No comments about Sheep in Wolves Clothing.

5 comments about Hit 29: Based on the Killer's Own Account.

1. David Fishers is the ghost writer behind the story of Mafia hit man Joey. Fisher has already published the bestseller Joey the Hitman, and his second memoir with the anonymous Joey focuses on a specific hit--number 29--in Joey's career of over thirty contract murders.
   
   The book is told from Joey's first person point of view. He lays #29 out as a reckless decision, a poor choice in his calculated career. He should have laid low after #28, should have listened to his instincts, but he needed the money for his gambling habit.
   
   The 1968 crime bosses and gambling numbers runners are sufficiently colorful to hold the reader's attention, and the moral code of the tough guys is fascinating, as are Joey's expectations of his "old lady" back at home. He's not college-educated, but Joey's no slouch. He manages a gambling ring and plots his every move to stay on the down low to the law and the right side of the Mafia. He's hardworking and methodical. His tale of a hit that spiraled out of control is a terrific narrative from a tough, cocky wiseguy. Is it 100% true? Probably not. A great read? You bet.



2. Joey is going to make a hit. Hit number 29 in fact. This time it's a bit strange. He knows the intended victim from childhood, the guy who hired him has a vendetta against him, he's got people following him, and he's not quite sure if the guy deserves what he's getting.

   The book boils down to whether in the end, the victim gets killed, or Joey gets shafted. In order to describe how he kills someone, he describes the events leading to, during, and after the job has been done. While hitting is a great story, the preparation involved, along with the needless and pointless details is not.

   Joey seems to describe his days at the track, his arguments with his wife, how he hates one guy, how numbers are run. Seemingly sidetracked, he sometimes forgets he's hitting a guy and describes the tedious day to day movements of his own life. When he does go back to the hit, the mystery of the victim is fragmented and hardly fluid.

   While interesting in the beginning, towards the later half it gets pretty monotonous, as if delaying the ending in order to fill a few more pages.

   What saves it is that is a true story, and does provide insight to the methodical way a hit is accomplished, along with a description of a life of a New York criminal.




3. Joey was a real contract killer, but not a Mafioso. He just did some work for them from time to time. Not an unusual situation. He died some years ago from natural causes. His obituary was in Time Magazine. This book appears to have been put together from Fisher's notes without Joey available to fill in the holes. Fisher had to ad-lib some facts, but did not have specific knowledge. For instance, when Joey smelled trouble he took the safety off two of his .38s. Revolvers do not have external safeties, and no hitman would use a semi-automatic (which has an external safety), even if reliable .38 semis were available in the '50s and early '60s. There is always the chance of a misfire, and with a semi one has to go thru a clearing drill to get off a shot. With a revolver one has merely to pull the trigger again. Also, tailing someone as Joey did it would get you made within a very short time; and; no phone tap would be be done in such a dangerous way. But if you read the book carefully and between the lines, there is some good information. Is the book worth reading? I say Yes.



4. Not nearly as good as the first book "Joey the Hitman" but still a great page turner. The most entertaing part was near the end. The killer calls up his cheeseball attorney to answer some police questions. When he tells him about the murder he is under question for, and that yes he did do it, the the lawyer laughs and says "Why can't you get into something safe like dope smuggling?" I wish I knew what his real name was. Oh yeah, one other thing. No matter what anyone says about these books by "Joey", the tone of the writing and the facts do ring true, very much so, especially when compared side by side with books by other contract killers. Those that say otherwise are full of hot air.



5. This book really gave an in depth look at what goes through a hitman's mind. I found it compelling and hard to put down. I constantly felt like I knew what was going on inside Joey's head.

   Oh, and HA HA I'm the first one to review this book!!

No comments about Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend.

1 comments about Sins of the Father: The True Story of a Family Running from the Mob.

1. I liked this unusual point of view on the world of organized crime - the experience of a family preparing to vanish from their lives into a Witness Protection Program. Details of the father's criminal involvement are secondary to the problems and fears of the wife and two teenage sons. Narration shifts between the voice of the older son and the father, a technique which works fairly well. Taylor must have conducted some pretty intensive interviews to get the subjects to talk in such detail about what they thought and how they coped during such a weird time in their lives.

4 comments about Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison.

