Mafia Framed Nurse After Killing Doctor Who Treated Sicilian Cosa Nostra Boss

Barbie Latza Nadeau at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the Cosa Nostra boss who orderedthe death of his doctor.

When urologist Attilio Manca was found dead with two heroin needles still sticking out of his wrist and elbow in 2004, none of his friends believed for one minute he had overdosed. For one, Manca, who died alone in his home, was left-handed and the needles were stuck in his left wrist and elbow, which would not have been a natural way to inject the drug. A distinct lack of fingerprints on the syringes still protruding from the doctor’s body were also suspicious. Even had the doctor been careful, he likely would have left at least one print on the plunger. And his friend, a nurse named Monica Mileti, who was ultimately convicted of selling him the fatal heroin and sentenced to five years in prison, just didn’t fit the bill of a drug pusher.

This week, after Mileti pushed to have her case re-examined, Italy’s high court agreed that she had not sold the doctor the heroin and cleared her name. The court also ruled that Manca had not in fact died of a self-inflicted heroin overdose, but a mob-ordered one after Italy’s anti-mafia parliamentary commission investigated the case. Manca, who was born in Sicily but died in Viterbo, near Rome, it is now believed, was secretly flown to France to operate on Bernardo Provenzano, the top boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, while he was in hiding.

Provenzano, who was famously arrested in a farmhouse in 2006 after 43 years on the run after police traced his freshly ironed shirts from his wife’s house to his hideout, died in prison in 2016. Several turncoats testified that Manca had been summoned to France to treat Provenzano's prostate cancer and that Provenzano was so afraid the doctor would rat him out and tell authorities where he was hiding, the capo dei capi or boss of bosses ordered his death. Manca had performed the first laparoscopic prostate surgery in Italy and had a reputation as a skilled surgeon.

You can read the rest of the story via the below lnk:

Mafia Framed Nurse After Killing Doctor Attilio Manca Who Treated Cosa Nostra Boss Bernardo Provenzano (thedailybeast.com) 

CIA Officers Reveal How Bill Clinton Stopped Them From Killing Bin Laden And Preventing 9/11

Marlow Stern at the Daily Beast offers a piece on a new documentary that features former CIA officers blaming former President Clinton for 9/11, as he didn’t allow American forces to take out bin Laden when they had the chance before 9/11.

Former President Bill Clinton has talked openly about how he could have killed Osama bin Laden—but passed. 

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I just didn't do it,” Clinton confessed to an Australian audience just 10 hours before two planes struck the World Trade Center. 

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But in The Longest War, a new documentary from director Greg Barker (Manhunt) and executive producer Alex Gansa (Homeland), former CIA agents reveal that they had another opportunity to take out Osama bin Laden with little collateral damage. 

“Bin Laden was constantly moving, and we were using Afghan tribal networks to report on his travels and his whereabouts,” Bob Grenier, then-CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, says in the film. 

When the Afghan tribal networks uncovered that a caravan carrying bin Laden would be traveling along a certain route, they suggested U.S. forces bury a cache of explosives along it to eliminate the infamous terrorist. But Grenier told them they’d be “risking jail” if they did, and that was all thanks to President Clinton. 

“The CIA had a so-called ‘lethal finding’ [bill] that had been signed by President Clinton that said that we could engage in ‘lethal activity’ against bin Laden, but the purpose of our attack against bin Laden couldn’t be to kill him,” Grenier explains in the film. “We were being asked to remove this threat to the United States essentially with one hand tied behind our backs.” 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cia-agents-reveal-how-bill-clinton-stopped-them-from-killing-osama-bin-laden-and-preventing-911 

Note: I changed the headline from CIA agents to CIA officers. Career Americans at the CIA are officers, not agents. Agents, or assets, are the foreign nationals that CIA case officers recruit to spy for America. 

How To Drink Like Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, And Other Literary Greats

Philip Greene, author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming, two writers who drank and wrote about Campari and other drinks.  

