Crime Books and Films

Truman Capote's ground-breaking "non-fiction" novel about the murder of a Kansas farm family.  We take the position that the book is not only flawed, but dishonest.

by J.J. Maloney

The publication of In Cold Blood, in 1966, launched Truman Capote firmly into the top rank of American writers. It was – and is – widely heralded as a masterpiece -- not only a masterpiece of writing, but as a brilliant insight into the criminal mind.

After publication of the book, Capote told George Plimpton, in an interview for the New York Times published in January, 1966, that he had been watching for an event that would allow him to write a "non-fiction" novel – in his definition, a factual book written using the literary skills of an accomplished novelist.

The murder of the Herbert Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, on Nov. 15, 1959, caught Capote’s eye. The case received a blurb in the New York Times because Herbert Clutter, during the Eisenhower administration, had been a member of the Farm Credit Board, and was founder of the Kansas Wheat Growers Association.

The murders were brutal, unsolved, and apparently without motivation, since nothing appeared to be missing from the house.

An overview of the evolution of crime films, their authenticity, the issue of using films to change public behavior and whether crime films, in the last two decades, have influenced public thinking about such matters as crime, prisons and capital punishment.

 by J.J. Maloney

Motion pictures have a way of creating their own reality. It is only through the strange power of film that one finds an audience of ordinary people cheering Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lector, at the end of Silence of the Lambs, because Lector has not only gotten away, but plans to kill and eat the superintendent of the mental hospital Lector had been confined in.

Or "caper" films, in which the audience roots for the criminals who pull off a big job and get away (of course they often do this in real life, as anyone who remembers the Brink's Job will recall).

Or "Death Wish" philosophy films wherein rogue (but good) cops indiscriminately kill the bad guys because the "system" doesn't work anymore.

Because of a motion picture's power to capture the imagination, there have always been those who would harness this power to try to achieve one purpose or another.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

The movie The Hurricane portrays Rubin "Hurricane" Carter as a black man wronged by a racist justice system. But Carter is a fraud and so was the movie, from beginning to end.

by Lona Manning

Most people who know about the Hurricane Carter case only know the Hollywood version presented in the movie starring Denzel Washington. The Hurricane, released in 1999, features crooked, lying, racist cops and frightened witnesses who won't come forward. Carter himself is brash but noble, persecuted his whole life by one obsessed detective who keeps sending him to jail.

The real Rubin Carter and the real Lafayette Grill murder case are nothing like the movie. This movie bills itself as being about hope and redemption. The movie, in terms of Carter and the actual murders at the Lafayette Grill, is a fraud from beginning to end, full of errors, distortions and fictions, large and small. Some events were invented to add dramatic excitement, but most of the distortions and misrepresentations appear to be attempts to place a halo over Carter's head and paint horns and a tail on the police. If this was director Norman Jewison's attempt to right one of the legions of wrongs of a justice system riddled with racism, he picked the wrong case. Once Jewison had made that mistake in judgment, his need to fabricate the truth took over.

June 1, 2007

Vito Genovese

Tim Newark is the author of the recently published Mafia Allies: the True Story of America's Secret Alliance with the Mob (Zenith Press). This article is an adapted extract from that book.

by Tim Newark

Top Mafia Mobster Vito Genovese fled New York in 1937 and settled in with the Fascist regime in mainland Italy. When the Allies invaded Italy, he swiftly changed sides and became close to the senior Allied administration. It would take a remarkable young CID officer by the name of Orange C. Dickey to hunt him down.

September 15, 2005

Tony Spilotro (Courtesy LVMPD)

The introduction to Griffin's book entitled The Battle for Las Vegas — The Law vs. the Mob. The book chronicles the wide-ranging, criminal exploits of Chicago Outfit enforcer Tony Spilotro, the mobster portrayed by Joe Pesci in the movie Casino, and law enforcement's belabored efforts to oust the Mafia from Vegas. It is told in large part by the former FBI agents and detectives who fought the war against Spilotro and his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The book is scheduled for publication by Huntington Press in early 2006.