1. Social scientist have tried investigating correctional institutions to better understand both the causes of crime and the criminal actor, but a series of obstacles like secrecy, hostility, cultural distance, psychological endurance, and physical danger have separated the social scientist from this insight. Kaminski's Games Prisoners Play, the Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prisons, invites social scientists to take greater efforts in being constantly aware of the opportunity to exploit their own comparative advantages in accessing data sources, because data surrounds us everywhere. Arrested for anti-communist publishing in early 1980's Poland, Kaminski conveniently transcends the traditional obstacles, defining himself as an "observing participant...who enters a community through a similar social process as its other members and is subject to similar rules...and undertakes field research as if he or she was a researcher (p. 7)."
   
   Kaminski combines the insights of game theory with real accounts of inmate life, to describe prison life as a realm of strategic risk, uncertainty, cost, choice, status and reward. The characters take shape both personally and as entire classes. The reader can't help but feel empathy coupled with a sense of humor, as dark as it may be, that makes life "more bearable (p. 15)."
   
   Becker's 1968 paper "Crime and Punishment an Economic Approach" is perhaps the first to bridge the fields of criminology and economics. In Becker's model the criminal continuously makes cost benefit calculations, weighs risk and uncertainty, maximize his benefits, and chooses between crime and production. Becker's theory was bold; it stood in contrast to common opinions of criminal behavior being explained by either nature or nurture hypotheses. Under nature or nurture theories, criminals are either deprived or depraved, and policy implications are limited as such. By characterizing the criminal as a rational actor, Becker's model has policy implications which go beyond the limited notions of "lock `em up" on the one hand or "subsidize education," on the other. It forces planners to recognize that the institutions, to which their policies give shape, have direct effects on the incentives of individuals that operate within them.
   
   This interpretation can be taken in two ways. One could say that Becker's model gives greater legitimacy to the efforts of prohibitive policy in that they are trying to effectively provide negative incentives to crime. By imposing higher costs to criminal activity, policy makers expect to see fewer crimes take place. On the other hand, Becker's insight could be interpreted to show that prohibitive efforts are extremely costly and at times futile if they do not recognize all other counter-acting incentives, or more simply put; the elasticity of the demand curve for crime. Individually honed policies do not have direct control over all of the various institutional forces that promote a given behavior. Social behavior is more often than not, the result of a complicated network of interactive forces.
   
   Kaminski's text supports the latter interpretation of Becker over the former, and furthermore the complicated network does not start nor stop at the prison gates. His main thesis is a straightforward one; game theory is a useful theoretic device at explaining the behavior of inmates (p. 4). He uses his memoirs as representative testimony to model prison phenomena into simplified games. These games help the reader trace the incentives of actors and preferable outcomes are sought and exploited by the inmate players. Kaminski notes that his analysis is confined to the Polish system in the 1980s. Consequently some of the conclusions one draws from his analysis must be limited and treated with caution.
   
   The games Kaminski describes demonstrate the complexity and ingenuity of strategy used by inmates to cope with their uniquely resource-limited scenarios. The inmate's capacity to strategically interpret, foresee, and communicate amidst the harsh conditions of prison life is obvious. The reader is left to wonder why, if the prisoners are so strategic inside the gates, they were not sufficiently strategic in free society to avoid incarceration? The reader is told a classically liberal message (pp. 11, 22, 26, 27, 32, 63, 85, 119, 129) through the stories of political activists incarcerated by the hands of a communist regime, fitting the text within the thesis of Public Choice political economy. The reader sees imprisonment in society as less about promoting social order, but more about promoting particular political interests. Even strategic responses to social interaction can fall short against hierarchical positions of authority. This holds true both inside and outside the gates.
   
   Despite the straightforwardness of the book's main thesis, the implications are bold and combative of existing criminal justice policy. Prisons are meant to be an instrument of protection and a promotion of peace, yet inside their walls violence runs rampant. Prison management techniques take the shape of prohibiting inmates' access to physical materials, drugs, goods, and services. Authority, control, and imposed structure are the only tools used by prison managers to diminish violence and maintain order within the institution's walls. But are these tools the only ones available, and are they being wielded correctly to their stated aims of promoting peace and social order?
   