 European watering holes have been seducing writers for decades. A long afternoon spent writing (or supposedly writing) at a sidewalk café, usually accompanied by an apéritif, has a certain allure and draw. Ernest Hemingway wrote of his “good café” and extolled the virtues of “a clean, well-lighted place.” Malcolm Cowley pined for those days on the café terrace, “with a good long drink and nothing to do but drink it.”

And often, from the research I’ve done for my books, those writers enjoyed the bitter apéritif Campari and, naturally, included it in their novels, memoirs and poems.

The liqueur was invented by Gaspare Campari in the 1860s at the Bass Bar in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a maitre licoriste, or master bartender. Campari is a secret blend of natural ingredients, mostly herbs, spices, bark, fruits and fruit peels. Its distinctive carmine hue originally derived from dye extracted from the cochineal, a beetle-like insect native to Latin America.

… Coincidentally, it was in Milan where Ernest Hemingway discovered Campari, just two years after Lawrence released Twilight. At age 18, Hemingway served in the International Red Cross Ambulance Corps, and was severely wounded during an Austrian mortar attack on the Italian lines near Venice. Evacuated to a hospital in Milan, he spent the summer and fall of 1918 recovering from 227 shrapnel and bullet wounds to his legs. Friends would bring him wine and spirits to help him deal with his pain (and boredom). As he recalled in his memoir A Moveable Feast, one of these friends was an “old man with beautiful manners and a great name who came to the hospital in Italy and brought me a bottle of Marsala or Campari and behaved perfectly, and then one day I would have to tell the nurse never to let that man into the room again.” When he later recounted this tale to Gertrude Stein, she brusquely replied, “those people are sick and cannot help themselves and you should pity them.” Hmmm, but the old guy did have good taste in booze, no?

…Another famous novelist and imbiber, Ian Fleming, was also a Campari fan. In fact, the first drink ever enjoyed by his signature character, James Bond, who is, of course, known for ordering a Vesper and his “shaken, not stirred” Martini, was actually the Americano. It makes an appearance in Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953:

“Bond ordered an Americano and examined the sprinkling of overdressed customers, mostly from Paris he guessed, who sat talking with focus and vivacity, creating that theatrically clubbable atmosphere of l’heure de l’apéritif. The men were drinking inexhaustible quarter-bottles of Champagne, the women Dry Martinis.”

Speaking of Paris, Fleming reveals his disdain for the City of Light’s cocktail scene in his 1960 short story “From a View to a Kill.”

“James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet’s. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés…No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing—an Americano—Bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda he always specified Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to-drink-like-ernest-hemingway-ian-fleming-and-other-literary-greats?source=articles&via=rss 

The Journalist-Viet Cong Spy Who Changed the Course Of The Vietnam War

In my view, Pham Xuan An was a two-faced son of a bitch. I hope this communist spy, who aided in the killing of American soldiers during the Vietnam War and served a repressive and murderous communist regime, is rotting in hell. 

Thomas A. Bass, author of The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game, offers a piece in the Daily Beast on An, a Viet Cong spy who posed as a journalist during the Vietnam War and aided the communists during the Tet Offensive.

PARIS—The Tet Offensive, beginning with the Vietnamese Lunar New Year at the end of January 1968, was the turning point in the Vietnam War. More than a hundred cities and towns in the Republic of South Vietnam were attacked by communist guerrillas in a coordinated assault on America’s half million troops and their allies. The world was shocked to see the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under attack and Vietnam’s imperial capital in Hue overrun by communist forces, who held it until the end of February.

In spite of the remarkable footage of communist sappers blasting their way into the U.S. Embassy and the initial perception that the Tet Offensive was a communist victory, military analysts and historians have long agreed that Tet was actually a military defeat. The south Vietnamese communists, fighting under the banner of the National Liberation Front, lost half of their 80,000 fighters and secured none of their targets. No popular uprising greeted the assault, and the NLF suffered such heavy losses that they were effectively neutralized for the rest of the war, which from that point on was fought primarily by troops from the north.