by Dennis N. Griffin

Introduction

Mobster "Bugsy" Siegel is generally acknowledged as being the first member of organized crime to establish a major mob presence in Las Vegas. That occurred in the 1940s, when he took control of an unfinished hotel/casino construction project located on what would become known as the Strip. That property was the Flamingo. Siegel, financed with several million dollars of organized crime money from back east, saw the Flamingo through to completion. After a shaky start, the casino began to turn a profit. But some of Bugsy's financial backers had become suspicious of how he was spending their money. And the handsome, but volatile, gangster had shot his mouth off to some very dangerous people, including New York City boss "Lucky" Luciano. The Flamingo's improving financial picture wasn't enough to save Siegel from the mob's version of early retirement. On June 20, 1947, the 41-year-old was gunned down at his girlfriend's Beverly Hills home. Bugsy was dead, but the mob knew there was the potential to make some big money in Vegas. As the oasis in the desert transitioned into the gambling and entertainment capital of the world, more mobsters and their money poured in.

During those years organized crime considered Las Vegas to be an open city. Crime families from across the country were welcome to operate there, and many did. But the dominant group was the Chicago Outfit. In the 1970s, Chicago and its colleagues in Kansas City, Milwaukee and Cleveland were using Sin City as a cash cow. Commonly referred to as the "skim," unreported revenue from certain casinos was making its way out of Vegas by the bag full, and ending up in the coffers of the crime bosses in those four locations.

June 15, 2003

This is the prologue to the book The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia's Cali Drug Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk, the story of the rise of the powerful Cali Cartel and the long and often frustrating campaign that U.S. and international law enforcement waged to take it down. The book details the cartel's rise to international prominence and the lifestyles of its godfathers, its efforts to buy Colombia, its death struggle with legendary Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, its brilliant strategy to portray itself as the kinder, gentler drug cartel from Colombia, and the mistakes that ultimately led to the crumbling of its well-oiled organization. The book will be published by Praeger, a member of the Greenwood Publishing Group, in the fall of 2003.

 by Ron Chepesiuk

Prologue:

"It's similar to, maybe, baking a cake."
 — David Karasiewski, Forensic Chemist, DEA 

 The call that launched the biggest drug trafficking investigation in New York State Police (NYSP) history came on April 12, 1985. Bob Sears, a DEA agent in the Albany office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), groped for the switch on the bed lamp and squinted at the alarm clock on the end table. It was a little past 2 a.m. Sears fumbled with the phone and blurted: "This better be important."

The caller was Ken Cook, a friend for years, but Cook was also an investigator assigned to the Major Crime Units of Troop Six, NYSP, and he had worked with Sears on many joint investigations. This was no social call.

"There has been an explosion at a farm house in Minden," Cook explained. "We don´t know what happened. It could be a bomb factory...a meth lab. Barrels of chemicals are all over the place. It´s a mess. Maybe the DEA needs to go out and take a look." ¹

Sears yawned and rubbed his warm bed. He had a better idea. "Come on, Ken, it´s almost morning. Can´t we sleep on it ´til tomorrow?" ²

But Cook persisted. "No, we need to go out there tonight while the scene is still hot." Sears knew well what Cook meant. Often, he would go out to a crime scene only to find that some young cop fresh out of the academy had left his hoof and paw prints all over the place. ³

October 1, 2008

Left to Right: cover of Richard Condon's 1959 novel (1960 Signet edtion); poster from the original film (1962); poster from film remake (2004).

The assassins of the Kennedy brothers acted in cold blood, not under mind control.

by Mel Ayton

To coincide with the 40th anniversary of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination this year, conspiracists have once again raised the possibility that RFK's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, had been hypnotized to murder Senator Kennedy. And other writers have used the RFK assassination anniversary as a vehicle to promote their Lee Harvey Oswald "Mind Control" theories.

In a 2007 documentary RFK Must Die and a recent National Geographic Channel documentary, CIA - Secret Experiments (2008), a number of conspiracy advocates alleged Sirhan was a Manchurian Candidate-type assassin –an unwitting tool of faceless conspirators in the CIA and the military-industrial complex. The conspiracy writers say the same conspirators who were responsible for JFK's death had plotted RFK's murder to stop him from enquiring into the death of his brother when he became president. (1)