Crime Books and Films

May 13, 2013 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from George Hassett’s just released Gangsters of Boston, which is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com). Gangsters of Boston is available at Amazon, bookstores, as an e-book and at special discount price at the Strategic Media Books web site       

by George Hassett

In 1960, when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy launched his historic crackdown on organized crime he had to overcome resistance from the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover. For decades, Hoover had vehemently denied the existence of a national network of gangsters.

Privately, he knew that organized crime investigations made for bad statistics – lots of man hours resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also knew that mixing wealthy gangsters with underpaid agents – the FBI starting annual salary in the mid-1950s was a pitiful $5,500 – could undermine his FBI’s cherished reputation of incorruptibility.

But the Kennedy brothers would not let up. They had pressured Hoover to fight the Italian mob since John F. Kennedy was senator. Now that he was president and named Bobby his attorney general the campaign intensified.

April 1, 2013

Customs come and go but people’s fascination with the diabolical and the deadly is a constant throughout history. Greed, pride, and lust are among the most resilient of the Seven Deadly Sins. These perennial human failings help to power the stories of the books under review here, whether they take place in antiquity or in our own time period. Here are five books that are certain to captivate any aficionado of the true crime genre.

by Denise Noe

Dec. 12, 2012

Crime Magazine's Review of True-Crime Books

by Denise Noe

A multitude of approaches can be taken in crime writing. Crime is a subject that lends itself well to academic research. Thus, much writing on crime seeks to illuminate its history and the history of crime fighting techniques as well as to explore the social and psychological underpinnings of criminality. Humor is well known as a psychological defense mechanism. Much work on crime is written from a humorous slant as the most awful things in life can often inspire bursts of laughter. In addition, human weaknesses and faults of all kinds are always ripe for comedy. True crime books can also tell the stories of those victimized by crime and those who commit crimes. In this column, I examine a group of books that represent all of these diverse approaches to crime writing.

Nov. 23, 2012

The John Carlos Story, with Dave Zirin, Haymarket Books, 2011
Veronica & the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal as told to Valerie Jones, Xlibris, 2012

Two books – very different and yet with a common thread of courage. If the names do not immediately resonate with you, it is only because time and political circumstances are always changing.

by Lynne Stewart

John Carlos is the man and track star who electrified us when he and Tommie Smith and Peter Norman registered their protest to the USA’s denial of black equality from the winners' podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Veronica Jones (now deceased) is the witness to the shooting that Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of, who came forward after lying at his trial, to clear her conscience and the record in 1995. I was struck by the fact that the two subjects, both African Americans, of these books were so different in outlook and upbringing but who in the crunch elected to stand up. Both suffered afterward for their acts of courage and that is an important part of these stories as well.

Nov. 15, 2012

by Denise Noe

Like any other phenomenon, crime does not exist in a vacuum. It is often a kind of warped, mangled shadow of the era and culture in which it arises. Both the forms that crime takes and the manner in which the general population responds to criminal acts shed light – often an unwanted and unflattering light – on the greater society. One book reviewed here deals with crimes peculiar to the American culture devastated by the Great Depression while another deals with the organized crime culture specific to the Mafia. A book about the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping shows how a nation reacted to an especially heinous crime committed against a culture hero by a marginalized immigrant. A final book demonstrates how the wildly differing cultures of Great Britain and Japan were thrown together by both crime and the need to deal with it.

Nov. 7, 2012

Facing the U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong is a massive, thoughtful book written by someone from inside "the belly of the beast," who knows from years of personal experience what works and what doesn't. Ironically, most prisons today are not set up to rehabilitate prisoners but to do the opposite – simply to warehouse ever-increasing numbers of them until their eventual release with little or no practical training to succeed on the outside. Shawn Griffith, who spent almost 24 years in Florida prisons until his release in 2012 at age 41, advocates mightily that the real purpose of prison, in addition to punishment, should be to enable the 90 percent who will eventually be released to cope on the outside and not return to prison within the first three years, as now just under half of all released prisoners do. 

Shawn Griffith shows how tough-on-crime politicians, supported by guard unions and private prison corporations, have a vested interest in keeping the recidivism rate high. Instead of fostering in-prison drug rehab, job training, impulse control, and close family ties, prisons continually slash these critical programs to hire more guards and build more prisons. In California, 70 percent of the prison budget goes to pay the 31,000 guards it employs and only 5 percent to vocational programs to reduce recidivism. Until taxpayers grasp how counterproductive this approach truly is in providing public safety, there will be no chance for meaningful prison reform.

by Shawn R. Griffith

Preface

This book isn’t just a commentary on correctional problems and solutions.  Although my main goal is to present the mistakes that I believe U.S. policy makers have been making, it is also to share the human side of the story.  By integrating my own personal experiences with statistics and examples from different corrections systems around the nation, I am attempting to discredit the general perception that the system is designed to enforce and protect justice for everyone.  The U.S. criminal justice system is an economically and politically profitable enterprise for special interest groups in this country.  The general taxpayer needs to understand how the abusive policies fostered by these groups worsen the U.S. prison problem and the debt crisis through wasted corrections expenditures.

 Unfortunately, the system commonly attracts a darker side of people’s personalities, making compassion for those incarcerated a rare trait among many corrections officials.  As a consequence, hidden behind the walls, huge numbers of human beings have their spirits broken daily.  Secretly, many suffer false disciplinary reports, illegitimate confiscation or destruction of personal property, physical beatings, rape, and sometimes fraudulent criminal penalties.  Substandard nutrition, indifference to serious medical needs, and policies that encourage laziness have also become common.  These practices help to sustain rates of recidivism, which is defined as a return to prison within three years of release.