But if Tet was a military defeat for the communists, it was also a psychological victory. It turned American opinion against the war and sparked a firestorm of antiwar protest. By the end of February, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite was predicting “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” By the end of the following month, Lyndon Johnson had removed himself from seeking re-election as president and arranged for peace talks in Paris. A month later Gen. William Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 additional troops was denied, and the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam was about to be cashiered.

So how was the Tet Offensive—a military defeat—turned into a psychological victory? Amazingly, one man played several of the major roles in this drama: Pham Xuan An, correspondent for Time magazine and spy for the North Vietnamese communist intelligence services. An not only chose the targets to be attacked in Saigon, he also shaped the news that reported these attacks. He spun defeat into victory so convincingly that his view prevailed not only in Washington but also in Hanoi.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-journalist-spy-who-changed-the-course-of-the-vietnam-war 

You can also read my Crime Beat column on An, the Viet Cong spy, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/07/vietnam-spy-who-betrayed-us-part-one.html 

Inside The KGB Playbook To Recruit Americans

Michael Weiss at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the old KGB manual used to recruiet Americans during the Cold War.

In studying Americans, our Residency in Italy identified a number of places visited by Americans working in target installations of interest to our Intelligence Service. It was possible to determine that Americans in Rome systematically frequent the same bars, restaurants, and places of recreation. Americans feel almost at home in these places: they drink a great deal, are very free in their conduct and frequently sing. American women, especially the wives of Americans who are away on temporary assignments, drink and have relations with other men.”

There is something almost reassuring in this observation, taken as it is from an old KGB manual on recruiting American agents both inside and outside the United States. 

Quite apart from the unintentional comedy of seeing reproduced such a dime-store psychoanalytic stereotype of the boorish and loud bourgeois abroad—whose repressed housewife of course keeps a secret rendezvous with the decanter and the swarthy Mediterranean neighbor—we have in the current age of Cold War 2.0 a helpful reminder that it used to be difficult for Russian spies to envision the lives of others. 

Today, operatives dispatched by Moscow Center are as likely to wear Breguet timepieces, keep offshore accounts, and educate their children at elite Swiss boarding schools as they are to travel by yacht or private jet to cultivate and run bureaucrats, military brass, CEOs, and real estate moguls in Davos, Chicago, and New York. 

But it wasn’t always so. There was a time, not too long ago, when operatives of the KGB were still servants of the state rather than masters of it.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/07/inside-the-kgb-playbook-to-recruit-americans.html

A Look Back At How Hemingway Taught The World To Drink On The Great Writer's Birthday

Philip Greene, author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on how Hemingway taught the world to drink.

Like that old poem about the six blind men, each perceiving an elephant in vastly different ways (a snake! a wall! a spear!), so it is when it comes to people’s perspectives on Ernest Hemingway.

Indeed, he taught the world to write; his distinctive use of short, declarative sentences influenced many generations of young writers. He taught the world to hunt and fish: From trout streams up in Michigan to trophy marlin and tuna in the Caribbean to big game on the African veldt, his vivid depictions of these experiences inspired many to wet a hook or shoulder a rifle. He brought the drama and tragedy of bullfighting to the world and prompted many to journey to Pamplona to run with the beasts.

His love of travel motivated many more to follow in his footsteps. Ventures in Chicago, Michigan, the Great American West, Italy, France, Bimini, Cuba, China and, of course, Africa informed his writings with exploits worthy of any Lonely Planet guide.

And, of course, he taught the world to drink.

I am speaking of quality, mind you, not quantity. Hemingway, who would have turned 117 today, was no stranger to excess, and I routinely caution that while one should experience the wide array of drinks he brought to us, it should be done in moderation. That said, if you want to try to break the house record he set at the Floridita in Havana in 1942—17 double frozen Daiquiris downed in one sitting—be my guest!

