Book Review: Naked By the Window by Robert Katz

Naked By the Window:

The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta

      Ana Mendieta fell out a window and died. It happened in September 1985, just several months after marrying Carl Andre. The couple had been arguing. Both of them were artists in New York City. Other than that, not a lot is known about what jappened that night. We do know that Carl Andre was charged with second degree murder, but was found innocent when taken to trial. The author Robert Katz doesn’t accept this verdict and makes it clear in his book Naked By the Window.

This review doesn’t have any spoilers because there isn’t anything to spoil. It opens with Ana Mendieta falling out the window of Carl Andre’s loft in Lower Manhattan. He calls the police, gets taken to jail, and goes up in front of a grand jury who decide not to send him to trial. The case gets reopened twice with similar results and a verdict of not guilty the final time. The rest of the story is non-sequential, alternating between flashbacks and the 1980s up to the last attempt at conviction.

Ana Mendieta was an up and coming Cuban-born artist. After the Revolution of 1959, her parents sent her and her sister Raquel to the United States where they had rough childhoods in foster homes. The racist white Americans in Iowa were not kind to them. While Raquel opted for the hippy lifestyle as she got older, Ana turned to art to vent her anger and ended up in the blossoming Soho art scene in Manhattan. Her sculptures and photography drew on Land Art and Body Art as source materials, examining the connections between the female body and nature. 1980s Soho was the right time and place for her arrival as an interest in both Latino and feminist art were coming into vogue. It was there that she met Carl Andre.

He was older than Ana Mendieta and had already established himself in the art world. From the late 1970s, he was involved in the postmodernist minimalist movement. His most famous works were things like piles of bricks, pieces of wood, and square tiles of zinc laid on the floor. It’s the kind of stuff that art critics love to praise as genius while making people outside the art world laugh. The concept of the “art world” is important because it has a lot to do with how the public reacted to the death of Ana Mendieta at the time of Carl Andre’s trial.

If people weren’t aware of class, race, and gender divisions in the art scene before Ana Mendieta’s death, they became aware of them at her funeral. Modern artists like to maintain a public image of being anti-establishment revolutionaries, but by Robert Katz’s estimate, they are little more than an miniature establishment unto themselves, a closed society of artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and gallery owners that are predominantly white, male, and rich. Ana Mendieta was becoming a leading figure in the Latin-American art scene and also embraced by some, but not all, feminists; her rising popularity threatened the traditional domain of the art establishment and her funeral became a rallying cry for unity among artists representing the Global South. So her funeral ended up being a tense mixture of white people who were ill at ease and Latinos who were outraged by her death. The walls of demarcation grew taller and thicker over the coming years as the white establishment maintained a code of silent defense, protecting Carl Andre from questioning. Those that believed Ana Mendieta had been murdered became aggressive in their public campaign against him. If art is meant to be revolutionary, this revolution is one that failed.

Aside from the artists’ biographies, the death of Ana Mendieta, and the effect it had on the art scene, the other major component of this book is the invstigation and trial of Carl Andre. The man was a minimalist artist and a man with minimal emotions, and if he truly committed murder, it was a crime with minimal evidence. While the police were convinced that Andre was guilty, they botched the collection of evidence and the small number of material witnesses proved to be unreliable. Aside from Ana Mendieta’s corpse, they couldn’t find much else to go on. That meant the prosecution had little more than circumstantial evidence.

What could be admitted into the case was that the married couple were heavy drinkers and prone to fighting. Carl Andre was adulterous and had a known history for verbally and physically abusing women. In Ana Mendieta’s defense, she wasn’t likely to have committed suicide as Andre claimed since she had extensive plans for the future, one of which was to divorce her husband. She also avoided going near windows because of her extreme fear of heights. The defense’s argument was that Mendieta was overly emotional because of her Cuban heritage, mentally unstable because she incorporated elements drawn from Santeria into her works, and obsessed with death because of the color red, representative of blood, she used in her sculptures indicating an unconscious wish to die. Therefore she killed herself. By Robert Katz’s estimation, Carl Andre had more reason to kill Ana Mendieta than she did to jump to her death. But the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to support their case.

Robert Katz tells this story in a straightforward manner. His bias that Ana Mendieta is clear from the beginning. As mentioned before, those who are attracted to this book are probably already familiar with the case of Mendieta. Katz mostly wrote this book to fill in all the fine details for those who want to know more. But whether Andre pushed his wife out the window or she fell or jumped of her own volition is left an open question. Katz makes it feel overwhelmingly that Carl Andre is guilty of murder, but the reader is still left with the possibility that he is just skilled enough at persuasive writing to manipulate the reader’s emotions. He could have made his case by leaving out or altering information. But in recent times, patterns in the response to Ana Mendieta’s death have emerged even though more evidence hasn’t. Supporters of Carl Andre have continued to maintain strict silence in the questioning of the incident and the cause of Ana Mendieta remains a rallying call for feminists and social activists who are convinced of his guilt. Putting all politics aside, I am of the opinion that Carl Andre murdered Ana Mendieta and justice has never been served. Based on my sum of knowledge so far, I can’t see it any other way though I do admit this might be an impossible case to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt. And the two people who would know best are both dead.

Naked By the Window is a good document, probably the best document, of the Mendieta-Andre case. It is also a good portrait of the Soho art scene of the 1980s and some of its problematic aspects. It gives you a look into the darker side of a closed community that most will never be a part of. It should give you something to think about the next time you visit a gallery or sit for an art history class in a lecture hall. The art market is just as cut throat and vicious as any other big business. Don’t let the aesthetics and the mental stimulation of the art works fool you as to what goes on behind the scenes. As for the works done by those respective artists, and aside from the alleged crime of homicide committed by Carl Andre, the works of Ana Mendieta are certainly more visually engaging and meaningful. Her premature death cut short the life of a promising artist who was just beginning to find her stride towards her mature period of expression. Since her death, Carl Andre’s art has grown in popularity with his bales of hay and rows of bricks selling for millions. Some critics still love him, some consider him to be a con man. Although I’m not a big supporter of minimalism, I do know of some minimalist artists who are good. Carl Andre isn’t one of them. Maybe on that night of September 1985 the wrong person fell out of his window.