   Kaminski's game theory scenarios tell a story with a novel interpretation of how prisons are used by states. Kaminski demonstrates that it is the harsher conditions of scarcity which raise the stakes of enforcement in a prison, not the mentality or cruelty of prisoners. In prison a person may be beaten or degraded in social status for shaking hands with the wrong person or passing gas at the wrong time; obviously these are harsher conditions of enforcing social norms than in a free society, but harsh enforcement techniques are tools for preserving peace. The alternative of non-violently enforced social norms in prison would result in a constant war of every prisoner against every other prisoner. Comparing rates of violence between free and incarcerated people is no comparison at all because conditions of scarcity are completely different between the two samples. Institutions develop differently in different scenarios of scarcity. Through Kaminski's work we can see that harsh enforcement techniques are ingenious solutions to maintaining peace and order in the otherwise chaotic prison cell, and furthermore that they are emergent and diverse. Successful games and players remain while failures drop out or adjust their behavior. The allotment of games played were not singularly constructed and imposed by any single authority.
   
   The "grypsmen," prisoner upper classes, take the role of game designers and have access to information unknown to other players. In a world with next to no physical resources to convert into productive capital, these inmates capitalize on the one asset they seem to hold in abundance; knowledge. Veteran inmates know the repetitive nature of prison society and have exploited profitable avenues in it. There is a single unstable condition: the constant risk and uncertainty associated with new inmates. A new inmate might either accept the social ranks of his cell mates and abide by the rules upon hearing them, or he could rebel against it and threaten to disrupt all of the peace and order which the veteran inmates have worked hard to instill. The harshness of enforcement is a direct result of the combined limitations of physical resource scarcity with the extreme risk imposed by uncertainty of new inmate violence.
   
   Kaminski's text simultaneously draws into question the entire apparatus of prison management and constructed social enforcement. If management's true intention by prohibition, discipline, and control is to diminish violence and maintain order within cell walls (or within society for that matter), than it must look more closely at the spontaneity of enforcement mechanisms implemented by inmates themselves to cope with their conditions of extreme resource scarcity and uncertainty. Since knowledge is the commodity most valuable to the upper classes of inmates, prohibition is an ineffective tool at managing the interactions of inmates, perhaps equally true in free society.



2. I took several classes in game theory with the author. We used a number of other books on the topic, only later to abandon them to use his own book. To say the least, Games Prisoners Play did a much better job of arousing the interest of the reader and keeping game theory on an understandable level. This book is good for someone who is new to game theory; it's also great if you want a deeper practical understanding of the subject.



3. Without being aware, everyone plays GAMES everyday. This is strictly from the definition of GAMES (players, strategy, payoff). I attended Lectures where this book was used and have loved it. I recommended it to many of my collegues, friends, co-workers, and bosses at work. Learn about what Game Theory is all about.



4. I know very little about game theory but this hasn't prevented me from swallowing ?Games Prisoners Play? in one gulp. Having been taken by the attractive title and the author?s biography I didn?t experience a single moment of disappointment at any stage of the reading. Accustomed to story-telling and fiction I was astonished how interesting a structured, well-organized scientific analysis of prison life can be versus subjective visions depicted in all kinds of personal accounts (either in books or movies) I?ve read or seen so far.
   Following the author's (former prisoner himself) path through fascinating subculture of Polish prison you don't see freaks and outlaws but reasonable people. Even if inmates' behaviors may often seem freaky and completely incomprehensible the author introduces you to the rationale behind their (his) actions in a perfectly convincing mode, to the extent that you start imagining yourself making a seemingly freakish decision in similar circumstances (what comes to one's mind is that all of us are potential prisoners).
   What adds the flavor to the reading is an account of, among others, the prison argot (words and expressions explained in the book are later combined in an attached glossary) or everyday life including such ?trivial? areas as handling physiology in a small cell shared by a few people or sexual life.
   Having read the book I also feel greatly encouraged to learn more about game theory. Thus, I may assume that not only is the book a perfect introduction to prison life but also to game theory.

No comments about Califas: The Chicano Story.

No comments about Jesse James - Outlaw of the Wild West (Biography).

5 comments about Veerappan: India's Most Wanted Man.

1. as a veerappan fan i found this book very good. Author sunaad did not fall in either veerappan side or on police side. He mentioned atrocities of both sides. There are few not clear or false items but other than that book is very good and a must read for all south indian news followers. as veerappan got killed by police recently. i am really interested if the same author can write a book regarding his death. i am sure veerappan did not get killed by police encounter and police is not telling the truth.
   
   My god rest Verappan's soul.



2. I was so terribly curious to know more about this bandit called Veerappan. And finally, my desire to understand the man and his methods has been fulfilled by this gripping book.

   This is a book for all India-watchers who have the inclination to know the country beyond its computer software credentials! It is amazing how one man, the bandit in question, can do all the things that he has done.
   
   The author, Sunaad, deserves a pat on the back for having recreated the entire story without once slacking in the narration.

