a rich literary feast embracing a wide variety of worlds - the law, espionage, action-adventure, medicine, police and crime, romance, history, politics, high-tech, religion, and many more,” wrote Hewson in his introduction to Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads.

“But old or new — and this vibrant field never remains still — all thrillers share certain characteristics. Like Homer trying to keep his audience captive while telling his tale in ancient Greece, thriller authors are constantly aware that their readers want them to provide the sudden rush of emotions: the excitement, suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes subtly, with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace. By definition, if a thriller does not thrill, it is not doing its job.

“But thrillers are also intensely human stories, allegories that find truths in fiction in order to tell us more about the world we inhabit and the kind of people we are,” Hewson explained. “The thriller is the oldest kind of story — rooted in our deepest hopes and fears, for ourselves, those we love, and the world around us.”    

According to the editors, Morrell and Wagner, the 100 thrillers were chosen on the basis of the impact each had on the genre.

“Did the author contribute a new subject, direction, character, and/or technique that had a lasting effect?” the editors asked. “Did a work make such an impression that it had that it was frequently imitated?”

One may be surprised to see Homer or Shakespeare included in this book, but the essayists explain why the classics have all of the elements of a thriller. Some other selections, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, may also surprise the thriller reader.   

I was pleased to see Rudyard Kipling’s Kim include, as this was perhaps the first spy thriller I read. My father had a bookcase in our living room that held many of the children’s classics. I read them all at a very young age, but Kim was a special favorite. This was a thriller that grabbed my young mind and imagination.

In the early 1960s I saw Sean Connery as James Bond in the film Dr. No and I quickly read the Ian Fleming thrillers. I discovered that the novels were darker and more complex than the films and I remain a Fleming aficionado today.

I’m glad that the editors included Fleming’s great Cold War thriller From Russia With Love. Raymond Benson, who authored several of the Bond continuation novels, wrote the essay about the thriller.

Benson wrote that Fleming created a new genre with the “fantasy” spy novel. I don’t agree with this label. From Russia With Love is a realistic and hard-edged 1957 novel that I would stack against any of the other Cold War thrillers.

A World War II naval intelligence officer and a journalist before and after the war, Fleming knew crime and espionage. Although he wrote unabashedly entertaining thrillers, most of his ideas were in fact based on true events. On occasion, Fleming noted, a news story would “lift a corner of the veil” and reveal the real world of espionage

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming wrote.

Although some of Fleming’s other thrillers included fantastic elements, his novels were always grounded in reality (unlike the silly films).

For example, Goldfinger’s plot to rob Fort Knox of America’s gold reserves may seem fantastic, but then a story comes out that reveals that Gustav Steinhauer, a German spy before and during WWII, plotted to blow up the gold reserves at the Bank of England.

There are also essays on other Brit thriller writers and wonderful thrillers that I grew up with. There is an essay on Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, an essay on Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden or the British Agent, and an essay on Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

On the American side, there is an essay on America’s answer to Graham Greene (in my view), Charles McCarry.

Hank Wagner wrote an essay on McCarry’s great thriller The Tears of Autumn. There is also an essay on Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. The police thriller is represented here by Joseph Wambaugh’s great satiric novel, The Choir Boys.

I particularly enjoyed reading about several thrillers I knew only from the film adaptation. I have to now pick up copies of the thrillers these films were based on.

Of course, with 100 thrillers, I can’t list or comment on them all, but if you love thrillers, Thrillers: 100 Must Reads is a book you will want to read.

This is a book you will want as part of your library.

I love short stories and I truly love short stories about crime.     

Back in May I wrote a column about a collection of short stories called Boston Noir. At the end of my column I asked why there was no Philly noir collection and an editor at Akashic Books subsequently informed me that a collection of Philly crime noir stories would soon be published.

So while I wait for the Philly collection, I read another one of Akashic’s noir series, Manhattan Noir 2, The Classics.

This book greatly interested me as it contained short stories by several writers that I’m very fond of, including O. Henry and Damon Runyon.

One of the movies I try to watch every Christmas season is O. Henry’s Full House. The 1952 film featured five O. Henry stories, each segment with a different director. Author John Steinbeck introduced each segment. Some of the stories have a Christmas theme and all of the stories contain the famous twist at the end.

The film features two moving segments based on O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi and The Last Leaf. The other three stories in the film deal with crime.

Actor Charles Laughton is brilliant in The Cop and the Anthem. The Clarion Call, directed by Henry Hathaway, features Dale Robertson as a cop who is beholding to a hoodlum portrayed by Richard Widmark. Both actors are superb. And The Ransom of Red Chief, directed by Howard Hawks, features the great comic Fred Allen as the con man and crook who wishes he didn’t kidnap the odd and terrible little boy who calls himself Red Chief.

I love these stories and the film does them justice, I believe.

Lawrence Block, the author of Eight Million Ways to Die and other crime stories, edited Manhattan Noir and Manhattan Noir 2, The Classics.  He wrote in the introduction of Manhattan Noir 2 that for the first book all he had to do was to persuade some of the best writers in the country to produce new dark stories set in Manhattan.

“And to do so for a fee that fell somewhere between honorarium and pittance,” Block added.

“They turned in magnificent work, and I turned in the fruits of their labors, and that was pretty much it,” Block explained. “Nice work if you can get it.”

But with this book, Block had to find the stories and he noted that it was not that easy.

“I knew I wanted to include O. Henry and Damon Runyon — but which O.Henry story? Which story of Runyon’s? I did not want to resort to the anthologist’s ploy of picking stories from other people’s anthologies — this, of course, is one reason everybody knows The Gift of the Magi and Little Miss Marker, while so many equally delightful stories remain unknown to the general reader,” Block explained.

Block stated that he read all of O. Henry’s New York stories and all of Damon Runyon’s stories and then he narrowed the field until he could select a single story from each author.

Block informs us that money had much to do with the publishing of these classic short stories. 

“Consider this: In 1902, William Sydney Porter, whom you and the rest of the world know as O. Henry, moved to New York after serving a prison sentence in Ohio (he’d been convicted of embezzling $854.08 from a bank in Austin, Texas.) Within a year he had been contracted to write a weekly short story for a newspaper, the New York World,” Block wrote.

Block wrote that Porter received $100 for each story, which was very good money in those days (and not too bad these days, I might add).

“O. Henry published his first short story collection in 1904, and his tenth in1910,” Block wrote. “He never wrote a novel. He never had to.”

Block selected O. Henry’s The Furnished Room for his collection. 

“Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side,” O. Henry wrote. “Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever — transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

“Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.’

O. Henry’s story deals with a young man who is searching through these boarding houses that are home to transient theatrical entertainers. He is searching for a young woman.

“Consider Damon Runyon,” Block wrote in the introduction. “”Today’s readers know him chiefly for Guys and Dolls, the brilliant musical based on his stories.”

Block noted that Runyon was already a great success as a Broadway columnist when he began writing fiction in 1929. His stories about gangsters, gamblers, entertainers and other Broadway characters appeared in Cosmopolitan, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post.

“Damon Runyon never wrote a novel. He never had to either.”

Block selected Johnny One-Eye as the Runyon story for this collection.

The story is about a showdown and shoot-out between two gangsters and how a scruffy and injured kitten enters between them. One of the kitten’s eyes is closed, hence the name one of the gangsters gives him. 

Manhattan Noir 2, the Classics also offers short stories by Evan Hunter, Irwin Shaw, Stephen Crane, Donald E. Westlake, Joyce Carol Oates and other great writers. The book also includes Edgar Allen Poe’s great poem The Raven.

I’ve been a student of crime since I was an aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia in the early 1960s.

My interest in crime, and my particular interest in organized crime, stems partly from my being half-Italian and my coming of age in South Philly, the hub of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Cosa Nostra organized crime family. Angelo Bruno, the long-time local mob boss, lived around the corner from my home.

Richard Zappile, an Italian-American who rose in the Philadelphia Police Department to become the Deputy Police Commissioner, also lived around the corner from my boyhood home. When he was the Chief of Detectives, Zappile was the cop who locked up the mob guys.

During one of my interviews with Zappile in the 1990s, he said that organized crime members were very small in numbers and that most Italian-Americans, and most South Philadelphians, were honest and hard working. 

Zappile was right, of course. South Philly was not then or now all mob guys, racketeers and gamblers - but they just sort of stood out. 