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/21/how-ernest-hemingway-taught-the-world-to-drink.html

You can also read an earlier post on Hemingway via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/07/happy-birthday-to-ernest-hemingway.html

The Russian Spy Run By Dumb And Dumber

Katie Zavadski at the Daily Beast offers a piece on convicted Russian spy Zhenya Buryakov.

Zhenya Buryakov lived a quiet Bronx existence with his wife and two children in Riverdale, an affluent neighborhood, working at a state-owned bank by day. He moved there, his wife would later say, because he wanted his children to speak perfect English, and two nuns next door would even pet-sit the family’s bird.

But by night, Buryakov met with his handlers at SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and passed along information his bosses in Moscow hoped to use against his host country.

That bucolic life was interrupted when Buryakov was arrested by the FBI in January 2015, and charged with being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Unlike his handlers, whose sloppy conversations may have led to his arrest, Buryakov was only allowed to be in the United States as an employee of a foreign firm. A year later, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison, in a case that garnered relatively little attention coming on the heels of the 10 Russian “illegals” arrested in 2010.

But Buryakov’s arrest and sentencing serves as a firm reminder that despite the end of the Cold War, covert Russian espionage in the U.S. is prevalent and ongoing.

“Russia never gave up espionage against the West, and the United States remains the prime target of Russian intelligence,” former KGB spy Oleg Kalugin told The Daily Beast. Kalugin, now 81, served as a general in the KGB, but was found guilty in absentia of spying for the West by a Russian court in 2002.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/05/the-russian-spy-run-by-dumb-and-dumber.html

You can also read the U.S. Justice Department's release on Buryakov via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/01/attorney-general-manhattan-us-attorney.html 

Menefreghismo: Just How Good a Singer Was Dean Martin?

I'm a huge fan of Dean Martin.

Old Dino was a great singer, comedian and actor, but he was so casual about it all, he was often underestimated.

I recall Martin's daughter, an aspiring singer, telling a story about how family friend Frank Sinatra was coaching her on a vocal technique. She asked Sinatra if her father did this.

"He doesn't know what he's doing," Sinatra replied. "He just does it."    

Ted Gioia at the Daily Beast offers a piece on Dean Martin's casual and confident style, which he called menefreghismo. 

We celebrated Frank Sinatra’s centenary a few months back, and the amount of media coverage was stunning. I can’t recall another musician generating so much acclaim after 100 years. Sinatra received veneration in full-scale tributes from HBO, PBS, CBS, TCM, and other three-initial media powerhouses, along with a stack of books, articles, album reissues, and tribute concerts.

Next year will be the 100^th anniversary of Dean Martin’s birth, and I am curious to see how Sinatra’s old colleague and fellow Rat Packer fares. Will he get the red carpet treatment, and find a place on the radar screens of new fans? Or will his centenary celebrations be limited to old-timers who remember Martin from decades long gone? 

... He could act, sing, dance, emcee, play the straight man to Jerry Lewis, or tell his own jokes. He could improvise routines with the Rat Pack in front of a casino audience, or host a TV variety show. He could play a credible cowboy or a super spy in a Hollywood movie, but he was just as happy acting like a drunk on stage or performing one of his ethnic novelty songs that mixed Italian phrases and American slang. And judging by infomercials I’ve seen lately, he might be best known to today’s audiences for hosting a celebrity roast show on NBC. 

In other words, Martin was that greatest of rarities: a top tier star who didn’t mind playing second fiddle. He probably even preferred it. Martin fed off the vibe in the room and the other folks on stage—it didn’t matter who, Frank Sinatra or Jerry Lewis or Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong, it was all the same to Dino. 

But any comparison with Sinatra will eventually lead to the tricky question: how good of a singer was Dean Martin? This is a surprisingly difficult subject to address, if only because Martin had such a cavalier attitude to his own vocal skills.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/15/just-how-good-a-singer-was-dean-martin.html

Note: You can listen to some of Dino's songs via the below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0LY2JSMdwE&list=PLA27E94805B5E2551

Even Broke, Mark Twain Traveled In Style

Richard Zacks, author of Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain's Raucous and Redemptive Around-the-World Tour, offers a piece from the book at the Daily Beast. 

