The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
Total Pages : 313
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781453245347
ISBN-13 : 1453245340
Rating : 4/5 (47 Downloads)

Synopsis The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight by : Jimmy Breslin

New York Times bestseller: A novel of a messy mob war in Brooklyn that “makes you laugh out loud” (Chicago Sun-Times). Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking—if only Kid Sally weren’t a Grade A moron. To keep Sally from stirring up trouble, Baccala tosses him an easy assignment: Organize a bicycle race through Brooklyn, and keep the profits. Kid Sally bungles it, setting off a turf war that quickly engulfs the borough. The dimwitted mobsters are masters in the art of murder, and they are about to put on a show. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight
Author :
Publisher : Crown
Total Pages : 277
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780307525697
ISBN-13 : 0307525694
Rating : 4/5 (97 Downloads)

Synopsis The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight by : Marc Weingarten

. . . In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Armies of the Night . . . Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change, they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again—from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn’t provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent—and significant—years in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories, from Tom Wolfe’s white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herr’s redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory, recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible, notably the three greatest editors of the era—Harold Hayes at Esquire, Clay Felker at New York, and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists, a tragedy of hubris, miscalculation, and corporate menacing. This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism, a time when writers didn’t just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn’t just report America but reshaped it. “Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.” —from the Introduction

A Life in Movies

A Life in Movies
Author :
Publisher : Abrams
Total Pages : 376
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781683355281
ISBN-13 : 1683355288
Rating : 4/5 (81 Downloads)

Synopsis A Life in Movies by : Irwin Winkler

“A lively memoir . . . a first-hand work of cinema history . . . the testament of a pivotal figure in American moviemaking.” —Martin Scorsese The list of films Irwin Winkler has produced in his more-than-fifty-year career is extraordinary: Rocky, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, De-Lovely, The Right Stuff, Creed, and The Irishman. His films have been nominated for fifty-two Academy Awards, including five movies for Best Picture, and have won twelve. In A Life in Movies, his charming and insightful memoir, Winkler tells the stories of his career through his many films as a producer and then as a writer and director, charting the changes in Hollywood over the past decades. Winkler started in the famous William Morris mailroom and made his first film—starring Elvis—in the last days of the old studio system. Beginning in the late 1960s, and then for decades to come, he produced a string of provocative and influential films, making him one of the most critically lauded, prolific, and commercially successful producers of his era. This is an engrossing and candid book, a beguiling exploration of what it means to be a producer, including purchasing rights, developing scripts, casting actors, managing directors, editing film, and winning awards. Filled with tales of legendary and beloved films, as well as some not-so-legendary and forgotten ones, A Life in Movies takes readers behind the scenes and into the history of Hollywood. “Charming and anecdote packed . . . popcorn for movie nerds.” —Newsweek “A deftly written recollection of an eventful and happy life in a precarious and, frankly, insane business; a remarkably clear-eyed look behind the scenes of moviemaking.” —Kevin Kline

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
Total Pages : 164
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781453245323
ISBN-13 : 1453245324
Rating : 4/5 (23 Downloads)

Synopsis Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by : Jimmy Breslin

A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times–bestselling author (Newark Star-Ledger). Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball. Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

I Don't Want to Go to Jail

I Don't Want to Go to Jail
Author :
Publisher : Little, Brown
Total Pages : 384
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0316120324
ISBN-13 : 9780316120326
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Synopsis I Don't Want to Go to Jail by : Jimmy Breslin

Fausti 'the Fist' Dellacava is the most feared mobster in all of Gotham. But running the family business is proving to be problematic as the Feds start closing in. So what's a mobster to do to stay out of the slammer? Fausti chooses to go down the insanity route.

The Good Rat

The Good Rat
Author :
Publisher : Harper Collins
Total Pages : 290
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780060856663
ISBN-13 : 0060856661
Rating : 4/5 (63 Downloads)