My early interest in organized crime also stems from the TV program The Untouchables, which aired from 1959 to 1963. I loved that program as a kid and I don’t think I missed an episode. Robert Stack as the incorruptible federal prohibition agent Eliot Ness was an early hero of mine, and I loved the voice of former columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who narrated the program as if it were a crime documentary.

I recently watched the program on DVD and I’m sad to say that it does not hold up. The show is historically inaccurate and the acting is at turns wooden and over-the-top. The Italians are portrayed as caricatures and real mob guys, according to Gay Talese, the author of Honor Thy Father, got a kick out of the show and they watched it as if it were an early version of Saturday Night Live. 

The TV program was not realistic - nor was Brian De Palma’s 1987 film The Untouchables, although I thought Sean Connery and Robert De Niro were great in the film - but TV’s The Untouchables introduced me to the Prohibition era, Elliot Ness and a larger-than-life character named Al Capone. Actor Neville Brand was miscast as the notorious gangster, but the TV show led me to read about Al Capone and true crime history.

Later, while attending Navy Boot Camp at Great Lakes, Ill in 1970, I visited Chicago and I took the crime tour. We stopped at several notorious crime landmarks, including the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, where on February 14, 1929 seven men were brutally murdered during the Prohibition-era gangland wars. Al Capone, although he was in Florida at the time, was and remains a prime suspect. The horrific crime is unsolved to this day.

Although I’ve read several books about Capone and the Prohibition era - including John Kobler’s Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone and Laurence Bergreen’s Capone: The Man and the Era - my interest has not waned, so I picked up Jonathan Eig’s Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster (Simon & Schuster).   

Eig, a Chicago writer who previously wrote about Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, states in Get Capone that he kicked around the idea of writing a book on Capone, but he couldn’t find the right angle. Then while reading an article in the library about the prosecutor who led the government’s case against Capone, George E.Q. Johnson, he read that the prosecutor’s son stated that all of his father’s papers had been turned over to a college professor at the University of Nebraska. Eig tracked down the prosecutor’s papers, which were stacked in old boxes. Eig described the boxes as “treasure chests.”

“Here were transcripts of wiretaps typed by Elliot Ness; memos and telegrams from Herbert Hoover and his cabinet members plotting to put Capone behind bars; and handwritten notes jotted by prosecutors expressing their innermost doubts and fears as they tried to build a case they knew from the start was fundamentally flawed,” Eig wrote in Get Capone. “Here was the real story of Al Capone.”

Eig wrote he went on to receive from the IRS formally secret, raw intelligence files that had never been released to the public and he received Capone’s prison records, which included his personal letters and medical records. Eig also came across a hundred pages of notes that Chicago journalist Howard O’Brien made from his meetings with Capone when the crime lord was thinking of having O’Brien ghostwrite his life story. The book never came about, but the notes survived.

This was the “Roaring 20s,” the “Jazz Age.” A time of alcohol prohibition, yet many people still wanted to drink and party, which gave rise to the bootleggers and small-time crooks. Eig chronicles the rise of Al Capone and does a fine job of describing the crime boss and his era.

Not as well known as Capone and far less colorful, Eig also offers the story of the U.S. attorney at the time, George E.Q. Johnson. Coming from Swedish farmer stock, as Johnson himself put it, the fiercely principled and fiercely honest lawyer led the federal government’s fight to get Capone.

Due to the many murders in Chicago, the near-total disregard for Prohibition laws, and Capone’s public image, President Herbert Hoover ordered the Justice Department to “Get Capone.”

The best part of Eig’s book is his description of how the President, the Attorney General, the U.S. attorney, and a federal judge, James H. Wilkerson, conspired to bring Capone down.

I thought Eig went a bit overboard describing how much Capone was a loving family man (OK, but he was also a murderer), and I’m not convinced that Capone didn’t order the most notorious murders in American history, the St. Valentine Day murders.

Eig offers a theory that police officers killed the North Side Gangsters in revenge for the murder of a Chicago police officer’s son. Had the killers been cops, as Eig suggests, I don’t think they would have worn police uniforms to the shooting. I also believe had the shooters been cops, they would have taken the gangsters’ money.

Capone’s involvement in the murders is only a theory as well. He was in Florida when the killers (all of the suspected killers had ties to Capone) opened up their Thompson machine guns on Bugs Moran’s underlings.

Capone then traveled to Atlantic City to meet with Charles “Charley Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky and other crime lords at the first national crime syndicate convention. Capone then went on to be arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed gun.

Civic pride would like me to believe that the Philly detectives were on the job, but I subscribe to the theory that it was “suggested” to Capone by Charlie Lucky that he lay low until the clamor over the St. Valentine murders quiet down. What better place than a Philly prison, so Capone arranged to have himself arrested.

I visited Eastern Penitentiary a while back and I saw Capone’s cell. The prison, now a museum, has placed period furniture in the cell that matched photographs of Capone’s incarceration there. Capone lived better than most prisoners.

But laying low in a prison cell did not help Capone in the end. The St. Valentine Day’s murders were Capone’s undoing, whether he committed the deed or not. The murders pushed the feds to finally get Capone.    

Eig’s Get Capone is a good addition to the many books about the most notorious gangster in American history, Al Capone.

In My Little Chickadee the late, great comedian W.C. Fields played a wily card sharp.

In this classic comedy film an eager sucker sees Fields spreading cards across a table and asks excitedly, “Is this a game of chance?”

“Not the way I play it, no,” was Fields’ classic answer. 

I grew up on movies and TV shows that revolved around poker games and I read crime fiction and thrillers that also featured poker in the stories.

I also grew up playing poker. I began at an early age, playing poker for nickels, dimes and quarters in the Francis Scott Key elementary school yard in South Philadelphia. As a kid I watched high-stake gamblers and racket guys play poker at a club in South Philly long before there were casinos in nearby Atlantic City. I used to run to a nearby luncheonette and bring back sandwiches and coffee to the players. The game’s big winner always gave me a huge tip.  

I joined the U.S. Navy when I was 17 and I continued to play poker on an aircraft carrier on our down time off the coast of Vietnam. Many of the sailors never played poker prior to joining the Navy, so I and a few other more experienced players always did well.

After leaving the Navy I began to play poker for somewhat higher stakes and I played cards often during my 20s. I also bet on sporting events heavily, and if there were two bugs on the ground, I would put twenty bucks on the one of the right.

I was a relatively good poker player, as I won more often than I lost, but I didn’t care much about money in my youth. I spent it as fast as I made it. When I won I went out with girl friends or the guys and I promptly blew all of my winnings at stores, bars, clubs and restaurants. When I lost I borrowed money from the local loan sharks. These guys circle poker games like a shark circles his prey in the ocean.

I liked the active “sporting life” and I truly loved playing poker in my younger days. Although I gave up serious gambling when I married at age 30, I still play an occasional “friendly” game of poker with friends.

So with my life-long interest in poker, as well as my life-long interest in crime, I was eager to read Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table (Harcourt).

Otto Penzler, the editor of Dead Man’s Hand, wrote in the forward that he was surprised that no one had put together a collection of stories combining poker and crime before this.

“If ever a subject begged to be associated with crime it is gambling,” noted Penzler. “And if you think poker doesn’t involve gambling, you are seven years old and think it’s fun to play for matchsticks.”

Penzler, the founder of the Mysterious Press and owner of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York, collected 15 short stories that feature poker and crime. The stories were written by some of today’s top crime and thriller writers.

“For well over 150 years, poker has been America’s game of choice,” Howard Lederer wrote in his introduction to the stories. “The mere mention of the game would conjure images of Mississippi riverboat gamblers, cowboys willing to a man if he thought his opponent had an ace up his sleeve, and brazen Vegas hustlers drinking whiskey and smoking cigars while using marked cards to take the unsuspecting.”

Lederer, a professional poker player known as the “poker professor,” added that for the last 150 years poker has become inextricably woven into the fabric of the American experience. He noted that the game is played by American presidents, Supreme Court justices and friends who use the game as an excuse to get together each week.

“Otto Penzler assembled a staggering array of crime novelists and asked each of them to weave the great game of poker into an original short story,” Lederer explained. “John Lescroart writes a story about how the memories of a father’s home poker game still haunt the son many years after his death. Rubert Holmes tells a tale of a poker game that is more than it appears. Eric Van Lustbader shows how the game can form the basis for a unique father/daughter relationship. Walter Mosley examines how the game of poker can provide a unique platform for nonverbal communication. And Sam Hill examines a poker pro coming to grips with his own mortality, both physically and professionally.”

