The Library

The complete idiot's guide to the Mafia

Jerry Capeci

Here is the most comprehensive introduction to and explanation of the most infamous crime organization in history. Completely updated with more than 70 pages of new material and photographs, it includes information about the shifts in power and tightening of ranks of different families after convictions of their key members; new inside information on the role of the families in Chicago, Boston, Las Vegas, Rochester, and even Montreal; and updates on the DeCavalcante family who bragged they were the real Sopranos on FBI wiretaps.• More than 70 pages of new material• Full of dramatic anecdotes and photos about everything from Capone to Gotti and beyond• Written by acclaimed expert author and reporter of all things Mafia in his weekly online column “Gang Land”(www.ganglandnews.com)

Uncle Jack

Tony Williams, Humphrey Price

A solution to Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes - the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Invisible

Stephen L. Carter

"She was brilliant, ambitious, and unafraid to break barriers. As the only member of a squad of twenty high-powered lawyers who was not a white male, she devised the strategy that in the 1930s sent Mafia chieftain Lucky Luciano to prison. She achieved so much--but what could she have accomplished if not for barriers of race and gender?..."--back cover.

Berserk!

Graham Chester

Including eight pages of shocking photographs, terrifying true stories of notorious mass murders and the deranged killers who committed them include the McDonald's massacre and the murderer in the Texas tower with a high-powered rifle.

The devil's right-hand man

Stephen G. Michaud

From a New York Times bestselling author and an award- winning journalist comes the gripping true story of a cold-blooded killer.In 2000, Robert Charles Browne wrote a letter from his prison cell in Colorado, where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of a young girl. "The score is you one, the other team 48," wrote Browne. "Seven sacred virgins entombed side by side, those less worthy are scattered wide."No one in local law enforcement knew what to make of this message, nor could they guess the bizarre murder saga about to land in their laps. Then in 2002, three retirees formed their own cold case squad-and wound up tracing Browne's tantalizing and enigmatic clues to unsolved murders in six states.This is the gripping, powerful true story of a cold-blooded killer-and the tireless investigators who defied all odds to uncover his chilling truth.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

M. Chris Fabricant

An insider's journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. From *CSI* to *Forensic Files* to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, "forensic scientists" have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Judges and juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant's astonishing true-crime narrative. The book also features a full-color photo insert that illustrates the junk science explored by the author.

The prince of paradise

John Glatt

"Ben Novack, Jr. was born into a life of luxury and opulence. Heir to the legendary Fontainebleau hotel, he spent his childhood surrounded by some of the world's biggest stars, including Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley, and Ann-Margret, who performed regularly at the Fontainebleau's La Ronde Room. He sat by while his parents entertained presidents and movie stars, as they reigned over Miami Beach in the '50's and '60's, and when the family business went sour he became wealthy in his own right, founding a multi-million dollar business using connections he made at the Fontainebleau. But Ben, Jr.'s luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would end in another hotel room--a thousand miles away from the one where he grew up--when police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death. Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation--when his wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for twenty-four hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce. Now prosecutors claimed Narcy let the vicious killers into the room and watched as they beat her husband with dumbbells. They also suspected she was involved in the horrendous death of Novack's mother, just three months before. But it would be Narcy's own daughter who implicated her to the police--in this twisted case of passion, perversion, and paradise lost."--Provided by publisher.

Aruba

Dave Holloway, R. Stephanie Good, Larry Garrison

"I am a father who has no idea what has happened to his child. The questions run through my mind all day long. Is she dead? Is she being held captive somewhere? Is she crying out for me?" These are the words of Dave Holloway, father of Natalee Holloway, whose disappearance in Aruba sparked a media frenzy and an international scandal. This book is the story of his search, the most complete account of Natalee Holloway's disappearance in Aruba. Continuing his investigation to this very day, Holloway discloses behind-the-scenes details of the investigation, new revelations about the corruption of the Aruban law enforcement, and the countless trails leading to possible rape, murder, and even sexual slavery. Holloway relates the horror of personally searching through crack houses and trash dumps for Natalee--working alone, with authorities, even with psychics--while enduring the stonewalling of Aruban officials.--From publisher description.

To kill and kill again

John Coston

The people of the idyllic town of Missoula, Montana liked baby-faced Wayne Nance. The friendly, familiar native son and furniture delivery man was considered so trustworthy that some of his customers just gave him the keys to their houses to make his deliveries easier. But would you give your keys to a serial killer? For 12 years Wayne Nance - the boy-next-door - was littering the beautiful Northwestern landscape with bodies, bodies he had brutally raped and murdered. This reign of extreme terror left eight corpes in its wake, and didn't end until the heartstopping showdown with two would-be victims who lived to tell all. This book recounts this story of a homicidal misfit who was able to fool the police and everyone who knew him, and documents one of the most exciting endings in true-crime history.

