front cover of The Case That Never Dies
The Case That Never Dies
The Lindbergh Kidnapping
Lloyd C. Gardner
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Winner of the 2004 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Book Award for Scholarly Non-Fiction | Named a 2005 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities

Essential reading for anyone interested in the most famous American crime of the twentieth century

Since its original publication in 2004, The Case That Never Dies has become the standard account of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Now, in a new afterword, historian Lloyd C. Gardner presents a surprise conclusion based on recently uncovered pieces of evidence that were missing from the initial investigation as well as an evaluation of Charles Lindbergh’s role in the search for the kidnappers. Out of the controversies surrounding the actions of Colonel Lindbergh, Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the New Jersey State Police, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Gardner presents a well-reasoned argument for what happened on the night of March 1, 1932.

The Case That NeverDies places the Lindbergh kidnapping, investigation, and trial in the context of the Depression, when many feared the country was on the edge of anarchy. Gardner delves deeply into the aspects of the case that remain confusing to this day, including Lindbergh’s dealings with crime baron Owney Madden, Al Capone’s New York counterpart, as well as the inexplicable exploits of John Condon, a retired schoolteacher who became the prosecution’s best witness. The initial investigation was hampered by Colonel Lindbergh, who insisted that the police not attempt to find the perpetrator because he feared the investigation would endanger his son’s life. He relented only when the child was found dead.

After two years of fruitless searching, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant, was discovered to have some of the ransom money in his possession. Hauptmann was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Throughout  the book, Gardner pays special attention to the evidence of the case and how it was used and misused in the trial. Whether Hauptmann was guilty or not, Gardner concludes that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of first-degree murder.

Set in historical context, the book offers not only a compelling read, but a powerful vantage point from which to observe the United States in the 1930s as well as contemporary arguments over capital punishment.

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The Central Intelligence Agency
History and Documents
William M. Leary
University of Alabama Press, 1984
Provides for the first time a complete and dispassionate history of the most discussed and least known agency in the history of the American Republic

In late 1974 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on the CIA, headed by Frank Church of Idaho, began collecting documents and materials to buttress the committee hearings on the CIA’s role and activities that were to begin in the fall of 1975. Among the materials prepared for the Church Committee is History of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was written by committee staff member Anne Karalekas.

This book reproduces the History, with an introduction by Leary that establishes the historical framework for the Church Committee hearings, and also includes ten relevant documents covering events from 1944 to 1981.
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Chicago Heights
Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana
Charles Hager with David T. Miller, Foreword by Louis Corsino, Afterword by Ashleigh D'Andrea
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

In this riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights.
 
Street-smart and good with his hands, Hager is accepted into the working life of a chauffeur and “street tax” collector, earning the moniker “Little Joe College” by notorious mob boss Albert Tocco. But when his childhood friend is gunned down by a hit man, Hager finds himself a bit player in the events surrounding the mysterious, and yet unsolved, murder of mafia chief Sam Giancana.
 
Chicago Heights is part rags-to-riches story, part murder mystery, and part redemption tale. Hager, with author David T. Miller, juxtaposes his early years in West Virginia with his life in crime, intricately weaving his own experiences into the fabric of mob life, its many characters, and the murder of Giancana.
 
Fueled by vivid recollections of turf wars and chop shops, of fix-ridden harness racing and the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Chicago Heights reveals similarities between high-level organized crime in the city and the corrupt lawlessness of Appalachia. Hager candidly reveals how he got caught up in a criminal life, what it cost him, and how he rebuilt his life back in West Virginia with a prison record.
 
Based on interviews with Hager and supplemented by additional interviews and extensive research by Miller, the book also adds Hager’s unique voice to the volumes of speculation about Giancana’s murder, offering a plausible theory of what happened on that June night in 1975. 
 
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The Combat Zone
Murder, Race, and Boston's Struggle for Justice
Jan Brogan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Shortlisted for the 2021 Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction and the 2022 Anthony Award for Best Critical or Nonfiction Work

At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the other way. At the end of the night, Italian American star athlete Andy Puopolo, raised in the city's North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's red-light district.