In my view, one of the better stories in the book is called Bump. The story was written by Jeffery Deaver, the author of a series of thrillers that feature a quadriplegic detective named Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs. One of Deaver’s novels, The Bone Collector, was made into a film with Denzel Washington.

Deaver was also recently chosen by the family of the late Ian Fleming to write the next James Bond continuation novel.

Bump is about an actor who once starred in a successful TV crime show, but is now reduced to sheepishly pitching an idea for a new show to a TV producer. The producer was not interested in the idea, but he offers the older actor a chance to appear on a reality show called Go for Broke. The live program will film a high stake poker game between “celebrities.”

The celebrities will use their own money at the game and they will use cash, not chips. If the actor wins the poker game, the producer tells him, he would receive a “bump,” which is a buzzword in the entertainment world that means a “leg-up,” or getting recognized on the media radar. Bump also means a raise in poker.

As the reality show uses cash instead of chips, the criminal element becomes interested and two hoodlums plan to take the game down.

Deaver’s story is clever and interesting and he packs a lot of character, plot and details into a short story.

I also liked One-Dollar Jackpot by noted crime novelist Michael Connelly. In Connelly’s short story a professional poker player is murdered in her parked car in front of her home. Connelly’s popular character LAPD Homicide-Robbery Detective Harry Bosch catches the case.

The woman won a considerable amount of money at a casino and Bosch wonders if she were followed from the casino by a thief and killed for her winnings. He also suspects her husband, a less successful poker player. This is a well-written, suspenseful story.

Otto Penzler offers a very good collection of stories, so if you’re interested in crime, poker, crime fiction, or all of the above, I recommend you read Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table. 

John Timoney, the man Esquire magazine called “America’s Top Cop,’ has written a book about his experiences commanding police forces in New York City, Philadelphia and Miami. The book is called Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities (University of Penn Press).

Although Timoney rose from a patrolman to become the youngest four-star chief in the history of the New York Police Department, he was not asked to be the police commissioner. In 1998 Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell asked Timoney to come 90 miles south to become Philadelphia’s police commissioner, making him the city’s top cop. 

So Timoney told an audience of about 100 people on April 11^th  at the Philadelphia Free Library in Center City that it was appropriate he was kicking off his national book tour in Philadelphia.

I was in the audience that night as Timoney said that unlike many cops who say they always wanted to be a police officer, he didn’t want to be a policeman. He said he didn’t much like cops as a child growing up in Dublin, Ireland, and later in Washington Heights, New York City.

“Like parents and teachers, they told you all the things you couldn’t do, like they arbitrarily took stickball bats from you on 175^thStreet just because Mrs. Randolph was complaining we were hitting her window,” Timoney told the audience at the library.

Timoney went on to say that he followed a group of friends who all took the police exam in 1967 and entered the NYPD. While he initially didn’t like being a police officer, he said that after some weeks he began what was up to now a 40-year love affair with the police profession.

Timoney added that he was also fortunate to live through some tumultuous times and he saw the process of much social change over those 40 years.

I first met Timoney outside his office at Philadelphia Police Headquarters - the place old-time cops, crooks and Philly residents called the Roundhouse because of its circular structure.

On assignment for Counterterrorism magazine, I was on my way to interview then-First Deputy Commissioner Sylvester Johnson about “Operation Sunrise,” a major Philly Police, DEA and FBI counter-drug operation in “the Badlands” of North Philadelphia.

Timoney was talking in the hall to then-Chief Inspector Patricia Giorgio-Fox, the commander of the South Police Division, whom I knew as I was at the time a columnist for a South Philly weekly newspaper.

She said hello and introduced me to Timoney. Although Timoney is critical of the press and he has had some difficulty with the press over the years, he is very smooth and personable with reporters.

I would later see Timoney at South Philly and Center City community meetings, at crime scenes, at CompStat meetings at the Philadelphia Police Academy, and I witnessed him dealing with rioting street protesters during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000.

Many hard-core protest groups came to the city with the intent to disrupt the convention and to cause general mayhem. Timoney decided not to deploy officers in full riot gear as he believed the look was provocative. Instead, he opted to use the city’s bike cops, who wore their standard bike helmets and rode Raleigh Mountain bikes.

The protesters knew that the city’s convention center in South Philadelphia was heavily protected, so they opted to take their disruptive demonstrations to the Center City restaurants and hotels were the delegates were staying.

On Tuesday night of the week of the convention, nearly 300 protesters were arrested as they overturned trash dumpsters, defaced buildings and police cars and assaulted police officers. Chemicals and urine were also tossed on some of the officers. Timoney was out on the street on a bike and he and another officer scuffled with a group of protesters.

I was there, covering the protests for Counterterrorism magazine, and I witnessed how Timoney led the police response to the violence organized by the protesters.

I saw how the police effectively used their bikes to move quickly in and out of crowds. The bikes were also used as barriers when the officers turned them sideways and held them waist-high.

The mountain bikes were also a useful tool to ram, prod and herd the unruly and violent protesters. The bikes were used much like earlier police and military forces used a more deadly tool - bayonets.

I was impressed with Timoney’s leadership of the police that week.

That is not to say that I subscribe to all of Timoney’s views. I disagree with his view on gun control. Timoney believes that strict gun control can control crime. Of course strict gun control in Chicago has hardly curbed violence, as the government’s ban on drugs has hardly curbed illegal drug sales and use. 

Although initially I wanted a commissioner promoted from within the Philadelphia Police Department, as did the police rank-and-file, I came to believe Timoney was a very good police commissioner. I was sorry to see him leave Philadelphia.

“Ecce facies! Behold the face!” author Tom Wolfe wrote in his introduction to Timoney’s book. “That face, belonging to John Timoney, now chief of the Miami Police Department, has become a legend in its own time.”

“According to the legend, Timoney never had to draw a weapon to arrest a felon and take him in. He just gave him a good look at…that face…and even the most obtuse and poisonous viper became a mewling little pussy… and that face became a legend in its own time.”

Wolfe went to write that he meet Timoney when he had risen to Inspector, the third highest rank in the NYPD. Four years later, Wolfe writes, Timoney would become, at age forty-five, the youngest four-star chief in the department’s history.

“Even someone in the grandstand, like me, could read the lines incised in that face, punctuated by a blunt nose, and immediately make out the words “tough Irish cop,” Wolfe wrote.

Wolfe, a great journalist and novelist, wrote a fine introduction to Timoney’s book.

Timoney writes of his early days as a patrolman and his steady rise to high rank in the department. The 1970s were a tough time to be a cop and perhaps it was even tougher to be a police supervisor and commander. I especially enjoyed the account of his time as the captain of the Chinatown precinct.

Timoney’s observations and insights into crime fighting and police management are thoughtful and serious, but he also adds a dash of good humor. Serving under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Timoney and the rest of the command staff instituted radical means of fighting crime, including CompStat and other initiatives that drastically reduced crime in New York.

His account of his time as the Philadelphia Police Commissioner interested me the most. I know some of the people he writes about and I was interested in his impressions of them and of Philadelphia. He writes about quickly identifying the department’s problems and making sweeping personnel and policy changes. He also writes about the cases, issues, events and his missteps of his time here.   

Timoney left Philadelphia in early 2002 to take a job in private security, but a year later he was back in uniform as Miami’s Police Chief.

Miami held a new set of issues and problems, including the accusation that his used his position to receive a favorable lease of a Lexus SUV from a local car dealer. Timoney explains the situation and how it was resolved.

When a new mayor was elected in 2009, Timoney resigned as the chief of police.  He is now working for a private security firm. 

“I have learned more from my mistakes than I have from my successes,” Timoney wrote in the book. “That doesn’t mean mistakes are good. Mistakes are bad, but they do teach.”

Timoney’s book outlines both his successes and mistakes in policing three cities.  Timoney has led an interesting life and he has written an interesting book.

Happy birthday to Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond thrillers.

Fleming was born on May 28, 1908. He died on August 12, 1964. 

You can read three of my On Crime & Thrillers columns that dealt with Ian Fleming here  

When I think of Boston I think of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

For more than a dozen years when I worked for a Defense Department command in Philadelphia, our regional headquarters was located in Boston. During that time I visited the city quite often.