Body hunter

Patricia Springer

To the people of Olney, Texas, 39-year-old Faryion Wardrip was an upright, respected citizen. Then, in January 1999, investigators linked him to the female victims of three unsolved rape/murders. Smart police work matched a sample of Wardrip's DNA to the semen... He then confessed to the three murders, and one more, and is now on death row.

The mad sculptor

Harold Schechter

"Beekman Place, one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan, hasn't always been home to the rich. In the 1930s, when bluebloods like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers began to build luxury towers, poor European immigrants lived in filthy slums among the riverside factories and abbatoirs. It was in this setting that a young man committed a grisly triple-murder on Easter Sunday, 1937. The details of the case were so sensational that one might think it had been cooked up in a tabloid editor's overheated imagination. The charismatic perpetrator, Robert Irwin, was a promising young sculptor, but he was also deeply disturbed. An obsession with Veronica Gedeon, a stunning photographer's model, would inspire him to murder. Harold Schechter masterfully tells the story of the "Mad Sculptor" case, one of the most engrossing American crime dramas of the twentieth century--evoking an atmosphere and a madness that will have readers glued to their chairs"--

Fatal

Harold Schechter

In an era that produced some of the most vicious female sociopaths in American history, Jane Toppan would become the most notorious of them all. AN ANGEL OF MERCY In 1891, Jane Toppan, a proper New England matron, embarked on a profession as a private-duty nurse. Selfless and good-natured, she beguiled Boston's most prominent families. They had no idea what they were welcoming into their homes.... A DEVIL IN DISGUISE No one knew of Jane's past; of her mother's tragic death, of her brutal upbringing in an adoptive home, of her father's insanity, or of her own suicide attempts. No one could have guessed that during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital the amiable "Jolly Jane" was morbidly obsessed with autopsies, or that she conducted her own after-hours experiments on patients, deriving sexual satisfaction in their slow, agonizing deaths from poison. Self-schooled in the art of murder, Jane Toppan was just beginning her career -- and she would indulge in her true calling victim by victim to become the most prolific domestic fiend of the nineteenth century.

Final Harvest

Andrew H. Malcolm

Capturing the anachronistic life and struggle of the Midwestern farmer, this true drama recounts the 1983 murder of a Minnesota banker by a farmer and his son who had been evicted from their land

The truth about Aaron

Jonathan Hernandez

"To football fans, Aaron Hernandez was a superstar. A standout at the University of Florida, he helped the Gators win the national title in 2008. He was drafted by the New England Patriots, and in his second season with the team, he and Rob Gronkowski set records for combined touchdowns and yardage. In 2012, along with Tom Brady, they led New England to Super Bowl XLVI. But Aaron's NFL career ended as quickly as it began. On June 26, 2013, he was arrested at his home, charged with the murder of acquaintance Odin Lloyd, and released by the Patriots. On May 15, 2014, while on trial for Lloyd's murder, Aaron was indicted for two more murders. Convicted in the Lloyd case, Aaron Hernandez died by suicide in his jail cell. He was twenty-seven years old. In this clear-eyed, emotionally devastating biography--also a memoir of family and football and true crime--Jonathan Hernandez finally tells the previously unknown story of a man no one fully understood. Jonathan draws on his own recollections as well as other sources to give us a full portrait of the star athlete and troubled young man who would be convicted of murder, and the darkness that consumed him for the entirety of his short life. Refusing to portray Aaron as a victim, Jonathan speaks openly about his brother's talent, his sexuality, his crimes and incarceration, and the devastating condition--chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE--that ravaged his brain until his death. Filled with headline-making revelations, [this book] is a shocking and moving account of promise, tragedy, and loss--as told by the person who knew Aaron better than anyone else."--Jacket.

Female serial killers

Peter Vronsky

The first book of its kind-photographs included.Mothers, daughters, sisters and grandmothers-fiendish killers all.Society is conditioned to think of murderers and predators as men, but in this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women who kill-and the political, economic, social, and sexual implications.From history's earliest recorded cases of homicidal females to Irma Grese, the Nazi Beast of Belsen, from Britain's notorious child-slayer Myra Hindley to 'Honeymoon Killer' Martha Beck, from the sensational murder-spree of Aileen Wournos, to cult killers, homicidal missionaries, and the sexy femme fatale, Vronsky challenges the ordinary standards of good and evil and defies the accepted perceptions of gender role and identity.