 

Book Review: Blood In the Soil by Carol Townsend

Blood In the Soil:

A True Tale of Racism, Sex, and Murder In the South

by Carol Townsend

Who could possibly be a bigger creep than Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine? The guy who tried to assassinate him, that’s who. Carol Townsend’s Blood In the Soil tells the tale of the man who attempted to murder the world’s most famous pornographer. It’s not a happy story.

Not surprisingly, Joseph Franklin had a miserable childhood. He grew up iimpoverished in Alabama. His parents were cruel and he had no friends. He dropped out of high school and turned to religion to find meaning and connection to a community. Up to a point, our basic capacity for sympathy kicks in and we can feel pity for him considering how terrible his upbringing was. But then we learn that he felt deeply hostile to the rise of integration, especially when it came to interracial dating. His search for community led him to join the Ku Klux Klan. You still might have an ounce of sympathy for him, thinking that because of his circumstances he was misguided and took a wrong turn in life. But it only gets worse from there. He regarded the Klan as little more than a fraternal drinking club and what he wanted was something on a more revolutionary scale. He decided to go on a terrorism and killing spree in order to spark a race war.

Franklin had a habit of frequenting newsstands and poring over their racks of pornographic magazines without paying for them, of course. He had a particular interest in Hustler but what he saw one day enraged him. Larry Flynt had published a pictorial of a naked African American man with a naked white woman, something that infuriated Franklin to the point of stealing a Ruger .44 semiautomatic rifle he would later use in an attempt on Larry Flynt’s life. Franklin claimed the pictorial layout was degrading to white women, but that is an odd opinion to have since he was highly abusive to the women in his life.

Flynt was in the town of Lawrenceville, Georgia on trial for obscenity. While he and his lawyer were walking from a restaurant to the courthouse, Franklin opened fire on them, nearly killing both. Flynt’s body was nearly ripped in half from the bullets and his spinal chord was almost severed. He managed to survive though and a good portion of this book gives details on the pain and suffering he went through after the attack. Larry Flynt’s biography is weird enough to merit its own book.

Franklin, meanwhile, went on a crime spree that included bombing synagogues, armed robberies, and shootings that mostly involved interracial couples. Overall, he is known to have killed 22 people. While his attempt on Flynt’s life takes up most of the oxygen in the room, it is important to remember the humanity of Franklin’s other victims, none of which were pornographers whose only crimes were having the wrong skin color and socializing with white people. They may be forgotten now, but remember they were the types of people who we have as friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members.

The story shifts between Carol Townsend’s narrative and testimony from the detective Michael Cowart who solved the case of Larry Flynt’s attempted assassination. Cowart spent time meeting with Joseph Franklin in to get an official confession from him. A lot of what we know about Franklin’s personality comes from Cowart’s interactions with him. Their meetings took place in a maximum security prison after Franklin had been incarcerated for other crimes. He was never charged or brought to trial for the assassination attempt because he was already on death row for a synagogue bombing.

Townsend never takes a deep dive into the mind of Joseph Franklin. Her explanations are predictable. His rotten childhood made him the monster he became. He was a psychopath. He never got the opportunities he needed, so on and so forth. These are generic explanations you get from any true crime book. There are lots of people who are born into similar circumstances who don’t become terrorists and serial killers so it would be useful to know what set Franklin apart from those others. Even worse, she tries to blame his pathological hatred on the racist history of the South by saying the soil is saturated with racism because of slavery and the Native American genocide. It’s as if the racism just radiated upwards into the Southern white community by osmosis and animated them to commit hate crimes against ethnic minorities. The problem with this is that racism exists wherever humans exist. All nations have been built on a foundation of conquest, bloodshed, and genocide so there isn’t any excuse for the American Southeast to stand out in regard to every other piece of land on planet Earth. Besides, saying that Joseph Franklin is a conduit for racist violence that preceded his existence is just a kind of way to provide an easy explanation where there isn’t one.

There is an interesting pattern to notice though. Many of the people Franklin shot were in pairs. Most of them were either interracial couples or pairs of friends. One involved a pair of African American men who were jogging together. Franklin was a loner who failed to make social connections with others, so there may be an element of jealousy in his murders. Since synagogues are also places of community, it is possible that the bombings of the Jewish temples grew out of resentment since he failed to find the type of religious congregation that suited his needs. Loneliness, isolation, and living without love and affection are fundamentally existential problems for individual humans.

Townsend starts this book by waxing poetic as if she wants to reiterate Truman Capote’s finely crafted true crime novel In Cold Blood. But her language is cliché and more purple prose than poetry so thankfully she drops the literary pretentions a short ways into the story and finishes with straightforward writing. For the most part, this is written like standard true crime fare.

Blood In the Soil is a gritty and depressing read about a man who possibly was little more than pure evil. Even before being executed, Joseph Franklin was given a chance to redeem himself, but his apologies were little more than an act. And Larry Flynt spent the rest of his life living as a millionaire pornographer in a gold-plated wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down. We’re left with the impression that our planet is a Hell that we often make worse through our own actions. 

 

Book Review: Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien

Two Of a Kind:

The Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

      By the late 1970s, America was in the grip of a new source of anxiety. Along with the cult scare of the time there was also a serial killer scare. Lone wolf killers who mostly preyed on vulnerable women were showing up more and more in the news. The media, always hungry for stories that shock and disturb people for the sake of attention grabbing, latched on to this trend, bringing it further into the public eye and possibly influencing an unprecedented number of copycat homicides. One of the early fascinations for serial killers was for the Hillside Strangler, then written in the singular because no one knew the killings were done by a pair of men. Darcy O’Brien’s Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers is the definitive account of this pair that came into prominence as the serial killer scare of the time began taking off.

The first thing to note about this true crime book is its lucidity, it polished prose, and its clear writing style. The author was obviously aiming to write another novelization of murder the way Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood. This book includes everything you would find in a formulaic, mainstream novel including character development, a plot arc, subplots, a conflict resolution as a climax, and moral commentary. This is all good for the sake of readability, but in a detrimental sense, reality is messy and fitting it into the template of a novel makes this book a little too slick. There are times when you might doubt the reliability of the narration just because the pieces of the puzzle’s plot fit together a little too securely to be believable.