Boston has fine bars and restaurants and fine historical and cultural scenes, and I’ve had some fine times there - yet to me Boston will always be first and foremost the home of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 

Picador has released a 40^th anniversary edition of the 1970 crime novel about low-level, low-life criminals, and I’m pleased that new readers are discovering this classic crime story.

Higgins was a former reporter and worked as an assistant U.S. attorney when the book was published. He knew criminals and he accurately captured their language, their life-styles and their double-dealing.

The 1973 film adaptation was faithful to Higgins’ novel and the British director, Peter Yates, cast Robert Mitchum as Eddie Coyle and Peter Boyle as his “friend”, a bartender and part-time hit man.

As George Kimball noted in his piece on the 40^th anniversary of the novel in the Irish Times, Robert Mitchum befriended James “Whitey”Bulger, a notorious Boston gangster, during the filming in Boston

Higgins, the assistant U.S. attorney, warned Yates about Bulger and suggested that Mitchum stay clear of him. Mitchum, who had a perverse sense of humor and was for many years Hollywood’s bad boy, replied that since he had done “time” for using marijuana some years before, he was the “criminal” that Bulger should be leery of.

Bulger would later gain national attention when it came out that he was an FBI informant. He used his FBI controller to eliminate his Cosa Nostra competition, while at the same time the FBI protected him from prosecution as he committing a wide variety of crimes that included multiple murders.

This great Boston crime story was captured by journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill in their book Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob.

Higgins was unable to separate Mitchum from Bulger during the filming of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but he got the last laugh on Bulger in the sense that his last novel was a fictional account of the Bulger story called At End of Day.

Dennis Lehane, author of his own great Boston crime novel, Mystic River, wrote the introduction to Picador’s new edition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He wrote that The Friends of Eddie Coyle was the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years. Lehane added that Eddie Coyle cast a long shadow over Boston novels in any genre.

Lehane also wrote the introduction and edited Boston Noir (Akashic Books), a collection of short stories about crime and the dark side of Boston.

“No matter what you may hear to the contrary, noir is not a genre defined by fedoras, silver streams of cigarette smoke, vampy femme fates, huge whitewall tires, mournful jazz playing in the gloomy background, and lots and lots of shadows,’ Lehane wrote in the introduction. “Nor is it simply skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy, a kind of trailer park opera.”

One could argue, Lehane wrote, that what it is, however, is working-class tragedy…

“Eddie Coyle is a good example here because if there’s a more seminal noir novel of the last forty years than The Friends of Eddie Coyle, I don’t know of it,” Lehane wrote.

Lehane goes on to write that Eddie Coyle is more than just a seminal noir; it’s also the quintessential Boston novel.

“It captures the tribalism of the city, the fatalism of it, and the outsized humor of people who believe God likes a good laugh, usually at your expense. Boston is a city that produces guys - or, in the city’s vernacular, knuckleheads - who once stole the replica of a cow that sat in front of a Braintree steak house. The cow weighed what a car weighed, and yet these knuckleheads had the industry to get it onto a pickup truck, drive it back to South Boston, and deposit it in the middle of Broadway. They did this solely so they could then call the Boston Police Department and ask them to respond to a “beef going down on Broadway.”

As Lehane points out in his introduction, Boston has its distinct humor, distinct accent and distinct vocabulary.

Lehane’s contribution to the book is one of three short stories that stand out in my view.

In Animal Rescue, a sad-sack character named Bob tends bar in an old-style crime hang out. Bob rescues an abused dog, which leads to his meeting a pair of unsavory types who could have been friends of Eddie Coyle.

In another good short story, Brendon DuBois offers a post-WWII private eye who takes on a client that simply wants him to retrieve a box of belongings her late-boyfriend left at a military base on a Boston Harbor island. Naturally, nothing is simple in these kinds of stories.         

In Turn Speed, Russ Asborn gives us a group of not-so-slick criminals who think they’re slick. The boys rob a mob-connected trucking boss, which leads to a surprise ending.

Akashic Books has put out a series of books with noir themes about other cities. I have to ask why there is no Philly Noir. 

I’m not big on graphic novels and I’ve not read comic books or adventure comic strips since I was a kid, but The James Bond Omnibus, Volume I interested me.

I was first introduced to Ian Fleming’s iconic secret agent when I saw Dr No at the Colonial movie theater in South Philadelphia in 1962 when I was 10-years-old. But for many British children and adults, their first visual introduction to James Bond was through a daily comic strip that appeared in the newspaper the Daily Express.  

From 1958 to 1984, the Fleming thrillers were serialized in comic strips and syndicated in British newspapers.

The James Bond Omnibus (Titan Books) has pulled together the newspaper comic strip adaptations of eight Fleming novels and three short stories. The novels are Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, From Russia With Love, Dr No, Goldfinger and Thunderball. The three short stories offered are Risico, From a View to a Kill and For Your Eyes Only.

The stories were adapted from the novels by Anthony Hern, Henry Gammidge and Peter O’Donnell. O’Donnell, who recently died at age 90, went on from the Bond comic strips to create his own comic strip, Modesty Blaize. The comic strip’s art was drawn by John McLusky.  

One of the first thoughts that struck me as I began to read the comic strips was that they were more faithful to Fleming’s novels than the films. My second thought was to wonder what might have been had the film makers stuck more closely to the Fleming novels.

I’ve been an Ian Fleming aficionado since I first saw Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No. The first nine books in my now extensive library were Ian Fleming’s thrillers and many of my lifelong interests such as travel, crime and espionage were all sparked by Fleming. As a teenager I was fascinated by Fleming’s use of exotic locales, women and villains in his stories.

Many years later I was thrilled to have been able to spend a week with my wife at Goldeneye, Fleming’s villa in Oracabessa, Jamaica. Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels at this cliff-top villa that overlooks the Caribbean Sea.

The villa was then just as Fleming liked it - rustic and casual. Fleming had a sunken garden that lead to the edge of the cliff. Off to the side of the garden, he had steps carved out of the cliff, which lead down to a small private beach.

Like Fleming, I went free-diving in the sea with my mask, flippers and knife during the day, and I worked at Fleming’s original Jamaican Blue Mahoe writing desk at night.

I met and spoke to a wonderful woman named Violet, who was Fleming’s original housekeeper. She spoke of how “the Commander,” as she called him, was such a nice man. Tears came to her eyes as she spoke of Fleming.

Goldeneye was a magical place. It was a truly a dream vacation for a Fleming aficionado.

It was at this magical seaside villa that Fleming wrote the novels that his contemporaries Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler and John Betjeman immediately recognized as classic thrillers.

“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 weapons-grade plutonium,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in the introduction to one edition of the thrillers.

Ian Fleming often told friends that he was going to write the spy story to end all spy stories. He was born in London, England on May 28, 1908. He was the grandson of Robert Fleming, a wealthy Scot banker, and his father, Valentine, was a Member of Parliament. Major Valentine Fleming was killed in France in 1917 during World War I, shortly before Ian Fleming’s ninth birthday. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for the London Times.

Fleming attended Eton, Sandhurst and the Universities of Geneva and Munich. In his twenties, Fleming worked as a journalist for the Reuters News Agency. He was dispatched to the Soviet Union by Reuters in 1933 to cover the famous spy trial of six British engineers who worked for Metropolitan-Vickers.

Fleming later worked a stockbroker and when World War II began he was recruited to become the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey.

Lt Commander Fleming accompanied Godfrey to the U.S. to establish closer relations and he met with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Fleming also met William Stephenson, who was the head of British intelligence operations in North America. Stephenson was known as “The Man Called Intrepid.”

Fleming visited Camp X in Canada where allied spies and commandos were being trained. Much of Fleming’s wartime experiences would find their way in to his post-war thrillers.

On another naval intelligence mission in 1942 Fleming ventured to Jamaica, where he met with his American counterparts over concerns about German U-Boats in the Caribbean. Fleming fell in love with the tropical island and bought an old donkey racetrack where he planed to build his dream house.

After the war Fleming returned to journalism and he became the foreign manager for the London Sunday Times. He negotiated two winter months vacation each year and he spent those months at Goldeneye.

Fleming was a long-time bachelor and “womanizer” like his character James Bond, but he finally married Ann O’Neil in Jamaica in 1952. He often told reporters that he wrote the Bond books to get over the shock of getting married at the age of 42.