Celebrity perks usually amount to a few comped bottles of champagne or courtside tickets. A British railway once set aside 35 miles of mountain track in the Himalayas forMark Twain to use as a private roller coaster ride. Six-seater car, a handbrake and a long way down if the car jumped the edge. (He expected it would.) He shared that opinion with his wife and daughter just as they boarded.

In 1895/1896, in a mostly forgotten trip, Mark Twain traveled around the world, performing 90 minutes of stand-up in 71 different cities, across the United States and the fading British Empire, in Australia, New Zealand, India, Southern Africa. He spent almost 100 days at sea and 50 days sick in bed.

This most American of authors rode an elephant in India, at a palace owned by one of the ten wealthiest men in the world, the “Gaikwar of Baroda.” (Twain loved the exotic names: the “Nizam of Hyderabad,” the “Nawab of Mysore.”) “I took a ride; but it was by request—I did not ask for it, and didn’t want it; but I took it, because otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was.” The elephant’s gold ankle hoops and jewel-encrusted howdah were worth more than Twain’s entire savings at the time, which then amounted to nothing; the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer was traveling around the world to pay off huge debts from failed business ventures.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/23/even-broke-mark-twain-traveled-in-style.html

Yakuza Vs. Yakuza In A ‘Sea of Blood’

Jake Adelstein, the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On the Police Beat in Japan, offers a piece at the Daily Beast of the growing Yakuza gang war in Japan.

TOKYO — Molotov cocktails, beatings, shootings—the tempo of Yakuza on Yakuza violence is picking up in Japan, and there’s every reason to believe it’s just a little taste of what’s to come.

Almost six months after this country’s largest crime organization—the Yamaguchi-gumi, the one yakuza group that once ruled them all—was split apart by the defection of many members to a new group calling itself Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, or KY, Japan’s tabloid press has been predicting “a sea of blood.”

Many fear the two gangs will go head to head in an all-out war, and other gangs may follow suit.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/08/yakuza-vs-yakuza-in-a-sea-of-blood.html

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Jake Adelstein's book on Japanese organized crime via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/tokyo-vice-american-reporter-on-police.html

Irish Mobsters Threaten To Kill Crime Reporters

Dana Kennedy at the Daily Beast offers a piece on Irish gangsters threatening crime reporters.

Covering drug-related crime in Dublin in 1996 was so dangerous that gangsters murdered one of the country’s toughest journalists, 37-year-old Veronica Guerin, just to shut her up.

Almost 20 years later, some of the same crime fraternity that Guerin fought so relentlessly to expose have gotten more powerful and violent—with a reach that extends to their new base on Spain’s Costa del Sol and as far away as China.

A complicated new feud between two men long identified by Irish media as smooth, old-school Irish gangsters, Christy “The Dapper Don” Kinahan and Gerry “The Monk” Hutch—ignited by younger, dumber gang members and possibly a Northern Ireland Republican dissident—is like something right out of Ireland’s cult gangland TV series Love/Hate, and blood is spilling all over Dublin.

Police have warned some Dublin crime reporters that they are in such danger from drug lords angry at being written about that they should leave their homes.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/16/amid-the-irish-mafia-bloodbath-attempts-to-silence-the-press.html

Yakuza Hollywood: How Japanese Organized Crime Is Running Japan’s Film Industry

Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On the Police Beat in Japan, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on how Japanese organized crime controls the Japanese film industry.

TOKYO — Japan’s entertainment industry is infested with organized crime and despite crackdowns on “yakuza Hollywood” nothing much seems to change. For example, last month 10 comedians from the colossal Yoshimoto Kogyo talent agency were caught up (innocently, they said) in a yakuza insurance fraud scheme involving, ahem, free massages. The scam reportedly netted over a million dollars. Who will be prosecuted remains murky. And that’s business as usual.

