Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in True Crime

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

Raised an aristocrat in Colombia and educated in European schools, Pilar transfixes everyone with her charm and her guile. She also falls for dangerous men and finds herself drawn into the highest levels of the cocaine trade. After two failed marriages and a harrowing escape from the drug life, she settles down to a quiet existence in Florida with her children - until her second husband tries to cut short his prison term by giving her name over to members of a new task force being formed by the DEA.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

The tragic death of 13-year-old Danny Croteau in 1972 faded from headlines and memories for 20 years until the Boston abuse scandal - a string of assaults taking place within the Catholic Church - exploded in the early 2000s. Despite numerous indications, including 40 claims of sexual misconduct with minors, pointing to him as Croteau's killer, Reverend Richard R. Lavigne remains "innocent." Drawing on more than ten thousand pages of police and court findings and interviews with Danny's friends and family, fellow abuse victims, and church officials, the author uncovers the truth.

In the closing days of 1799, the United States was still a young republic, its uncertain future contested by the two major political parties of the day: the well-moneyed Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the populist Republicans, led by Aaron Burr. The two finest lawyers in New York, Burr and Hamilton were bitter rivals both in and out of the courtroom, and as the next election approached - with Manhattan likely to be the swing district on which the presidency would hinge - their animosity reached a fever pitch.

Annie has just started her new job as emergency room administrator at Roosevelt Hospital. In her wildest dreams, she never expects December 8, 1980, to be her baptism by fire when John Lennon's bloodied body is carried into the ER over the shoulder of a policeman. Nor could she anticipate, moments later, the suspicious death of an elderly John Doe.

Beginning in June, 1962, the Boston area was terrorized for 18 months by an elusive serial killer who sexually assaulted and then strangled a succession of women. Boasting that he was the killer and that he had raped an additional 2,000 victims, Albert DeSalvo's horrific story became the subject of a best-selling book and a major Hollywood movie. But it was all a monstrous hoax: DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler.

On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor - some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan - but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials.

Trained by his uncle, an assassin, and initiated in murder at 17 years of age, Julio Santana proved to be a natural. Without moralizing about mass murder, The Name of Death attempts to show how such a career can be not so very different from other ordinary working lives. The portrait that emerges in this riveting narrative based on seven years of phone conversations. Describing in detail only a handful of the almost 500 murders Santana carried out, Cavalcanti reveals just how lawless much of the interior of Brazil has been for the past 50 years.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case.

The brutal murder of LaVerne Stordock, a respected family man and former police detective, shocked the residents of his rural Wisconsin community. On the surface, the case seemed closed with the confession of Stordock's second wife, Suzanne. But the trail of secrets and lies that began with his death did not end with his widow's conviction. Ever since she was a teenager, Dorothy Marcic was haunted by unresolved questions surrounding the killing of her uncle. Though she led a busy life as a playwright, theatrical producer, and university professor, she couldn't put her doubts to rest.

Each year Americans lose billions of dollars to fraudulent activity. The Madoffs Among Us explains in graphic detail how and why people fall prey. Most importantly, it tells you how to easily identify the people who perpetrate these crimes and avoid their deceitful practices. Why do smart people fall for these cons? What are today’s most common scams? And how can you avoid becoming a victim?

In April 2014, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving 29 years in prison. This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for 10 years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum, along with a group of committed friends and professionals.

Lessons of Redemption is the memoir of Kevin Shird, a former drug dealer from Baltimore who now is a leading advocate against violence, drug dealing, and social inequality. The book is an extraordinary account of how one young man turned his life around after years of involvement in serious crime and drug dealing. Shird tells of shootings, murder, drug dealing, and his life behind bars in a federal prison.

You land in prison in your 20s, faced with the likelihood of spending the rest of your life behind the wall. What do you do? Danner Darcleight started writing. He writes about what he sees, what he has done, and the toll that his own past actions have exacted. Concrete Carnival brings us inside a maximum-security prison, introducing a colorful cast of rogues while revealing the day-to-day struggles experienced by millions of Americans now living inside the world's largest prison complex.

Mass violence committed by young people is now an epidemic. The reasons behind this escalating violence and the cultural forces that have impugned a generation is the subject of this important new book. The Spiral Notebook is full of interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma and antidepressants and ADHD drugs, by a doomsday/apocalyptic mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that has turned violence into parlor games.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane - the credited artist of the weepy waifs - for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a conman than an artist and that he forced his wife, Margaret, to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

In 1991 Nancy Dillard Lyon, daughter of a powerful Dallas real estate tycoon, was murdered, poisoned with arsenic. Nancy’s brother became convinced her adulterous husband, Richard, was responsible. And so Richard was arrested, tried, and convicted - and sentenced to life in prison. But did the evidence support this conviction?

New York Times best-selling author and renowned prosecuting attorney Robert K. Tanenbaum provides the first insider's account of the historic Wylie-Hoffert case, from the shocking double murder to the wrenching interrogation of an innocent young man and the heroic assistant district attorney who risked everything to unravel a disgraceful injustice. Here is a gripping chronicle of the unnerving crime that led to the Miranda rights and of the courageous stand that forever reformed the American justice system.

Their crimes span the globe, but one thing unites them: They are 16 of the 20th century’s most notorious serial killers. In this well-researched volume, discover their motives and what made them tick. Walk the path of the investigators who broke their cases and listen to the killers’ own words. All of them made their communities tremble in fear.