From then on until his death in 1964, Fleming spent every January and February at Goldeneye, writing that year’s James Bond thriller.

Not that it matters, as Ian Fleming himself wrote in the introduction of From Russia With Love, but much of the background material in his books was accurate.

He was a journalist and an intelligence officer before he became a novelist, so his books contain a good deal of what he called “incidental intelligence.” From the practices of voodoo in Live and Let Die, to genealogy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, his books explained in detail a wide variety of interesting subjects. He also richly described people, places, products and happenings, which added authentic touches to his stories.

Although Fleming has been criticized for creating unbelievable villains like Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Dr No, one should stop and consider real life villains like Martin Bormann, Al Capone, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Or consider Manuel Noriega, a tin-pot dictator who was involved in international drug operations, believed in witchcraft and wore red bikini underwear to protect him from his enemies.

Top that, Mr.Goldfinger.

In a 1964 Playboy interview Fleming said that Bond was a man of action, a cipher, and simply a blunt instrument in the hands of the government. Fleming also infused his character with some of his own “quirks and characteristics.”

Fleming said he wanted Bond to be entirely an anonymous instrument and let the action of the book carry him along. He wanted the character to more or less follow the pattern of Raymond Chandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s heroes - believeable people, believable heroes.

“He’s sort of an amalgam of romantic tough guys, dressed in 20^th Century clothes, using 20^th Century language,” Fleming told Playboy. “More true to the type of commandos and secret service men than to the heroes of ancient thrillers.”

The Double O license to kill was a fictional device to make Bond’s job more interesting. Fleming said he got the idea from the British Admiralty, which at the beginning of WWII used the Double O prefix on all its Top Secret signals.

Bond battled SMERSH, which was a contraction of Smert Shpionam, which means death to spies in Russian. SMERSH was a real Soviet counterintelligence group that hunted down and executed anti-Soviet spies during WWII.

In the later books (and in the early films) Bond took on SPECTRE - The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. SPECTRE was an international crime organization that contained elements of SMERSH, the German Gestapo and international organized crime groups.

Fleming readily admitted his plots were fantastic, yet he said they were often based on the real world of intelligence. He noted that on occasion a news story would “lift a corner of the veil” and reveal the real world of spies and commandos.

Fleming made note of the case of the Russian assassin Captain Nikoly Khokhlov, who cam equipped with an electrically-operated gun fitted with a silencer and concealed in a gold cigarette case. The gun fired bullets dipped in cyanide, which might lead a pathologist to rule the cause of death to be heart failure.

“I can trace most of the central incidents in my books to real happenings,” Fleming wrote in a magazine piece. “The line between fact and fiction is a very narrow one.”

Fleming would often dismiss his thrillers as mere entertainment, but he also said that thrillers may not be literature with a capital L, but it was possible to write what he called “thrillers designed to be read as literature.” Fleming went on to say that the practitioners of this form have included Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

Fleming stated that he saw nothing shameful in his aiming as high as that.

Ian Fleming died in 1964. He did not live to see the film Goldfinger, which was released later that year. Fleming died of a heart attack, which his character Darko Kerim in the novel From Russia With Love described as “the iron crab.”

Fleming died - as he thought he would - from living too much and from living to well.

Most photos of Fleming show him in the last years of his life, but I’ve always liked an earlier photo of him, where he is standing in his Royal Navy uniform at the Admiralty.

In this photo Fleming is young and handsome, with dark hair and a cold sardonic look on his face. He looks an awful lot like his character James Bond.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ian Fleming, you should read John Pearson’s The Life of Ian Fleming, Andrew Lycett’s Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond and Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.

Of course you should also read Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, and you might also read The James Bond Omnibus.

Conspirata opens like many crime thrillers. There is the discovery of a dead body.

But Conspirata (Simon & Schuster) is different than most crime thrillers, as the dead body in this novel is a slave who was murdered more than 2,000 years ago, and the person called to investigate is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman.

Conspirata is a historical thriller written by Robert Harris, the British author of Enigma and Pompeii. Prior to writing novels, Harris worked as a reporter for the BBC and then became the political editor for the British newspaper the Observer. He went on to become a columnist for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph.

Robert Harris first introduced us to Cicero in his novel Imperium. Conspirata is the second novel in his planned trilogy about Cicero and ancient Rome.

Imperium is about the rise of Cicero to the position of consul. The novel’s narrator is Tiro, Cicero’s slave.

“My Name is Tiro,” Harris writes in Imperium. “For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero. At first this was exciting, then astonishing, and finally extremely dangerous.”

Tiro is almost 100 years old when he writes these words. He states that he has often been asked what Cicero was really like, but he kept silent in fear for his life. But as he no longer fears death, he states that he offers this work as his answer.

Marcus Tullius Tiro was a real man. He was a slave, but he served as Cicero’s secretary and confidant. Thanks to Tiro’s invented system of shorthand, we have a historical record of Cicero’s great speeches. Tiro also wrote a biography of Cicero, but it was lost over the ages.

In a style that reminds me of Robert Graves’ great historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both Imperium and Conspirata have Tiro as our narrator and guide through the most interesting times of ancient Rome.

When Cicero is called to the body found in the Tiber River, he was the consul-elect. The body was a young boy who had been bludgeoned, stabbed and then horribly mutilated.

This murder turns out to be a ritualistic slaying meant to cement the plotters who plan to overthrow the Roman Republic. This novel is about how Cicero puts down the plot, which was called the Catiline Conspiracy. The plotters are led by Lucius Sergius Catilna.

Catilina flees the city, leaving five other conspirators to be arrested. Harris shows us Cicero at his best in the Roman Senate debating the plotters’ fate. As Harris and others have noted, this was perhaps one of the world’s greatest parliamentary debates.              

Cicero’s has the five men sentenced to death without the benefit of a trial. The five are taken to a prison and strangled.

For his actions in putting down the conspiracy, Cicero was given the title “Father of his Country.” But then Cicero has to contend with the political intrigue of the young Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, AKA, Pompey the Great.

In an interview with Steve Inskeep at NPR, Robert Harris said that he found Cicero to be one of the most fascinating and attractive characters in history.

“He was brilliant, he was self-made, and a man of great complexity who is accessible to the modern mind, I think,” Harris said.

Harris said that Cicero left behind 700 letters.

“In a way, this book in particular, is a duel between Cicero and Caesar, two ambitious men, but with very different forms of ambition. Cicero’s ambition is to rise within the system. Caesar’s desire is to smash the republic and remake it in his own image.”

The clash between the two historical figures - who are, Harris noted, sort of wary friends and admirers - is truly the dynamic of the novel.

“And I believe that Cicero has had a less of a good shake from history than Caesar, who was in some ways, a monster - along the lines of a Napoleon or even Hitler,” Harris said.

In Conspirata, we see Rome at a time of civil unrest, rampant crime and utter debauchery. One often reads about backstabbing politicians and cutthroat politics, but in ancient Rome, the phrases are quite literal.

Like any student of history, I know the outcome of Cicero, Caesar and the Roman Empire, but yet I still enjoyed the suspense of this most interesting historical thriller.

I look forward to reading Harris’ third novel of Cicero and ancient Rome.

“Always keep the hose’s stream of water between the fire and you,” I recall my Navy fire instructor telling me so many years ago.

If you let the flames get around you, I learned, they’ll reach out and hit you like a boxer’s jab. That’s what happened to me when I was an 18-year-old sailor attending the U.S. Navy Fire Fighting School in San Diego.

After the deadly fire that killed 134 sailors and injured many more on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in1967 all carrier sailors were ordered to attend two or more firefighting schools.  

In 1970 I was among a small group of sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk that crowed into a square cement structure that simulated a ship’s compartment at the firefighting school. I held the nozzle of a long hose and I began to wave the hose in short left to right movements. As I waved the hose too sharply to the left, I allowed the fire to slip past me on my right. The flicker of flame seemed almost human — perhaps even supernaturally evil — as it lashed out like a whip and struck my right arm.

The pain and shock of getting burned caused me to drop the hose’s nozzle and jump back. Fortunately, the instructor grabbed the discarded nozzle quickly and he ordered me out of the burning structure. To my further embarrassment, the heavy smoke and the hood of my poncho impaired my vision and I hit my head on the hatchway as I was exiting the structure. The other instructors rushed to me, as they believed I was seriously injured.

As it turned out, my burns were superficial and the head injury was only a bump, but my pride received some serious blows that day. I returned to the fire a while later and completed the course without further incidents.