What is unusual is for a yakuza boss to break the code of silence and discuss how the talent agency he worked for intimidated its stars and the media, even using other yakuza to get the job done.

... Kazuo Kasaoka, the leader of the yakuza group Matsurua-gumi (Kobe),submitted a statement to the court which details the time he spent employed by the head of Burning Production, doing his own dirty work for the firm, he says, and watching the sinister activities of others.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/06/the-yakuza-are-running-japan-s-hollywood.html

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Jake Adelstein's true crime book about Japan via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/tokyo-vice-american-reporter-on-police.html 

Papa’s Got A Brand New Museum Exhibit

Nicolas Mills at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the museum exhibition on one of my favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway.

It has been more than 60 years since Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and 90 years since the appearance of his breakthrough collection of short stories, In Our Time. Yet, in all that time there has been no major museum exhibition devoted to Hemingway and his work.

Now all that has changed with the new landmark show, “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” that the Morgan Library and Museum in New York has organized in partnership with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

The exhibition, which opened at the Morgan on September 25 and remains there until January 31, is far more expansive than its title indicates. It starts with Hemingway as a high school student in Oak Park, Illinois, and continues past his World War II years.

...  “I felt that the Hemingway myth, or at least the popular perception of Hemingway, had come to overshadow and obscure the prose,” Declan Kiely, the show’s curator as well as the head of the Morgan’s literary and historical manuscripts, has said.

... In his famous account of the D-Day landing, “Voyage to Victory,” Hemingway’s ego is on display, but as he heads toward the Fox Green sector of Omaha Beach on a small landing craft with the troops who will go ashore, he is risking his own life as he records their and his anxiety in the face of the heavy fire coming from German shore batteries.

For most other writers, a war story like “Voyage to Victory” would have been the high point of their careers. For Hemingway, the story, with its focus on doing your job while facing your fears, was, as the Morgan’s exhibition reminds us, just one more episode in a life rich with intensely felt, brilliantly described episodes.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/30/papa-s-got-a-brand-new-museum-exhibit.html 

Howie Carr: Whitey Bulger Wanted Me Dead

Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist, broadcaster and author of the crime novel Killers, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on why Boston mob boss wanted Whitey Bulger wanted him dead.

BOSTON – Did Kevin Weeks and his gangland boss Whitey Bulger want to murder me? Undoubtedly.

Did they ever concoct an actual scheme to accomplish their goal, either by blowing me up with military-grade explosives or by shooting me from a cemetery across the street from my home?

I’m not so sure about that.

I can’t say that I’m displeased that Weeks has put me back in the news, especially with the new Bulger biopic Black Mass opening wide. Weeks’ story about the 40 pounds of C-4 explosives that the gang obtained from corrupt FBI agents is great publicity for my new novel about the Boston underworld, Killers, which is available on Amazon and everywhere else.

Every knock a boost, as they say. There are worse things than being called a “vicious bastard” by a vicious bastard. I think I’ll use it as a blurb for the paperback edition.

Of course Weeks and Whitey knew where I lived—I was a neighbor of one of Weeks’ brothers. And Whitey did hate me. I had committed an offense he considered punishable by death. I had embarrassed his younger brother, the state Senate president, William M. Bulger. And I had done so in the worst possible way, by repeatedly linking the imperious pol to his serial-killing, cocaine-dealing gangster sibling.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/23/whitey-bulger-wanted-me-dead.html

Inside U.S. Commandos' Shadow War Against Iran

Sean Naylor, the author of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, offers a piece on the Daily Beast on the U.S. commandos' shadow war against Iran.

It was July 25, 2004. Violence was escalating in Iraq, the Taliban were reasserting themselves in Afghanistan, and Joint Special Operations Command – the U.S. military’s cadre of elite special operations forces -- was already deploying operators to the Horn of Africa and Yemen. But for the first day of the three-day JSOC commanders’ conference at Fort Bragg, the country under discussion was Iran. 