Then something else strikes a sour note at the beginning. O’Brien apologizes to the readers for his graphic descriptions of the Hillside Strangler’s crimes. This might be a small point of contention, but seriously, are you kidding me? Apologizing? Call me naive if you want, but I’d assume that anyone who picks up this book does so because they want all the gory details. Why else would anybody want to read this? Well, I can think of one or two other reasons having to do with the legal system and the trial, but we’ll return to that later.

The Hillside Stranglers were two cousins from my hometown of Rochester, New York. (I actually attended the same grammar school as them, although they were there a good ten years before I was) Actually, they weren’t cousins by blood since the younger of the two was adopted. Angelo Buono left the great city of Rottenchester for the greener pastures of Hollywood. Never mind that Hollywood is in a desert. You know what I mean. Buono bought a house and opened a car upholstery shop back when they had things like that. His younger cousin Ken Bianchi followed him out there and moved in while trying to get his feet on the ground. Bianchi tried to make money by opening a fake psychotherapy clinic, offering counseling services at discount prices even though he never graduated from college.

Angelo Buono had a rough childhood. Violent from the start, he had a long criminal record and spent most of his youth in trouble with the law and other kids his age. When married he molested his step-daughter and step-son. Ken Bianchi, on the other hand, was less prone to violence, but he had been a compulsive lair from the time he could speak. He was impressed by the older Buono’s ability to pick up women for casual sex, effortlessly and with ease. Bianchi looked up to Buono and thought of him as a mentor. The bad childhood doesn’t serve as a sufficient explanation for what went wrong. Lots of people have bad upbringings and most of them don’t become mass murderers. The author never grapples with why the Hillside Stranglers diverged from the rest of us.

Since Bianchi was failing to make a sufficient income, mostly due to his unwillingness to engage in any real work, the two psychos decided to enter the profession of pimping. They kidnapped two fourteen year old girls from Denver and forced them to work as prostitutes. But as the gangsta rapper MJG says, “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” The two girls escaped and the sad sadists, Buono and Bianchi, were so emotionally distraught that they decided to vent their frustrations by posing as cops, abducting a girl, raping her, torturing her, and then strangling her. They dumped her body in a public place with the intention of it being seen. Serial killing became a hobby for the two and they used a similar routine every time. They began referring to their nights out on the town as “The Scam”. They went about their work as casually as two guys shopping for sports equipment at the mall. Or at least that’s how the author makes it look.

As you might imagine, leaving corpses around the Hollywood hills captured the attention of the police. LAPD detective Bob Grogan sits at the center of the story since he was the only one who agreed to collaborate on this book. Other than being a detective on the case, Bob Grogan is not an especially interesting person. He hangs out in bars, he cheats on his wife, he has a boat, and plays cheesy music on the electric Hammond organ he has at home. He’s also a jerk who thinks he’s superior to everybody else. He spouts off a lot of shallow right wing ideas and laments the fact that the American criminal justice system was simpler 100 years ago without realizing that America probably wasn’t any safer then than it is now. It just seems that way to him because he doesn’t know that forensic science at that time was rudimentary, meaning a lot more crimes went unsolved or undetected and a lot more criminals got away with murder. And that also means that a lot more innocent people were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Back in those days, a knife wound in the hand could be just as deadly as a bullet in the brain because they had no penicillin to stop deadly infections. Blood feuds were common in rural areas. Lynch mobs were certainly never convicted for murder either. So 100 years ago, everything was better? Don’t be so naive, Bob Grogan. If you think life was simpler in the 1880s, you’re just displaying your own ignorance of history and the simplicity if your own mind. The author Darcy O”Brien could have spared us the details of this cop’s private life and thoughts. Grogan deserves any credit he gets for catching the killers, but other than that he’s neither here nor there.

Despite some small annoyances on the author’s part, the first third of this book is good and definitely the best section of it all. Abd, yes, the murders as they are described are nothing short of disgusting.

Ken Bianchi decides Hollywood is heating up too much for him so he runs off to a hick town in Oregon where he gets arrested after strangling two college students. The LAPD sees a connection to the case of the Hillside Stranglers and it doesn’t take long to get a confession out of Bianchi. Being the sociopath he is, Bianchi is a pathological liar. Under hypnosis, he confesses to his crimes, but convinces a team of psychiatrists he has multiple personality disorder. Of course, hypnosis is considered by some to be a pseudo-science and the existence of multiple personality disorder is also in dispute. Deeper scientific inquiries prove that Bianchi is faking and this is a big relief to the detectives of LAPD since a plea of insanity could have kept him out of prison. Bianchi realizes his only way out would be a plea bargain, sparing him the death penalty in exchange for testifying against Angelo Buono. While not as gripping as the accounts of the murders and the police investigations, this second section of the book is still interesting since it gives some insight into the mind of Ken Bianchi, or at least what little is actually in the empty space between his ears. He is a man of superficial charm, but entirely lacking in substance, a textbook case of psychopathy.

In the final stretch, the two year long trial is examined in detail. While the trial itself is interesting, O’Brien’s account of it is marred by his constant quips about how terrible America has become because of Liberal politicians. His portrayal of the team defending the Hillside Stranglers is so negative that it’s hard to take seriously. Predictably, Bob Grogan whines about due process of law and believes the killers should be executed without a trial. Forget about the Constitution. It’s funny how a cop can claim to be upholding the law while expressing disgust over the legality of due process, something which exists for a definite purpose. Without due process, courts would be nothing more than kangaroo courts and arenas for scapegoating. As wrong and faulty as due process sometimes is, it acts as a guardrail against innocent people being thrown in jail or executed. It doesn’t always work, but it is the best we have as of now. Bob Grogan wants to condemn a criminal for murdering a woman, but if the same woman were sent to the electric chair in error because there was no due process, he would be celebrating because someone was found guilty. That is sick minded hypocrisy on a grand scale.