After graduating from firefighting school I went on to fight some real fires during my Navy days, but thankfully the fires were nothing along the lines of the fire on the USS Forrestal.

I learned to respect the power and fury of fire at the Navy’s firefighting school and I came to truly respect firefighters. 

I thought of my Navy firefighting experiences as I read about the New York fireman who was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison last week for setting a fire that killed a mother and her three children.

Prosecutors said that Caleb Lacey, a volunteer fireman, committed the arson so he could act the part of a hero.

The firefighter/arsonist is not a new phenomenon. I covered fires and arson as a reporter and I’ve heard firemen and investigators speak of other cases where bent firemen have set fires in the hope they will be acknowledged as a hero when they first arrive on the scene.    

This recent case brings to mind another case involving a California fire investigator turned arsonist named John Orr.

Joseph Wambaugh’s Fire Lover: A True Story  chronicles the strange case of Fire Captain John Orr, who was once a respected fire investigator. Orr, currently incarcerated for life for the crimes of arson and murder, is considered to be the most prolific arsonist in American history.

In addition to causing millions of dollars worth of damage to private homes and businesses, one of his fires caused the deaths of four people.

Wambaugh, a Los Angeles detective sergeant turned crime novelist and true crime author, received his second Edgar Award for Best Crime Fact Book from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) in 2003 for Fire Lover. The following year the MWA gave Wambaugh a Grand Master Award.

In Fire Lover, Wambaugh describes Orr as a “cop-wanna-be” and a “head-case who does not know it.” Initially rejected by both the LA police and fire departments, Orr became a Glendale, California fireman and part-time security guard. Wambaugh wrote about Orr’s aggressive crime fighting as a Sears’ security guard and on the job as a fire inspector. Wambaugh wrote about Orr’s near-comical chasing of criminals in his fire department vehicle. His antics caused some contention, and a good bit of ridicule, from the real cops.

Orr would go on, Wambaugh tells us, to become a respected arson investigator. He wrote articles for trade and professional journals and held seminars for other arson investigators. He was known for his uncanny ability to be the first on the scene of a fire and for finding arson devices and “points of origin.”

Of course investigators would later discover that Orr had the inside track on the arsons, having set the fires himself. Wambaugh estimates that Orr set more than 2,000 fires over a ten year period.

Orr wrote and shopped around his novel called Points of Origin, which was about a fire investigator who hunted a serial arsonist. HBO based a disappointing movie on the unpublished novel. Orr’s novel was so close to the reality of his two sides — fire inspector and arsonist — that prosecutors used the novel as evidence at his trial.

Wambaugh paints Orr as a pyromaniac and psychopathic personality and calls him a “fire monster.” Wambaugh wrote of his sexual deviant attraction to arson and his odd relationships with several women.

In Fire Lover  Wambaugh also details the relationship between cops and firemen (unlike cops, everyone loves a fireman) and he covers what he calls the “Balkanization of American law enforcement.”

Balkanization is his term for the lack of communication between clannish, competitive and suspicious law enforcement officers. Although the horrific terrorist attacks on 9/11 have made law enforcement communicate more, this problem still has to be resolved, especially in the light of the possibility of another terrorist attack.

Wambaugh tells how an arson task force investigated Orr after his fingerprint was found on one of the arson devices, which was made from a cigarette, a rubber band, paper matches and a piece of notebook paper.                              

In the last part of Fire Lover  Wambaugh chronicles the lengthy state and federal trials and he utilizes 8,000 pages of court transcripts. The passages offer the reader a primer on the American justice system and Wambaugh makes the case that the time has come for professional jurors. I’m inclined to agree.

Fire is one of the most destructive forces on earth. Wambaugh’s Fire Lover offers a tale of what happens when a monster like John Orr uses the destructive power for his personal gratification.

Michael Connelly is a best-selling crime novelist whose series of crime thrillers about Harry Bosch, a troubled but dedicated LAPD detective, is very popular with crime and thriller readers.

I spoke to Michael Connelly about his latest novel, Nine Dragons, and his previous novel, The Scarecrow. We also discussed the Internet, crime novels, crime, Clint Eastwood, and the current state of journalism.

Below is my interview with him:

DAVIS: I enjoyed The Scarecrow, which I reviewed right here  at When Falls the Coliseum. In The Scarecrow did you set out to have a clash of characters, with one from the declining newspaper industry, and the other from the rising technology industry? Were you looking to do more in this novel than just having an interesting backdrop - or in this case, two?

CONNELLY: Yeah. I was trying to carry over a metaphor. It’s very simplistic to say that the Internet is killing the newspaper, but it is part of what’s happening. So I started with the idea that well, if the Internet is a newspaper killer, then I was going to have a newspaper guy go after an Internet killer. That was kind of what made that leap. But often you just take stuff that comes to you. I have a friend who lives in Milwaukee. He’s like my researcher. He is a private investigator and he used to work for a law firm. He’s always doing a lot of work on the Internet. That’s what a lot of private eyes do these days, and in an offhand conversation, he was talking about how they back-up their data to an off-site location. I started asking questions about what an “off-site” location was. That led me to this world of “server farms” and so forth. It just seemed so very fascinating to me and that’s where that angle came from.       

DAVIS: I don’t know what was more frightening about the serial killer - that he murdered people or his ability use the Internet to wreak havoc on one’s life. Serials killers can be boring - in crime fiction, certainly not in reality - but you gave your serial killer character an interesting background in computer technology.

CONNELLY: I think that fiction goes down its own path from reality and, as you say, a serial killer is a very serious and horrible thing in reality, but it’s rare that they have the kind of chops that you see in fiction. It’s a product of having to keep drama as one of the major balls to keep in the air. And so you often see this kind of skill. One of the early origins of this book was an offhand discussion that I had with an FBI agent. We talked about the Internet and how it has all these wonderful things - a great advance for all mankind - but the social networking it offers in the positive way also has a negative side. And that’s that people with aberrant desires and tastes can now go on the Internet, type in a few words, and find someone who has the same tastes. They can find community and acceptance of something that society would not accept. So what the FBI agent was predicting is that you will find more people meeting on the Internet and acting out on their fantasies because they have found someone who shares them. And that is a pretty scary thought. There is no anctidotal or empirical data that proves that’s what happening, or will happen, but I write fiction and it stuck in my head and it was something that came up later in the story.

DAVIS: Do you lament the decline of the newspaper?

CONNELLY: Yes. My job here is to write a thriller - to be entertaining and keep the pages turning - but you always have an opportunity to say something or open up a window on something happening in the world, and what I chose, in this case, was to write about newspapers. I believe that a newspaper is a community tent pole. It holds up a lot of the community. I think you’ll get your information and news reporting and some of your community on the Internet for sure, but it definitely will not replace the newspaper. I just don’t know if a website, a blog, or any of that, will ever be the tent pole that the newspaper is.

DAVIS: It appears to me that the biggest source of news and information on the Internet today are the magazine and newspapers’ online editions. In my view, I think that newspapers are simply going to change from printing paper to posting the publication entirely on the Internet. It will be the same organizations and news and information products, but minus the costly paper and distribution costs.            

CONNELLY: I think that they have started that, but have they been able to figure out how to stay financially viable if they are only on the Internet?

DAVIS: No, not yet. Rupert Murdock is planning to charge for access to his newspapers online. I hope this will not be the way to go. I only get the Philadelphia Inquirer in print but I read a dozen or so other newspapers online.                         

CONNELLY: I read a lot online too and I get a couple of real papers delivered. Yeah, they are shifting to the Internet, but that won’t last if they can’t find a model. A friend of mine at the Washington Post said someone has to invent the iPod for newspapers, something that captures the market and makes money, or they won’t survive, even on the Internet.

DAVIS:: It seems that young people are doing all of their reading online. Reading a print newspaper or book  seems to be going out of fashion.

CONNELLY: I have a 13-year-old daughter and I don’t know what we did right or wrong, as she loves reading books, but she is glued to the computer several hours a day. That is the future right there.

DAVIS:: Having the newspaper versus technology backdrop makes your book more interesting, it seems to me. It also seems to me that crime fiction and thrillers often tackle subject matters more interesting and more serious than one sees in literary fiction. Of course, what is more serious than murder?        

