Showing results for "For the Win" in True Crime

The favorite book of William Burroughs. A journey into the hobo underworld, freight hopping around the still Wild West, becoming a highwayman and member of the yegg (criminal) brotherhood, getting hooked on opium, doing stints in jail or escaping, often with the assistance of crooked cops or judges. Our lost history revived. With an introduction by Burroughs. A BookSense 77 selection.

The traveling criminal known as Jack Black was born in 1872 and disappeared in 1932. His matter-of-fact autobiography was a major influence on William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers. In this plainspoken but colorful memoir, he recaptures a hobo underworld of the early 20th century, a time when it was possible to pass anonymously from town to town. Black's firsthand accounts of hopping trains, burglaries, prison, and drug addiction offer a compelling portrait of life outside the law and honor among thieves.

In 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the US Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it. Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

You Can't Win is the pioneering American criminal underworld memoir written by Jack Black, a burglar, drifter, and criminal active in early 1900s America. Black's astonishing accounts of hopping trains, cracking safes, escaping prison cells, and drug addiction offer an unusually vivid portrait of American underworld life over a century ago. Beat legend William S. Burroughs ("Junkie") cited the book as influential in his life and writing. In his striking, and often deadpan and humorous, memoir, the author recaptures the transient underworld of the early 20th century.

Two murder trials were held in Toronto in the spring of 1962, only 19 days apart. The accused man in each trial, one a pimp accused of stabbing a fellow pimp to death, the other a thief who killed a policeman in a shootout, were the last two men to be hanged in Canada. Toronto criminal lawyer Ross Mackay was the counsel for the accused in both trials, a mere 30 years old when he lost them both to the gallows. But the trials were far from the last times that Mackay defended accused murderers in the most horrendous circumstances.

Em 1942, os Aliados estavam perdendo a guerra e a Alemanha parecia invencível. A inteligência britânica tinha espiões treinados em todo tipo de serviço, mas percebeu que, para vencer, era necessário tomar uma medida sem precedentes: recrutar agentes do sexo feminino. Trinta e nove mulheres responderam ao chamado, deixando suas vidas para se tornarem sabotadoras na França.