Synopsis The Good Rat by : Jimmy Breslin

He was the first to put the mafia on the page exactly as they were-before The Sopranos, before The Godfather, there was Jimmy Breslin of the New York Herald Tribune. As Breslin says, 'I hate legitimate people. They all proclaim immaculate honesty, but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore. To whom do you care to listen, Warren Buffet, the second richest and most boring person on earth, or Burt Kaplan out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn?' Breslin can sniff out a story like he can sniff out a rat. Characters like the Honorable Jack Weinstein, the judicial heavyweight who snapped Vincent Gigante's insanity defense in two, Sammy the Bull, the original snitch, Gaspipe Casso, named for his weapon of choice; and hangouts like Pep McGuire's, the legendary watering hole where reporters and gangsters (all hailing from the same working class neighbourhoods) rubbed elbows and traded stories, the dog-fight circles and body dumps at Ozone Park, the back room at Midnight Rose's candy store where Murder, Inc. hired and fired. But best of all, Breslin captures the moments in which the Mafia was made and broken- Breslin was there the night John Gotti celebrated his acquittal at his Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry, having bribed his way to innocence, only to incite the wrath of the FBI, who would later crush Gotti and others with the full force of the RICO laws. Woven throughout Breslin's stories is the aforementioned 'Burt Kaplan out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn,' and star witness in the recent trial of the two New York City detectives indicted for acting as mob hit men in eight homicides. Kaplan was a former handler for the Luchese crime family who owed the law 18 years in the penitentiary, and, like all rats, he knew when to flee a sinking ship.

Table Money

Table Money
Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
Total Pages : 624
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781453245392
ISBN-13 : 1453245391
Rating : 4/5 (92 Downloads)

Synopsis Table Money by : Jimmy Breslin

DIVAs a city worker and former war hero tumbles into alcoholism, his wife fights to hold on to her newfound freedom/divDIV /divDIVOwney Morrison has walked the catacombs underneath New York City since he was eleven. His father was a sandhog—a tunnel worker—and the first to introduce him to the miles of passageways snaking beneath the ground./divDIV /divDIVNow an adult, back from Vietnam with a Medal of Honor and no work prospects, Owney takes up the family legacy, digging and maintaining the tunnels that provide the city with water. It is dangerous work, and at the end of each shift he deserves a few drinks. But when alcohol takes control of him, his wife Dolores is left with a decision. Should she take her baby daughter and cut ties with her husband, or stay and risk being dragged under by a man who feels safest one hundred feet below the street?/divDIV /divDIVAt once witty and moving, Table Money is a memorable portrait of family and marriage in modern America./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection./div

"I Heard You Paint Houses"

Author :
Publisher : Steerforth
Total Pages : 338
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781586421557
ISBN-13 : 1586421557
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis "I Heard You Paint Houses" by : Charles Brandt

"I Heard You Paint Houses" will soon be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. The working title for the movie is "The Irishman". The first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran were, "I heard you paint houses." To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned to kill in the U.S. Army, where he saw an astonishing 411 days of active combat duty in Italy during World War II. After returning home he became a hustler and hit man, working for legendary crime boss Russell Bufalino. Eventually he would rise to a position of such prominence that in a RICO suit then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani would name him as one of only two non-Italians on a list of 26 top mob figures. When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill Hoffa, he did the deed, knowing that if he had refused he would have been killed himself. Sheeran's important and fascinating story includes new information on other famous murders including those of Joey Gallo and JFK, and provides rare insight to a chapter in American history. Charles Brandt has written a page-turner that has become a true crime classic.

How the Good Guys Finally Won

How the Good Guys Finally Won
Author :
Publisher : Viking
Total Pages : 204
Release :
ISBN-10 : MINN:31951001846042F
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (2F Downloads)

Synopsis How the Good Guys Finally Won by : Jimmy Breslin

After the Watergate scandal corrupted American democracy, it took a gang of honest politicians to restore honor Not long after burglars were caught raiding the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, Congressman Tip O Neill noticed that Democratic fundraising efforts for the 1972 election had stalled. Major contributors were under IRS investigation, and Republican lackeys were threatening further trouble if those donors didn t close their checkbooks. O Neill sensed a conspiracy coming from the Nixon administration, but it wasn t until the scandal broke that he connected the threatened donors with the Watergate burglary. In the boldest move of his career, he did something that would shock the nation: O Neill decided to impeach the President.To his fellow members of the House of Representatives, this was an ugly idea. But as evidence mounted against Nixon and his cronies, O Neill led the charge against the President. This blow-by-blow, conviction-by-conviction account is a gripping reminder of how O Neill and his colleagues brought justice to those who abused their power, and revived America after the greatest political scandal in its history.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author s personal collection."

A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings
Author :
Publisher : Riverhead Books
Total Pages : 706
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781594633942
ISBN-13 : 1594633940
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis A Brief History of Seven Killings by : Marlon James

A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers, and ghosts against a backdrop of social and political turmoil.