CONNELLY: I share that view. Some of it has to do with the contemporary nature of crime novels. I write at least a book a year. You see that more often in crime fiction, especially in a series. If you want to establish a series, you can’t go six years between books - you keep them coming. One of the positive sides of that kind of hard work is you’re able to be almost contemporaneous with what is happening in the world. There is a reality in these books that you don’t get in the literary novels. A case in point is 9/11. There were several references to how 9/11 changed our world in crime fiction within months. Now you’re seeing the literary giants coming out with 9/11-inspired fiction. It’s all good stuff, but its many years after the fact.

DAVIS: We have always had good crime writers, but we appear to have more truly good crime writers today. In decades past, you might have one or two. We have much more than two today. Certainly, I think you are one of the leaders in the field.         

CONNELLY: Thanks for saying that. I think what writers are seeing is an art form there. I loved reading crime fiction when I was growing up. When I read Raymond Chandler it changed my world. It was not only entertainment and stuff I wanted to read about, there was an art to it, certainly an artistic endeavor to it. If you talk to most crime writers - we all talk about this - we all knew we could write some serious stuff within this genre         

DAVIS: I recall reading that Raymond Chandler once said something along the line that “people will still be reading the best of our work when so-called serious literature will be one with the telephone books.” I like that. 

CONNELLY: Yep.

DAVIS: You mentioned that you have a researcher and even though you’ve worked as a newspaper reporter, did you do any research on the current state of newspapers?

CONNELLY: Well, I was kind of caught with my pants down. I haven’t been a reporter in 14 years. I wrote the first draft of the book using my experience and knowledge. But then I did something smart. I gave my manuscript to people that are currently in the business, two people in particular. I said read this and tell me if it works. They both liked the story as a thriller but they said I was seriously out of date in my view of how a newsroom works. Through researching with them and getting feedback from them, I was able to update the book. It was mostly on a technological level. In my first draft I didn’t have Angela Cook, one of the characters, filing a story from the press conference. It was the old way of hurrying back to get it into the paper. I didn’t have anybody filing for the Internet edition and those types of things. The story was all there. The instincts of a reporter have not changed, Jack McAvoy is still kind of my voice, but I did have to update and make it more of a newspaper story set in 2009 instead of 1994, when I quit being a reporter.

DAVIS: That was a criticism of David Simon on his last season of The Wire. The newspaper he depicted was pre-Internet. And a bunch of reporters picked up on that.

CONNELLY: I guess I didn’t pick up on that. I loved The Wire. It was part of the inspiration for me writing this.                      

DAVIS: I’m a fan The Wire as well, but people who worked on daily newspapers said that this was not the way newspapers operate today. Perhaps he was writing from his perspective from a dozen years ago when he was last a newspaper reporter. That was one of the few negative things I read about the series. 

CONNELLY: The Scarecrow does have that component in it, and the feedback I’ve gotten from some journalists is that it was there, but I can’t take credit for it. Thankfully my friends that I showed it too were not the type who would just say, oh, you’re wonderful. They did come back and help me.

DAVIS: Were you surprised or shocked by anything you learned, either in the declining world of newspapers or in technology?

CONNELLY:: I worked at the LA Times and I read it online so I guess I’m part of the problem. I live in Tampa so I can’t get the paper. I knew the paper had declined since I worked there and but I didn’t realize how much until I started asking some questions. The biggest shocker was the loss in circulation. When I left there the daily circulation was around 1.2 million and I found out when I was researching this book it’s down to 750,000. I didn’t realize the decline was so sharp. As I was getting into this book and writing about people taking buy-outs or forced out and so forth, I became pessimistic about this and started thinking this isn’t a downward spiral for the printed page, it’s a death spiral. As you say, it will resurface in other forms on the Internet so perhaps it’s not a death spiral.           

DAVIS: Newspapers claim the Internet is stealing newspaper advertising, but newspapers are also selling advertising on their Internet sites. But I guess not enough.    

CONNELLY: The stuff that newspapers used to offer readers are really shrinking.

DAVIS: I love your comment in the novel that the news is on the web overnight, so the newspaper should be called the Daily Afterthought. That was clever.

CONNELLY: That was ripped from my own editor.

DAVIS: You mentioned that Jack McEvoy was your voice. Is the character autobiographical?

CONNELLY: Not the details of his life, growing up in Colorado and having a twin, but what is autobiographical is his view of the business. So when I’m writing this story I’m not pushing my chair back away from the computer and rubbing my chin, wondering what this character would do. I just wrote what I would do. He says what I would say and thinks what I would think. So in that way we’re pretty close. I don’t know if that qualifies as autobiographical.

DAVIS: Do you find it easier to write about McAvoy than a detective like Harry Bosch?

CONNELLY: Yes, definitely, because I do have that process of pushing back and thinking what would Bosch do, what would he say? How would he react? And it takes longer. I wrote this book very quickly, just like The Poet. I didn’t have that middle step. It just came out of me - this is what I would say.

DAVIS: Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite writers and I read that you became interested in crime after reading Raymond Chandler in college.

CONNELLY: I was already interested in crime and I was reading a lot of it before I read Chandler. I had this bias when I was a teenager. I wanted to read contemporary crime stories. This was in the 1970s. I didn’t feel like reading a book set in 40s in LA. I skipped Chandler. Obviously I heard about him and he had been recommended, but I was not interested. Then I saw The Long Goodbye, the Robert Altman movie, which was contemporary. I had not yet read Chandler so I just saw this cool story set in LA and that made me pick up the book. Even though the book was set a couple decades earlier, I realize this book was even better than the movie.

DAVIS: After reading Chandler, did you become a crime reporter with the idea of later writing crime fiction?

CONNELLY: Yes. After I went through that whole Chandler thing, I went into journalism because I wanted a press pass that would get me in the police stations to learn about crime.

DAVIS:: Besides Chandler, what other writers influenced you?

CONNELLY:: The biggest was Joseph Wambaugh and Ross MacDonald. Those three were very important to me. I was also reading a lot of true crime.

DAVIS: Did crime films or TV crime shows influence you as well?

CONNELLY: Definitely. Bullitt with Steve McQueen was a big one. My mother didn’t like crime movies, but my dad loved them so he was always taking me to R-rated movies when I was 12. So I saw everything into the 1970s. Kojak and Mannix were also influential. I loved them all.

DAVIS: Clint Eastwood made a good film from your book Blood Work. How was your experience in working with him?

CONNELLY: I tried to suggest that he not change some stuff, but he had his reasons. He sent me the script and I had objections. He didn’t even have to respond, but he sat down and had long conversations with me. He tried to tell me his reasons, which were cinematic as opposed to the printed word story.

DAVIS: I’ve heard that Clint Eastwood is a true gentleman and a total professional.

CONNELLY: He is a very good guy and he was very good to me.

DAVIS:: Why do you think crime stories are so compelling and so popular with readers?

CONNELLY: There are all kinds of reasons. The stakes are high. People are making very serious choices and deep down we all want to know how we would react when the chips are down and we have to make choices with pretty high consequences. I think that is one of the basic things that attracts us to crime stories. There is also a subconscious thing that it is a complicated world and often things are tied up with order being restored in crime novels. There is a comfort in that and what you touched on earlier, these books are very contemporary and they reflect what’s going on in the world. Personally, as a reader, that’s what draws me to them.

DAVIS: Is Harry Bosch based on a detective or detectives you knew as a reporter?

CONNELLY: Yes, in part. I was influenced by many different detectives and I took from them all. He is also influenced by some of those characters we talked about in shows and movies and fictional detectives from books. So he comes from all over, especially in the beginning. In more recent years, I matched him kind of closely to one specific detective in the LAPD. He does what Harry does, like the early retirement thing that Harry did. Since Harry came back to the police department in The Closers he has been kind of following the career path and even some of the same cases as this detective.

DAVIS: Harry Bosch is a troubled character, isn’t he? I suppose that is one of the things that makes him interesting.

CONNELLY: When you write a book you are a slave to drama and one of the ways to create drama is to have your character have obstacles in front of him. A guy who is troubled, who has difficulty with women and supervisors and getting along - feeling he is an outsider looking in - all these things are ways of bringing drama to the forefront and keeping your reader plugged in.

DAVIS: When you were a reporter did you have good relations with the cops?