   All in all, a fine read, this book!




3. Well, I always wondered why anyone had not attempted a biography of a man who had taken a whole country's imagination with him for so long. And boy, was the wait worth it!

   Sunaad Raghuram has achieved what not one other journalist on the trail of the bandit has. And how does he do it? With style, aplomb, finesse and authenticity.

   Starting by detailing the history of crime in Veerappan's part of the world and going on to describe vividly the many chilling incidents in the bandit's story, Sunaad does a fine job of unravelling the whole scene layer by layer.
   This is a book which will remain in memory long after it has been closed. More so for readers of Indian origin who would probably know a thing or two of the story's setting.




4. This book by Sunaad Raghuram tells us the real story of Veerappan, sifitng so perfectly the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Handling a subject which is essentially given to hyperbole and exagerration-as indulged by vast sections of the media- is definitely not easy.

   But Sunaad Raghuram does it with professional ease and gives us a remarkably believable account of the brigand who has been bestowed with almost super-human abilitites.

   His writing style is direct, to the point, without any frills and throrougly riveting. An exhaustive work; one which leaves you with almost everything that you always wanted to know about the bandit who has been like none other in the world's history of crime.




5. This book is all about how a hard-nosed journalist has gone about unravelling the story of one of the most intriguing men in the world of crime today.

   Wonderfully descriptive and finely balanced in the treatment of the story, this book is one of the best works in the crime thriller genre in a long time. Just go for it!

No comments about The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial.

5 comments about The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York.

1. Celia Cooney, most celebrated as the "Bobbed-Haired Bandit" of the Twenties, comes vividly to life in this scholarly yet entertaining exploration of her brief life of crime and celebrity, with emphasis on the celebrity. Both Celia's own recognition of her fame and the multifaceted interpretations of it by police, press, and the public make for fascinating reading. Her duel persona as the aspiring flapper and expectant mother who joins her husband on holdups to make ends meet makes for one of the more compelling crime stories of the Jazz Age. Her later life, concealing her criminal past while raising her sons who knew nothing of it, presents a striking contrast to the young lady bandit who publicly gloried in her exploits. The photos are equally intriguing and belie the image of the dangerous gunwoman, especially when tiny, harmless-looking Celia is standing alongside husband Ed. And there are plenty of absolutely classic old crime cartoons from New York newspapers. Alternately funny, shocking, touching, and harrowing, this is one of the best historical crime books I've read in a while.



2. The Bobbed Haired Bandit by Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson tells the story of Celia and Ed Cooney in 1920s New York. Newlyweds and newly pregnant, Ed and Celia decide to rob some convenience stores to try and make a better life for themselves. Because Celia has bobbed hair, flapper style, the story of their robberies quickly grab the attention of the newspapers and soon the police. The Cooneys find that the stolen money doesn't last long and after a succession of several small hold-ups, flee to Florida only to be captured shortly after the death of their newborn daughter. The authors spend a great deal of time in the beginning of the book discussing the sociological implications of Celia's celebrity, but they can't seem to decide on what exactly the public's obsession with her meant. Much ink is also given to the personal histories of the cops chasing them, but they detract from the real story of Celia. Perhaps one of the most captivating details is that Celia's sons didn't find out about their mother until she had passed away. Celia Cooney was a woman of mystery to the papers in the 1920s and remained one in her life, even to her family. Now there's a story.



3. The Bobbed-Haired Bandit is about a pair of poor newlyweds, Celia and Ed Cooney, who turned to armed robbery to better their lot, sriking terror in the hearts of Brooklyn grocers in 1924. The competitive New York City tabloid press turned the girl desperado into a media darling, an anti-heroine for the age - Jesse James, in a flapper dress.
   
   The authors - both of whom are historians and "scholars of the media" - stumbled across the story by accident:
   
   "Digging through yellowed clippings in a scrapbook at the New York State Library in Albany, we came across a criminal with an intriguing moniker: the Bobbed Haired Bandit. With so much type set on her behalf, she was hard to miss. There were hundreds of articles about her, none of them all true."
   
   But these two fellows knew a good story when they saw one, and like me they have a fine appreciation for the rich vernacular of old journalism. They don't write headlines like these any more.
   