The author’s portrayal of the criminal defense team doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny either. Hating criminal defense lawyers because they represent criminals is a cheap shot and betrays a poor understanding of due process. The point of criminal defense is to point out all the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. The jury therefore has to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence provided to evaluate whether the criminal charges are justifiable or not. Without defense attorneys, the prosecutors would have a free ride to convict anybody brought to trial whether there was a justifiable cause for conviction or not. As stated before, the criminal defenders act as a guardrail against innocent people getting convicted. Just because it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time doesn’t mean it isn’t legitimate. If people in law enforcement truly respect the law, then they should respect the fact that everybody who gets brought to trial, no matter how egregious the charges may be, deserves a fair trial. By not respecting that right, law enforcement loses its moral high ground and sinks to the level of the criminals they prosecute.

O’Brien portrays the defense team as conniving, lying, cheating, conspiratorial, and evil with personalities to match all their negative character traits. He makes them resemble characters in a bad TV series that didn’t survive past its first season. This is done on purpose to manipulate the reader’s emotions, making you hate them. He wants the reptilian part of your brain to override your rational faculties as if it isn’t enough that we hate the killers already. But it’s such a transparent literary technique, straight out of the most shallow genre fiction, that it makes the whole portrayal look fake. It’s possible that it might be an accurate portrayal; I don’t know because I wasn’t there. But with all the cheap shots O’Brien and the windbag Bob Grogan take at Liberals throughout the story, it casts doubt over O’Brien’s credibility.

The crux of the matter is that this book is supposed to be about the Hillside Stranglers. No matter how smooth and lucid the writing is, using it as a platform for pushing right wing politics down our throats nearly ruins it. Even worse, O’Brien dishes out insults to Liberals without ever building a systematic argument in favor of his conservative beliefs. He offers nothing more than petty put downs. It’s like being kicked in the shin by a dwarf who then brags about beating you up. He underestimates the intelligence of his audience which is insulting to say the least. I gather Darcy O’Brien thinks Liberal politicians have turned America into a crime ridden hellhole because their compassion has led the country astray and yet he also wants us to believe that Liberals believe in due process because they are vicious, sadistic, criminal sympathizers who want to destroy the world. Compassionate and cruel? You can’t have it both ways, Mr. O’Brien. There is a time and a place for political discourse and I’d say a biography of serial killers is not the right one. If the author wanted to push his politics on people, he should have written a scholarly work on conservative interpretations of legal theory instead.

Two Of a Kind is not as good of a book as it should have been. Darcy O’Brien is obviously skilled at his craft, but he doesn’t know when to keep his opinions to himself. Thankfully, the Hillside Stranglers went to prison for life and Angelo Buono is now dead. Thankfully also, the number of serial killers in America peaked in the 1990s. According to the FBI, there are currently only about 20-30 known serial killers at loose in America. On a much darker note, America also has far more serial killers per capita than any other country on Earth. Most likely, there is something about American culture that is causing this to happen. Liberal politics are an unlikely cause. The majority of serial killers are white heterosexual males, middle class, between the ages of 25-40, and holding conservative political and religious beliefs. You might want to look beyond the weakness of Liberals for causes. It’s more likely a problem with the character and toxic cultural climate of the American people. We are a nation that breeds assholes like no other. And if you ever meet Bob Grogan in real life, shake his hand for catching the Hillside Stranglers, but walk away as soon as he starts to speak.

 

Book Review: Vesco by Arthur Herzog

Vesco:

From Wall Street to Castro's Cuba

the Rise, Fall, and Exile Of the King of White-Collar Crime

by Arthur Herzog

      The world of big business and corporate finance is a shady place. When profits and personal gain are the primary motivations for success, then inevitably a company will attract some questionable characters. Greedy, sharky narcissists and grifters sometimes claw their way to the top. Slick deal makers invade the boardrooms and moral guardrails get flushed down the toilet. Our culture of economics celebrates those who accumulate the most wealth regardless of their character or usefulness to society as a whole. Organized crime syndicates are little more than the shadow side of big business. It is no surprise that such an environment would attract some pathological predators. It is also no surprise that some libertarian lunatics will lionize these scumbags for being an exotic breed of amoral heroes. Vesco by Arthur Herzog gives a biographical account of one such sleazy businessman who eventually ended up on the lam.

Robert Vesco had an unimpressive childhood. His family were part of the Midwestern blue collar class, living without frills or fortune. After getting bored with mundane factory work, Vesco got into the habit of buying businesses. He developed a talent for buying failing businesses and turning them around to be either resold or else used to buy other businesses. He built up a network of them and then set his sights higher, using the profits to buy his way onto the board of the Investors Overseas Service or IOS. This high-finance corporation was already being run by some shady people and had actually been banned from doing business in America. So Vesco tried to take over IOS and along the way, stashed investors’ money in offshore bank accounts and shell companies in the Caribbean and Central America. The American SEC caught on to what he was doing and tried to take him down. After a joke of a trial in which the government struggled to define what crime Vesco had committed, let along prove their case, the rogue businessman had already become one of the richest men in the world. Instead of risking more harassment from the government, Vesco fled the country, spending most of his time making banking and business deals in the Bahamas and then making a semi-permanent move to Costa Rica.

That much of the biography is interesting if you can manage to extract so much meaning from Herzog’s text. Unfortunately, there are three identifiable problems that muddy up the narrative waters. One is that a lot of space is taken up with details of banking and corporate business management. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and it would be expected in a book about white collar crime. The problem is that it is alienating to readers who are not familiar with these business practices which can be assumed to be most people. Herzog doesn’t explain this side of the story sufficiently enough for those of us who have never been inside a corporate boardroom. Another problem is that Robert Vesco disappears for a long stretch from his own biography. Herzog goes into too much detail about the lifestyles of the IOS managers, especially that of Bernard Cornfeld who dominates such a long portion of the writing that you might forget who this is meant to be a biography of. And that is not the only time that happens in this book. The third major error is that the author writes about how Vesco has such a charming and attractive personality, but this never comes across in the writing. The book actually lacks sufficient detail to drive this point home. Herzog could have included more personal testimony or anecdotes from people who knew Vesco to make him come to life more as the central figure of the story rather than being so one dimensional.