CONNELLY: With some of them, yeah. With some of them, no. Especially when I worked in LA where the police department is very media-savvy because one of the main centers of media entertainment. Nearly every cop on the beat understands that something said to a reporter can blow up in his face. When I worked in smaller communities away from LA, like Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I could just walk into the homicide bureau and sit down and just chat and have complete access. That never happened in Los Angeles. They don’t let you near people until they can trust you. It was a much harder job in LA. You make some inroads and you get sources and some sources become friends. Some places you never get through. As an institution, the LAPD and the LA Times hate each other.

DAVIS: Do the cops like Harry Bosch?

CONNELLY: Yes, they like him. I have much better access to police now than when I was a reporter. I get more genuine stories and feelings about the job from them.

DAVIS: Do you feel in some ways you’re still a reporter? Your copy is just different.

CONNELLY: That’s kind of funny to say, but that’s the way I believe.

DAVIS:: Do you miss daily journalism or some aspect of daily journalism?

CONNELLY: I miss the camaraderie of the newsroom but as far as writing daily journalism, I kind of feel like I do it. I try to get my books as accurate as possible and I do research like a reporter.

DAVIS: I reviewed your latest novel, Nine Dragons, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, but I’d like to hear you describe the novel.  

CONNELLY:: It’s a Bosch novel and it been brewing for a while. It is a story about Harry’s daughter, who has been referenced obliquely in the books up to now, and that relationship between father and daughter comes out front. There is a mystery aspect to it and a homicide and Harry is trying to find out who is responsible, but the main focus is his relationship with his daughter.

DAVIS: Can you explain the title?

CONNELLY: Harry goes to Hong Kong in the book and Kowloon, which means Nine Dragons, is part of Hong Kong.

DAVIS:: I visited Hong Kong when I was in the Navy years ago. I loved the place. Did you go there?

CONNELLY: Yes, when I researched the book. Very interesting place.

DAVIS: Thanks for the interview and I look forward to reading your next book. 

I watched the first season of Wiseguy on DVD this past week.

I enjoyed the TV crime drama during its original run from 1987 to 1990. Produced by television veterans Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo, the program was about an undercover FBI agent, Vinnie Terranova, played by actor Ken Wahl.

Wiseguy employed “story arcs,” which extended a storyline across 10 to 12 hourly episodes, which I found clever and interesting. I especially liked the first story arc, which involved organized crime in Atlantic City.

Terranova, trained by the FBI’s fictional Organized Crime Bureau (OCB), and imprisoned for 18 months to establish his cover as a criminal, befriends the local crime boss, Sonny Steelgrave. Steelgrave is played with verve and style by actor Ray Sharkey.

I presume the producers were paying homage to one of my favorite writers, Raymond Chandler, as Sonny Steelgrave was the name of Chandler’s gangster character in his novel, The Little Sister. Chandler based Steelgrave on Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel     

Although it was not stated or explained, Wiseguy’s Steelgrave must be half-Italian, like the actor himself, as Sharky played the character with East Coast Italian-American mannerisms. Sharkey, in my view, nailed the young and cocky gangster. He whole-heartedly captured the attitude and swagger of wiseguys.

Being part-Italian and having grown up in South Philly — the hub and breeding ground of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Cosa Nostra — I know wiseguys. As a kid I went to school with them, hung on the corners with them, and later drank in bars and clubs with them. And although these days I have far more cop friends than crooks, I still see a few of the old hoods from time to time.

I felt that Sharkey could have come straight from a South Philly corner. Tragically, Sharkey died of AIDS from an intravenous drug habit. I believe he would have matured into an exceptionally fine actor.

Wahl holds his own against Sharkey’s more flamboyant character and Wiseguy also featured several fine supporting actors, including Jonathan Banks as Frank McPike, Terranova’s OCB supervisor and handler. McPike was a disagreeable and cold former undercover officer who often clashed with Terranova.

McPike’s saving grace is his droll and sarcastic sense of humor and his obvious concern for Terranova’s safety. I also like his barely concealed contempt for his bureaucratic bosses.

Terranova’s lifeline while undercover is a character called “Lifeguard,” a wheelchair-bound agent who mans the phones and the recording devices. Lifeguard was portrayed by country singer and actor Jim Byrnes, who lost his legs in an accident.

There were many other fine supporting actors that portrayed interesting characters in the series, including two gangster characters from South Philly. Wiseguy was a gripping and suspenseful drama and Sharkey’s Steelgrave character went out in homage to Jimmy Cagney’s final moment in White Heat.  

But what I truly liked about Wiseguy was the fact that the program, unlike the Sopranos and many other shows about organized crime, had a protagonist who was a law enforcement officer.

Terranova grows close to Steelgrave. Terranova debated the evils of organized crime with his elderly Italian mother, who explained that there was good in all people, but he should remember that Steelgrave was a criminal and a murderer. Terranova’s brother, a Catholic priest, also gave a speech about the evils of organized crime.

I interviewed legendary FBI agent Joe Pistone, who went undercover with the Bonanno crime family in New York for six years. Wiseguy was clearly influenced by Pistone, so I asked Pistone if he watched the TV show and if he felt similar mixed feelings for the mob guys he brought down. Pistone told me that he had watched Wiseguy and he understood the Terranova character’s feelings.    

“Yeah, it’s funny,” Pistone said. “I felt that way with Sonny Black Napolitano and even Lefty Ruggiero, who was a hardcore mobster.”

Pistone went on to say that he spent more than 10 hours every day with mob guys and he saw the good side of them, including their love for their children and grandchildren.

“But a half hour later he goes out and whacks a guy he has known for 15 or 20 years,” Pistone added.

Wiseguy, like Donnie Brasco, the film about Pistone’s years undercover in the mob, portrays the FBI agent as the good guy and the mob guys, despite their human qualities, as the bad guys.

Good and bad are somewhat less defined in The Godfather and other novels, films and TV programs about the mob.

Over the years I’ve heard from a good number of law enforcement officers who complain that books, movies and TV programs glamorize criminals. From The Godfather to The Sopranos, gangsters in fiction are often presented as romantic, tragic and even sympathetic. Told from the criminal’s point of view, the stories are accurate in the sense that many gangsters see themselves in this manner.

Although Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and director Francis Coppola’s film trilogy based on Puzo’s novel are highly romanticized, the novel and films offer a very good fictional study of organized crime history in America. Nearly all of the major events in the novel and film trilogy were based on actual events in history.

Puzo admitted freely that he never knew any mob guys and said he based his novel on research. It is perhaps a testimony to Puzo’s skill as a writer that real mob guys didn’t believe him. They were convinced that Puzo had a highly placed mob source.

Very few Italian-Americans are involved in organized crime, but despite the fact that the novel and films portray criminals, The Godfather is perhaps the best fictional account of the early Italian-American experience. The films are classics, with great acting, writing, music and direction. They can be viewed time and time again, which I and many people do.

On the other hand, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas offers a far less romanticized view of organized crime. There is little honor or family loyalty in this true crime story. The criminals portrayed here are venal and vicious. Goodfellas is also a classic crime film.    

A few years back I interviewed the assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of organized crime in the Philadelphia area. He did not agree with my assessment of Goodfellas, which I described as the most realistic film portrayal of organized crime.

He felt that movie audiences liked actor Joe Pesci, as he was funny and charming, and they failed to realize that he was portraying a psychotic murderer.

I countered by saying that in my time I’ve found some of the real mob guys to be funny, charming and even generous. I’ve also seen some of them turn vicious, cold and heartless — just as Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro portrayed them in Goodfellas.             

Goodfellas is a stylistic cinematic powerhouse. Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s true crime book, Wise Guy, (not to be confused with the TV program), the film chronicles Henry Hill’s low-level, low-life, crime story.

Hill, played by Ray Liotta in the film, was part of a New York crime crew under the leadership of James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, a notorious thief, hijacker and mob murderer. Burke organized the $6 million dollar robbery of the Lufthansa Air Cargo Terminal at Kennedy Airport in 1978, which at the time was one of the largest robberies in American history. Burke later murdered many of his cohorts. Robert De Niro’s character Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas is based on Burke.         

Hill testified against Burke and another of his crime mentors, Paul Vario, a Lucchesse crime family captain. Paul Sorvino’s character Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas is based on Vario.

Although Wiseguy is not as authentic or as well made as Goodfellas, I enjoyed watching Ken Wahl and Ray Sharkey mix it up again. And in Wiseguy, the good guys win.

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 Gangsters & 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 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 grand 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 truly for our age.

The modern criminal couple are 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.