In the days after September 11, JSOC was running at least two undercover agents into Iran. But the command wanted to know more – much more – about the would-be regional superpower it seemed to confront at every turn.

Today, the U.S. and Iranian governments are in a period of political détente, with the nuclear deal signed in Vienna. Tehran and Washington’s militaries are even cooperating – if at arm’s length – in the fight against ISIS. 

But this is hardly a friendship, especially not with Iran’s long, long history of supporting terror – and JSOC’s history of trying to kill those Iranian-backed terrorists.   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/01/inside-u-s-commandos-shadow-war-against-iran.html

The Coming Yakuza War In Japan

Jake Adelstein, the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On the Police Beat in Japan, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on the yakuza crime war coming to Japan.

TOKYO — This year should have been a good one for Japan’s largest organized crime organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi, the one yakuza group that just about ruled them all. But as it marks its 100th year in business, internal squabbles may split the organization apart; it could also result in the kind of large-scale gang warfare that hasn’t been seen in decades.

The Japanese police are on full alert. Thursday (Japan time), the sprawling Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters in Kobe was besieged by a fleet of black Mercedes-Benzes and high-end Toyota Lexuses, transporting the top dogs of the Yamaguchi-gumi, dressed in their finest black suits, for emergency meetings.

The Yamaguchi-gumi is expected to splinter into factions with some gangs supporting current top boss Kenichi Shinoda aka Shinobu Tsukasa, 73, and others supporting a rival group, primarily based in western Japan, that opposes him and his parent faction, the Kodo-kai.

Japan’s organized crime groups, known collectively as the “yakuza,” i.e., “Losers,” or “Gokudo” (the ultimate path), are different from the mafias we know about in the West. They are treated as if they were some sort of controlled substance, dangerous but accepted within certain parameters.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/28/the-coming-yakuza-war.html

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Tokyo Vice via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/tokyo-vice-american-reporter-on-police.html

Reviving Jack Carter, London’s Toughest Pulp Hero

Kevin Canfield at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the revival of Ted Lewis' gangster character,

In the 1970s, an Englishman named Ted Lewis published three rowdy yarns about a brutal Briton working as an enforcer for a gangland “firm.” The first of these inspired a suitably gritty crime film recalled as one of the era’s best. The next two books weren’t so successful. But now, 32 years after Lewis’ death, his Jack Carter novels are getting a second life here in the States.

Fans of Get Carter, Mike Hodges’ 1971 movie, surely remember the exploits of the unflappable brute. As played by a young and rugged Michael Caine, Carter was a bitters-drinking, blade-wielding get-even artist who managed to make the act of eating soup on a moving train look menacing. Yet readers coming to the novels fresh won’t quite know what Lewis’ leading man is all about. So before we get to the enterprising small publisher responsible for reviving the books, and the brief but artistically fertile life of the man who penned them, let’s (re)acquaint ourselves with Carter’s CV. 

It’s probably best to start with an explanation of how he became the top organized-crime fixer in the city he calls “the smoke” (i.e. London). As he puts in Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, the series’ third novel, “it hasn’t exactly been unknown for me, as a matter of policy as far as the firm’s concerned, to see to transgressors from members of the opposition on a more or less permanent basis, the more or less depending on the degree to which your religious beliefs extends.” A history of violence and a gift for understatement—that’s Carter, a remorseless pulp fiction killer.  

... On the whole, though, the novels are a welcome surprise to those of us whose only knowledge of Carter came via the big screen. The reissues are the first from Syndicate Books, an imprint that says it plans to put out up to 10 titles a year, mainly “out-of-print or neglected mystery and crime fiction of merit.” Syndicate was founded by Paul Oliver, the director of marketing and publicity for Soho Crime. In partnership with Penguin Random House, Soho will promote and sell the Carter books and future Syndicate titles. Until they were revived by Syndicate, the first two novels in the series were out of print in the U.S. for 40 years, and the third had never been published here at all.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/28/reviving-jack-carter-london-s-toughest-pulp-hero.html

Cooking The Books: Spies Say Obama's Brass Pressured Them To Downplay ISIS Threat

Shane Harris and Nancy Ybussef at the Daily Beast offer a piece on the intelligence analysts who claim senior officials have pressured them to cook the books on the ISIS threat.