Robert Vesco settled in Costa Rica after the American government put pressure on the Bahamas to extradite him. There he made friends with the president Jose Figeres Ferrer. Vesco was the wealthiest man in that tiny, impoverished nation and Figeres urged him to invest money in the national infrastructure. Subsequent presidents warmed up less to Vesco but tolerated his presence as long as he didn’t meddle with the national media. Public opinion in Costa Rica was divided and the presence of Vesco was a prominent news item for several years. Despite living lavishly, Vesco’s fortunes were growing smaller and he began investing in more dangerous business ventures like drug smuggling and arms running to keep himself afloat. He got too hot for the Costa Ricans to handle, so after secretly bouncing around from Antigua and Panama to Nicaragua, he eventually settled in Cuba. It can be said that the communists allowed him to stay in Havana simply to annoy the American government, but they probably wanted some of his money and access to his business contacts as well. The sections about Vesco’s life in exile are somewhat interesting, but again, he disappears from the story for unnecessarily long periods including passages about an illegal arms deal with Libya in which Vesco only had a tenuous connection.

As far as the writing quality goes, the best part, meaning the clearest and easiest to follow, comes in the final chapter when Herzog goes to Cuba to interview Robert Vesco and show him a transcript of his biography. Actually nothing especially interesting happens there and the chapter does almost nothing to add to the bigger picture of who Vesco really was, but it is the best written part of the whole book. This is important because Herzog wrote about what he saw in Cuba. The rest of the book lacks that kind of vision. Herzog can’t be faulted for not being in the room with Vesco throughout his entire life, but the author never actually sees what he writes about. There are lots of listed details, but he never actually puts you, as a reader, right into the action the way a good writer does. Reading this book has the feel of trying to follow a TV show while sitting in a separate room and listening to it through the wall without any visual input.

Robert Vesco was a man who got into too much too soon. He obviously had a natural talent for business, but he moved too fast for his own good. He didn’t learn the lesson of Icarus whose wings made of wax melted when he flew too close to the sun. If Vesco hadn’t been so reckless he might have survived longer in the world of corporations and banks. Maybe he would have even gotten away with squirreling some money in offshore bank accounts. White collar crime is just as common as kids stealing candy from the supermarket and probably gets prosecuted less often.

Arthur Herzog’s Vesco doesn’t qualify as a great biography. It has too much detail about things I don’t understand without sufficient explanation to make them comprehensible and not enough detail about the things that make Robert Vesco interesting even though he can’t be sympathized with. Unless you have a burning passion for corporate business, financial institutions, and white collar crime, this probably isn’t a book worth your time.

 

Book Review

Son of Sam

by Lawrence D. Klausner

By the end of the 1970s, New York was the most dangerous city in America, if not the whole world. Adding to the climate of fear, violence and crime was a lone serial killer striking out at random times and random places. Police knew every time he struck because the bullets recovered from the scenes all came from the same gun a .44 caliber pistol that was a rare make and model with a powerful kick that could most likely only be handled by an experienced shooter. That man was later revealed to be David Berkozwitz. Lawrence B. Klausner, in Son of Sam, tells the story primarily from the police force’s point of view.

Roughly half the book is dedicated to telling the story of NYPD’s detective task force put together specifically to catch the elusive murderer. Klausner does this for good reason. His intention is to celebrate the heroic manhunt conducted by that crack team of investigators, called Operation Omega, without overly emphasizing the sick details of Berkowitz’s long term killing spree. But this approach only goes so far. A lot of Operation Omega’s work leads to dead ends and faulty conclusions that result in nothing but frustration. Actually it is the Yonkers police who do the most to put the pieces of the puzzle together when they begin noticing the strange behavior of Berkowitz who lives in a Yonker’s apartment building up until his capture. This may be an accurate way to portray police detective work, but you have to consider that most people don’t read this book for information on law enforcement procedures.

Klausner also makes a slight and similar lapse of judgment in his handling of the murder victims and their family’s reactions. He mostly handles this sensitive part of the story well and in good taste. It is obvious where his sympathies lie and he shows us how violent crime does not only effect the people who get shot, but also their families and the surrounding communities too. But Klausner goes a little too far with this. After the shooting of Berkowitz’s last victims, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante who were out on their first date, the author tracks their families into the hospitals where they are taken. The problem is that this part of the book is overwrought and maudlin, descending into melodrama that over-sensationalizes and over-sentimentalizes the situation to the point where the author subverts his own intentions by trying too hard to show us the distress of the families. He wants us to see the gravity of the crimes, but turns it into a soap opera instead. We can forgive Klausner for this error simply because we know his good intentions, though.

And finally there is the story of David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and the Son of Sam himself. Berkowitz is an adopted child who had trouble making and maintaining friendships during his childhood. Shy and awkward, he always fails to fit in even though people think he seems like a good guy, at least on the surface. He makes it through the military, becoming an expert sharpshooter, then returns to New York City, living alone and holding down various jobs. At some point in his life he begins hearing howling dogs that he believes to be the voices of demons telling him to kill so they can drink the victims’ blood. Only Berkowitz’s attempts at murder make the auditory hallucinations stop. And these hallucinations do stop anytime he goes to work. On the days he has off, the howling dogs start to harass him. Unable to sleep, he tucks his gun into his pants and goes out to kill in the outer boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

Berkowitz writes letter to the police, some of which end up in the newspapers. With prose that sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he gives details of his crimes and explains his situation. He believes his neighbor in Yonkers, a man named Sam Carr who owns a dog that barks at night, is actually Satan and Berkowitz believes that Sam is commanding him to kill in order to prevent bigger disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes from happening, hence the self-given name of Son of Sam. The letters at first appear to be taunting the police, but in a sense they may be Berkowitz’s way of saying he wants to be caught. After they do arrest him, Berkowitz expresses relief because he doesn’t like the job of killing and feels he has no choice but to obey the voices in his head. It becomes clear early on in the book that David Berkowitz suffers from schizophrenia, but a schizophrenia that is difficult for outsiders to detect because his episodes only happen when he is tormented by loneliness. The degree of his disordered thinking is easy to spot early on when he thinks that his fist murder victim will marry him after she dies. His thoughts become more nonsensical from there.