   NEW GIRL BANDIT, A BLONDE,
   
   HELPS KIDNAP TRUCKLOAD OF
   
   SUGAR: TWITS CHAUFFEUR
   
   ***
   
   BEWARE THE BOBS
   
   ***
   
   DEPREDATIONS BY GIRL ROBBER
   
   AND MAN COMPANION ROUSE
   
   POLICE OFFICIALS TO ACTION
   
   ***
   
   FORGET SEX - SHOOT !
   
   Now tell me the last time you saw a word like "depredation" in a headline. Or "twit" as a verb. I love it!
   
   Now back to the story. So this young lady and her man go on a tear, robbing store after store, making the police "look like brass monkeys almost every time the sun went down," in the lady's own words. The journalists of New York gave her the front page day after day, while the crimes of other, more ordinary folk were "passed over unnoticed" (Brooklyn Eagle). The lady robber became a blank canvas, and journalists threw lots of ink on her.
   
   The authors did something interesting with all these old clippings, using newspaper articles from elsewhere in the same papers to explore other themes in the life of the city at the time, from the impact of Prohibition, the changing roles of women, on down to the weather reports to flesh out the full story of the "naughty scamp," to try to explain why she became the media phenomenon she was.
   
   Then, like the Younger Brothers before them, the Cooneys attempted a poorly planned daylight robbery, and it was their downfall. Though they tried to flee, they were caught and returned to New York for a triumphant homecoming.
   
   It turns out the journalists liked her story a lot more before she had a name. Before she had a poor childhood. Before the truth of what she was negated a lot of the coverage of her crime spree. In an extraordinary editorial, the influential newspaperman Water Lippmann had this to say about Cecilia Cooney:
   
   "For some months now we have been vastly entertained by the bobbed-haired bandit. Knowing nothing about her, we created a perfect story standardized according to the rules laid down by the movies and the short story magazines. The story had, as the press agents say, everything. It had a flapper and a bandit who baffled the police; it had sex and money, crime and mystery. And then yesterday we read in the probation officer's report the story of Cecilia Cooney's life. It was not the least bit entertaining...."
   
   
   
   Even after she was caught, and, along with her husband, sentenced to prison, Mrs. Cooney continued to be a blank slate on which various parties wrote rants. But these biographers don't let the story spin off into a sidebar. The last couple of chapters tell the rest of the tale of the bandit and companion, and by that point, she's visible as a flesh and blood person through the headlines, a heart and mind in addition to a journalism phenomenon. As the authors remark --
   
   "Reading these stories... not only tells us how certain individuals and specific events were understood at the time but also reveals how the past is remembered and reminds us how history is made... "the record" of the past is documented mostly by the commercial mass media, which subject the events to a filtering of fact and fancy based on standards of popularity and profitability. For what mattered most to the newspapers of New York City in the Twenties is the same thing that ... [matters to] book publishers of today: telling, and selling, a good story."
   
   And ain't that a final truth.



4. The 1920s was a decade when few major metropolitan newspapers didn't have National Enquirer style headlines every day. Renegade women were a fixture in these potboiler stories: Katherine Malm, a.k.a. the "Tiger Woman" and lethal flapper Wanda Stopa titillated Chicagoans, and in New York, a tough little laundress named Celia Cooney was determined to burst through the economic barrier between the Haves and the Have-Nots.
   
   Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson have written the type of book I love: an intelligent re-examination of a now-forgotten media sensation. Celia Cooney and her husband, Ed, embarked on a brazen robbery spree after money worries galvanized them out of anxiety and into action. That's the simplified version. Seen from a broader perspective, the Cooneys' crimes provided an impetus for politicians and the public to argue their views on touchy political and social issues, such as consumerism, attitudes toward the poor, and women's liberation. While telling the story of Ed and Celia Cooney, Duncombe and Mattson also expose the ambivalent feelings that the New York public of the 1920s had toward social progress and change.
   
   The authors did an especially good job of capturing Celia's spunky personality, and showing how it kept her spirits up from her degraded childhood right into her feisty old age. Well done.



5. This book is a historically accurate, compassionate and insightful look at a fascinating couple who committed robberies in 1923-24. She was pregnant and fashionable and he was the mastermind. Together, they set both the Police Department and the population of NYC on their ears. They were fast, gutsy and a little desperate.
   
   The real story to me is one of triumph over adversity. Not only did "the Bandit" overcome a tragic childhood to become a strong, compassionate, fiercely loyal and independent woman, but she became a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen after her jail time. After her husband's death, she raised two boys on her own through the Depression and World War 2. She is a wonderful example of how it is possible to move past our negative histories and ethical blunders.
   
   I should know - she was my grandmother.