Senior military and intelligence officials have inappropriately pressured U.S. terrorism analysts to alter their assessments about the strength of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. Analysts have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is, according to these sources, and to paint an overly rosy picture about how well the U.S.-led effort to defeat the group is going.

Reports that have been deemed too pessimistic about the efficacy of the American-led campaign, or that have questioned whether a U.S.-trained Iraqi military can ultimately defeat ISIS, have been sent back down through the chain of command or haven’t been shared with senior policymakers, several analysts alleged.

In other instances, authors of such reports said they understood that their conclusions should fall within a certain spectrum. As a result, they self-censored their own views, they said, because they felt pressure to not reach conclusions far outside what those above them apparently believed.

“The phrase I use is the politicization of the intelligence community,” retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, (seen in the above photo) the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast when describing what he sees as a concerted push in government over the past several months to find information that tells a preferred story about efforts to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups, including al Qaeda. “That’s here. And it’s dangerous,” Flynn said. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/26/spies-obama-s-brass-pressured-us-to-downplay-isis-threat.html

Best Of Breslin: Meyer Lansky Didn't Know How To Behave

The Daily Beast is offering Jimmy Breslin's old columns on their website. I don't subscribe to Breslin's worldview, but I enjoyed reading his columns (as well as his comic crime novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight). 

In today's Daily Beast Breslin's column covers the late crime lord Meyer Lansky.

He was a man who loved Israel, but not enough to behave in it.

There was this time a few years back when Meyer Lansky, living in Florida, decided that a prosecutor’s questions could best be answered with movement, and Meyer left the United States, went to Israel, and asked for asylum. Which he received for a while, and Meyer could be found in the Dan Restaurant, Ben Yehuda Street, in Tel Aviv. He ordered the food for those who sat with him, and if somebody ever tried to order on his own, Meyer would frown. The waiter would inform the guest that the whole restaurant would be happier if people ate exactly what Meyer Lansky ordered. 

Then the Israeli government announced one day that they were sending Lansky back to Florida, the rumor was that the United States was holding up an order of Phantom jets until Israel shipped Lansky back. But then one day I was at the bar of a place called Fink’s in Jerusalem and I asked the guy from the Israeli government about this and he said, “Please, we sent him away because he doesn’t believe in laws. He was causing trouble with taxicab fleets and nightclubs and women. Prostitutes. We don’t need him.”     

You can read the rest of the column via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/15/best-of-breslin-meyer-lansky-didn-t-know-how-to-behave.html 

The Story Of The Only NYPD Officer Ever Sentenced To Death—100 Years Ago Today

Edward Conlon, former NYPD detective and the author of Blue Blood, offers an interesting piece at the Daily Beast that looks back at the only NYPD officer ever sentenced to death.

When it came to scandal, the Tammany leader Big Tim Sullivan said, New York was a nine-day town. But in the case of the murder of his friend Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal, a gangster and gambling house proprietor, Sullivan’s adage proved spectacularly untrue. Charles Becker, an NYPD lieutenant, was one of five men convicted of the murder, and he remains the only New York City police officer sent to the electric chair. Though the case was sensational and the conviction a travesty, Becker is little remembered today, and defended less. Both failures are all the more disgraceful because the prosecution was undertaken for a noble cause, that of political reform in general and police reform in particular. 

As with any criminal trial that is transformed into social allegory, the cause trumped the case; facts that contradicted it were held not as false but as heretical, demanding suppression instead of debate. Later generations seeking lessons from the past are likelier to dwell on episodes of clear-cut triumph or transgression. Who wants to commemorate a battle without heroes?   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/30/the-story-of-the-only-nypd-officer-ever-sentenced-to-death-100-years-ago-today.html