Son of Sam is an interesting book, even if it is a little clumsy, uneven, and amateurish. The over-emphasis of the police department’s manhunt takes a little too much focus off of David Berkowitz to really make the story work entirely. But the biggest flaw is that a more in-depth psychological profile of the killer is never given. We get the details of his crimes and his mental illness, but the deeper psychology of how Berkowitz’s mind drives him to do what he does and how he came to be a killer when he didn’t want to be is never explored. His mental illness is the most colorful and interesting part of his biography and without a bigger examination of his mental processes, this book ends up being simply just a combination of police thriller and slasher horror story. Still the descriptions and atmospherics are well-done, and we do get enough of a taste of Berkowitz’s psychology to keep the story interesting.

Son of Sam is worth reading if you simply want the story of David Berkowitz’s crimes. In the end you may even feel an ounce of sympathy for the man who struggles with uncontrolled mental illness that drives him to commit crimes he doesn’t want to commit. Mind you, an ounce of sympathy is not a large amount and it is obvious that the victims deserves infinitely more sympathy than he does. Klausner does an adequate job of making this obvious fact clear enough.

Since he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to life imprisonment, Berkowitz has become a model prisoner and, every time he goes up for parole, he says he doesn’t deserve to be released because his crimes were so terrible. The story of his redemption is not covered in this book, but it is almost as provocative as the story of his serial killing spree. Is Son of Sam the American version of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment? That will be for future generations to decide. But there is no doubt, were Doestoevsky alive today, he would find David Berkowitz to be a fascinating character he could relate to.

 

Book Review

The Rochester Mob Wars

by Blair T. Kenny

     Ah Rochester, my hometown. The weather is harsh. The people are chronically ill tempered and unfriendly as wellas insular, provincial, and myopic. One of Rochester’s nicknames is Smugtown. The most popular food here is the Garbage Plate. It’s the eastern edge of the Great Midwestern Rustbelt. It’s the kind of place that produces serial killers like Arthur Shawcross and the Hillside Stranglers; Timothy McVeigh was living in the suburb of Webster when he decided to go to war against the US government. It’s the city where Jimi Hendrix got booed offstage, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Buddy Rich got arrested for possession of cocaine, and Billy Idol got arrested for attempted sexual assault. It’s also a haven for record collectors boasting of legendary stores like the House of Guitars, the Record Archive, Lakeshore Record Exchange, the Bop Shop, and Buzzo’s in Geneseo. We’re also the birthing ground for such musical luminaries as Cab Calloway, Wendy O. Williams, Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, the Chesterfield Kings, and Mitch Miller. Road construction is endless and we’ve got potholes in the road the size of elephant heads. It was once the hometown of Rob Black of Extreme Associates, a pornographer who made such extreme content that Larry Flynt told him to tone it down a few notches; he went to prison on obscenity charges. On the brighter side, Mt. Hope Cemetery has got to be one of the most beautiful boneyards in the country and a great place for drug parties and sexual trysts in the moonlight; it is the burial ground of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. There should be no surprise that such a sordid place would have its own arm of La Cosa Nostra, especially with its sizable population of ethnic Sicilians.

If you were around here in the 1970s, you are probably aware of the car bombing that killed Sammy G Gingello and the string of shootings which are documented in Blair T. Kenny’s The Rochester Mob Wars. The author does a historical service to this small town with a big attitude, documenting a side of life that wouldn’t surprise anybody from this region. But beyond simple documentation, this short book is a chore to read.

The story of this band of Goombatas is nothing unique. The Mafia demanded protection money from a handful of illegal gambling dens while involved in various other forms of crime. When the local big boss, Frank Valenti, was given an all-expenses paid vacation up the river courtesy of the local police force who, as we all know around here aren’t a whole lot different from other gangs, the Mafia split into three factions dubbed by the police as the A Team, the B Team, and the C Team. The A Team controlled all the rackets while the B Team rebelled against them and tried to seize control. The C Team was just around to cause more trouble.

Frank Valenti rose up in the ranks, having ties to the mob in Pittsburgh and the Bonanno Faimily in New York City. When he went away for a while, he put the slow-witted and unimaginative Tom Didio in charge of the B Team, thinking he would be easy to control from prison and ready to step down upon the boss’s return. But Didio wouldn’t budge and all hell broke loose. Didio was gunned down in the parking lot of the Blue Gardenia restaurant in Irondequoit. This was followed by car bombings, arson, and lots of shooting.

The book also mentions some ties to Hells Angels chapters from as far away as Tennessee and Georgia and Mafia infiltration of the Teamsters Local #398 which eventually was liquidated by the government for being mob controlled, although Blair Kenny doesn’t say a whole lot about what the paisanos did when they ran the labor union rackets.

I suppose it all sounds interesting, especially if you come from the great city of Rottenchester. However, this book is so poorly written that any excitement you might get from it is beaten down like a day at Charlotte Beach that got ruined by a heavy rainstorm or possibly even by the stench from the polluted water, making the air around Lake Ontario smell like a sewer. The whole thing reads like paperwork from a police department’s filing cabinet. Actually, the author just seemed to indiscriminately throw together a bunch of newspaper clippings from the local rag known as the Democrat & Chronicle, merely summarizing them as he went along without any effective narrative scheme or organization. You get the same stories, largely lacking in detail, repeated over and over again without much information about who any of these people are or why we should even be interested in them. Finally at the end, Blair Kenny rewrites the whole story into a coherent narrative as some sort of summary, but at that point it is too little too late to save the entire book from itself.

As someone who grew up in Rochester, this book is mildly interesting. I know all the neighborhoods and suburbs where the action took place; most of them are in neighborhoods you should avoid these days. I recognize the names of some police officers and journalists in the story, including Gordon Urlacher, the police commissioner who went to prison for embezzling money from the police department in the 1990s. I can remember hearing rumors about Charlie the Ox when I was a teenager. Several of the people here share last names with kids I was friends with in grade school. And yet there is no mention of the Garibaldi Gardens or the Rio Bamba. But other than that, this is such a poorly written book that it won’t be of much interest to most readers; it probably will appeal only to those fascinated with the most obscure elements of Mafia lore or those with especially low standards in reading materials. Any time you see that a book is self-published, proceed with caution.

 

Book Review

Serpico:

The Cop Who Defied the System

by Peter Maas

     

     Most Americans want to like the police. It’s just that so many of us have had bad experiences with them and that makes it difficult. If you grow up in a city, especially one with a moderate or high crime rate, you will learn not to trust the cops from a young age. For most of us, it starts in our teenage years. It’s even worse if you aren’t white or dress somewhat unconventionally. Yes we’ve all heard it said that not all police are bad and it’s unfair that a few bad ones tarnish the reputation of the whole institution. We all know that’s true. That line of reasoning doesn’t go so far when you get harassed, surveilled, and bullied on a weekly basis by the jerks in blue when you aren’t doing anything worse than walking to the corner grocery store or going to school. All that is just surface level annoyance though. There are deep problems with corruption in polic forces all across the country; NYPD is especially notorious for playing dirty, taking graft for allowing gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, and all kinds of crime. This isn’t something the media made up; any New Yorker will tell you it’s real and many of them know from experience.

Then a man like Frank Serpico comes along and tries to blow the whole rotten pustule open for all to see, but in his case, the little that got seen did nothing to stop the rot which was feeding on all levels of the law enforcement system. Peter Maas’s Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System gives the full run down on this singularly courageous man who tried to fix what had gone wrong. Written like a novel, it is a compelling biography that succeeds because he makes the protagonist a character that is easy to relate to.

Frank Serpico, like so many other great Americans, was the son of immigrants. His family were hard-working Neapolitans who came over from Italy. As a boy he developed a precocious interest in guns and a fascination for police which was partly influenced by their heroic portrayals in the movies and television. He also loved reading and developed an intellectual side that is rare among people who seek employment as police officers, most of which tend to be blue collar with low levels of education.

When Serpico realized his dream of becoming a cop, he exceeded in his duty, courageously making arrests that other policemen were too lazy or scared to get involved with. He immediately became an outsider on the force, not only because of his desire to be the best, but also because he started to see all the corruption; his partners routinely accepted bribes and many of them found places to sleep when they should have been out patrolling the streets. Even worse, Serpico grew a beard and long hair and began looking a little too bohemian for the other cops who thought he was gay or else some kind of hippie radical.

After being transferred to different departments, the corruption got even worse. He realized that the NYPD were actively working with criminals and encouraging crime for the sake of taking bribes. Many of these cops even chose their jobs for that reason alone. This was nothing new; the number of men seeking employment as cops during the Prohibition era spiked for the exact same reason, for example. When Serpico tried to fight the corruption by taking his case to the highest levels of the police department, he was met with nothing but cold shoulders. He eventually took his story to the media and testified in court on the issue of police corruption, but very little was done to stop the problem. Then during a drug bust gone wrong, he got shot in the face. Although he survived, there were sympathy cards he received in the mail from members of the police force who said they wished he had died.

This is a very accessible and visually stimulating book. What really works though is the way the author makes you feel Serpico’s frustrations and disappointment. You know from the start that Serpico will lose but the writing style really brings you close to his emotions and states of mind. The downside of this descriptive writing is that at times Peter Maas veers into purple prose with excessive use of adjectives that becomes slightly annoying. And while the anecdotes about Serpico’s early years as a cop are true, Maas writes about him as if he is a superhero, larger than life and a little cartoonish as he fights for truth, justice, and the American way. It comes off as too good to be true, even though those stories are true. Fortunately, these weaker parts of the writing are at the beginning of the story and don’t continue all the way through.

Serpico is a great book. In fact it was so great that it got made into a classic movie starring Al Pacino around the peak of his career in the 1970s, which is one hell of a credential. The book is somewhat better because Peter Maas makes Serpico so easy to relate to. If you have ever had big dreams of doing something great and then getting disillusioned after you got there, this biography will strike a cord with you. You don’t have to be an honest police officer to relate to Frank Serpico. I myself have been a teacher for twenty years and my experiences with the educational system have been similar to what he went through. I reached a point where I no longer want to have anything to do with such a dirty business. Frank Serpico’s dream was to work for a police force in which the bad cops feared the good cops and what he found was something the opposite way around. He failed in his mission but that fact that he tried is enough to restore a dash of faith in humanity. At least there are some people out there who want things to be right. Frank Serpico was heroic and that is why his story deserves to be remembered. 

 

Book Review

DB Cooper and the FBI:

A Case Study of America's Only Unsolved Skyjacking

by Bruce A. Smith

By now, a lot of people know about the DB Cooper case. As far as unsolved crimes go, this one is a fascinating story because so little, in fact almost nothing, is known about the perpetrator and, by some estimates, he appears to have gotten away with the skyjacking. With so many unanswered questions, it inevitably attracts a large number of hobbyists, amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and cranks. Of the latter category, it is tempting to include Bruce A. Smith, author of DB Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking.

This book starts off with a standard account of the DB Cooper adventure. The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a solitary man checked onto an airplane in Portland, Oregon. After the flight took off, he told a stewardess he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded the plane be grounded and also requested four parachutes and $200,000 in cash. The FBI handed over the money and parachutes, then the plane took off again in the direction of Mexico City. But en route to the Land of Manana, DB Cooper jumped out of the plane, disappearing into the freezing cold night. He and his money were never to be seen again, except for a small stash of bills that were found at a beach on the Columbia River seven years later. Ever since then, the skyjacker has been an endless source of fascination for certain kinds of people. The beginning of Smith’s book does an adequate job of telling the story, but this is no great literary feat. The same story has been told dozens of times in other books so no new ground is broken here.

From there, the author tracks down other people who might have knowledge of the case including FBI officers and other authors who have covered the DB Cooper case. Things start to get a little creepy while he stalks Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who spent the most time with Cooper during the flight. At this point, the author’s sanity comes into question. He not only stalks this woman, who clearly wants to be left alone, but he also states his pet theory that she and everyone else in the Cooper case were part of a brainwashing program conducted by the CIA.

From there a big chunk of the book is dedicated to people who have either admitted to being DB Cooper or have been identified by family members as the unknown skyjacker. Yes, believe it or not, there have been hundreds of people who were suspected of this crime by their own families. Some of the evidence is as flimsy as can possibly be; typically some dysfunctional family in rural Washington or Oregon wonders why Uncle Joe unexpectedly didn’t show up for Thanksgiving and then they later found out he had gone on a gambling spree in Las Vegas or something like that. People who admitted to being Cooper are no more promising. The most interesting one was a transgendered pilot who supposedly carried out the skyjacking for therapeutic reasons; after having the surgery, he needed to do something macho to feel like the transition to manhood was complete. The evidence linking this lady who became a dude is flimsy. The author takes himself pretty seriously when stating that this pilot and Cooper could have been the same because both of them wore loafers and smoked cigarettes. I could never imagine this kind of evidence being considered admissible in court.

Then we get to the really kooky stuff. Smith presents his conspiracy theory that DB Cooper was a participant in the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments. I guess they wanted to brainwash people into skyjacking commercial American airliners for some incomprehensible purpose and DB Cooper happened to be their most successful experiment. He entertains the thought that this was done to force the privately owned airline companies into taking safety a little more seriously. There is also something about Cooper’s clip-on tie, which he left behind before parachuting into the wilderness. Smith believes that everyone who has come into physical contact with the tie has developed amnesia regarding details of the case via post-hypnotic suggestion. There is also a lot about clandestine military operations in the Vietnam War and an FBI plot to avoid solving the case to cover up the activities of the CIA. To Smith’s credit, at least he is man enough to admit that he has no evidence to support any of this bunk.

But then it gets even weirder. Bruce Smith, admitting to being a member of the Ramtha the Enlightened One cult in Washington, has some meditation and hypnotherapy sessions in which he claims to meet DB Cooper somewhere in the afterlife. This doesn’t yield any useful information, except that it vaguely justifies the author’s conspiracy theories. I suppose DB Cooper was some kind of supernatural being from another dimension and the author has pursued him so vigorously because he thinks of him as some kind of long-lost (imaginary) friend.

At least the author was smart enough to save his most loony ideas for the end. He is probably sane enough to know that he would lose any of his more skeptical readers if he had mentioned that stuff in the beginning. Then again, maybe he just thought he was saving the best parts for last, thereby making a horrible miscalculation. To be fair, the majority of the book is about relaying information he found during his own research. He presents his ideas clearly and in an orderly fashion which is great if you’re writing something for a freshman composition class. But for the world outside of community college writing classes, the ideas presented need to carry a little more weight to be plausible unless you are a conspiracy theories or a religious nut. The conspiracy theories and mysticism might appeal to other cranks, but for people who actually want a realistic theory of what happened with DB Cooper, this information just ruins the whole book which was nothing exceptional to begin with.

DB Cooper and the FBI is not the best book to read if you want to learn about this skyjacking. There are plenty of other books on the subject and most of them are shorter too because they aren’t bulked up with nonsense. Actually, all the facts that are known are readily available on the DB Cooper Wikipedia page. In the end, this book is more like a chronicle of a Ramtha cult member who spends too much time going down internet rabbit holes and associating with too many other online kooks.

If you really want to know who DB Cooper was and what happened to him after he jumped out of the plane with the money, you aren’t going to find the answers here. You aren’t going to find them anywhere because there isn’t enough evidence to solve the case and it happened so long ago that the surfacing of new evidence is extremely unlikely. But this is the appeal of it all. Just reading the story will make you try to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks while the uncomfortable lack of closure will leave you wondering about it for long stretches of time. In the end, my gut feeling is that DB Cooper survived the jump and escaped with most of the money, but then again, I am the kind of person who places little value on gut feelings. Maybe DB Cooper lost all his money in a poker game with Bigfoot. My personal theory is that DB Cooper and Thomas Pynchon are the same man. 

Forensic Psychology & True Crime Book Signed by Author

Let Me Take You Down: 

Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman,

the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

Villard Books, 1992, 1st edition/2nd printing

hardcover with dust jacket

SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE

In Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones Penetrates the borderline world of dangerous fantasy, in which Mark David Chapman stalked and killed Lennon:

Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations... Chapman had neatley arranged and left behind a curious assortment of personal items on top of the hotel dresser. In an orderly semicircle, he had laid out his passport, an eight track tape of the music of Todd Rundgren, his little Bible, open to the The Gospel According to John (Lennon). He left a letter from a former YMCA supervisor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where five years earlier, he had worked with refugees from the Vietnam War. Beside the letter were two photographs of himself surrounded by laughing Vietnamese children. At the center of the arrangement of personal effects, he had placed the small Wizard of Oz poster of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

"I woke up knowing, somehow, that when I left that room, that was the last time I would see the room again," Chapman recalled. "I truly felt it in my bones. I don't know how. I had never seen John Lennon up to that point. I only knew that he was in the Dakota. But I somehow knew that this was it, this was the day. So I laid out on the dresser at the hotel room...just a tableau of everything that was important in my life. So it would say, 'Look, this is me. Probably, this is the real me. This is my past and I am going, gone to another place.'

"I practiced what it was going to look like when police officers came into the room. It was like I was going through a door and I knew I was going to go through a door, the poet's door, William Blake's door, Jim Morrison's door...I was leaving what I was, going into a future of uncertainty."

"Jack Jones has written a beautiful book, rare in its attention to the social context, giving rise to stalkers and assassins of celebrities...celebrity worship is ambivalent - admiration shares the altar with envy. When the worshipped celebrity disappoints, a 'nobody' can become a 'somebody' by killing the pop culture idol...Let Me Take You Down is both fascinating and brilliant."

(copied from the back cover)

Available for purchase on Ebay here

 

Videos About Books

True Crime, Sociopathy, and Popular Culture

by Thomas B

The second video in a series about crime, criminal psychology and the on-fire genre of true crime.

Thomas B's Youtube channel can be found here

 

Vintage Paperbacks with Interesting Covers

In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

Signet Books/New American Library

movie tie-in edition, 14th printing, 1968

mass market paperback

The spectacular bestseller about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas - the police investigation, the capture, the trial, and the execution of the two young murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. "Capote has thrust the act of violence before the reader as if it were happening before his very eyes." - Time IN COLD BLOOD: now a major motion picture written for the screen and directed by Richard Brooks. A Colombia picture in Panavision.

(copied from back cover)

Available for purchase here on Ebay