Starting with this brutal murder, The Combat Zone tells the story of the Puopolo family's struggle with both a devastating loss and a criminal justice system that produced two trials with opposing verdicts, all within the context of a racially divided Boston. Brogan traces the contentious relationship between Boston’s segregated neighborhoods during the busing crisis; shines a light on a court system that allowed lawyers to strike potential jurors based purely on their racial or ethnic identity; and lays bare the deep-seated corruption within the police department and throughout the Combat Zone. What emerges is a fascinating snapshot of the city at a transitional moment in its recent past.
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Confession of a Serial Killer
The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer
Katherine Ramsland
University Press of New England, 2017
In 1974, Dennis Lynn Rader stalked and murdered a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and then another, until he had ten victims. He named himself “B.T.K.” (bind, torture, kill) and wrote notes that terrorized the city. He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He nearly got away with his crimes, but in 2004, he began to play risky games with the police. He made a mistake. When he was arrested, Rader’s family, friends, and coworkers were shocked to discover that B.T.K. had been among them, going to work, raising his children, and acting normal. This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of victims and for the ordinary public face that Rader, a church council president, had shown to the outside world. Through jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence, Katherine Ramsland worked with Rader himself to analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Rader’s unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man’s motivation to stalk, torture, and kill. She reveals aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous of living serial killers that have never before been revealed. In this book Katherine Ramsland presents an intelligent, original, and rare glimpse into the making of a serial killer and the potential darkness that lives next door.
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Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior
Social Structure and Corporate Misconduct
Diane Vaughan
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Diane Vaughan reconstructs the Ohio Revco case, an example of Medicaid provider fraud in which a large drugstore chain initiated a computer-generated double billing scheme that cost the state and federal government half a million dollars in Medicaid funds, funds that the company believed were rightfully theirs. Her analysis of this incident—why the crime was committed, how it was detected, and how the case was built—provides a fascinating inside look at computer crime. Vaughan concludes that organizational misconduct could be decreased by less regulation and more sensitive bureaucratic response.
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The Courtship of Eva Eldridge
A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage Mad Fifties
Diane Simmons
University of Iowa Press, 2016

Everyone got married in the 1950s, then moved to the suburbs to have the children of the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion. And so in the 1950s, Eva Eldridge, no longer so young and marginally employed, was the perfect target for handsome Vick, who promised everything: storybook romance, marital respectability, and the lively social life she loved. When he disappeared not long after their honeymoon, she was devastated. 

Eva hadn’t always been so vulnerable. Growing up pretty and popular in rural Oregon, she expected to marry young and live a life much like that of her parents, farming and rearing children. But then the United States threw its weight into World War II and as men headed to battle, the government started recruiting women to work in their places. Eva, like many other young women, found that life in the city with plenty of money, personal freedom, and lots of soldiers and sailors eager to pay court was more exhilarating than life down on the farm. After the war, she was ambivalent about getting married and settling down—at least until Vick arrived. 

Refusing to believe her brand-new husband had abandoned her, Eva set about tracking down a man who, she now believed, was more damaged by wartime trauma than she had known. But instead of a wounded hero, she found a long string of women much like herself—hard-working, intelligent women who had loved and married Vick and now had no idea where—or even who—he was. 

Drawing on a trove of some eight hundred letters and papers, Diane Simmons tells the story of Eva’s poignant struggle to get her dream husband back, as well as the stories of the women who had stood at the altar with Vick before and after her. Eva’s remarkable life illuminates women’s struggle for happiness at a time when marriage—and the perfect husband—meant everything.

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front cover of Covering the Body
Covering the Body
The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory
Barbie Zelizer
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Images of the assassination of John F. Kennedy are burned deeply into the memories of millions who watched the events of November 1963 unfold live on television. Never before had America seen an event of this magnitude as it happened. But what is it we remember? How did the near chaos of the shooting and its aftermath get transformed into a seamless story of epic proportions? In this book, Barbie Zelizer explores the way we learned about and came to make sense of the killing of the president.

Covering the Body (the title refers to the charge given journalists to follow a president) is a powerful reassessment of the media's role in shaping our collective memory of the assassination—at the same time as it used the assassination coverage to legitimize its own role as official interpreter of American reality. Of the more than fifty reporters covering Kennedy in Dallas, no one actually saw the assassination. And faced with a monumentally important story that was continuously breaking, most journalists had no time to verify leads or substantiate reports. Rather, they took discrete moments of their stories and turned them into one coherent narrative, blurring what was and was not "professional" about their coverage.

Through incisive analyses of the many accounts and investigations in the years since the shooting, Zelizer reveals how journalists used the assassination not just to relay the news but to address the issues they saw as central to the profession and to promote themselves as cultural authorities. Indeed, argues Zelizer, these motivations are still alive and are at the core of the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's movie, JFK.

At its heart, Covering the Body raises serious questions about the role of the media in defining our reality, and shaping our myths and memories. In tracing how journalists attempted to answer questions that still trouble most Americans, Zelizer offers a fascinating analysis of the role of the media as cultural authorities.
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front cover of Crime and Justice, Volume 18
Crime and Justice, Volume 18
Beyond the Law: Crime in Complex Organizations
Edited by Michael Tonry and Albert J. Reiss Jr.
University of Chicago Press Journals, 1993
This collection explores structural incentives and disincentives to anti-social and unlawful behaviors and the roles of self- regulation, administrative agencies, and civil and criminal sanctions in shaping organizational behavior. Included are articles on organizational crime, the savings and loan industry, insider trading, industrial water pollution, garbage collection, and the nursing home industry.
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Crime Dot Com
From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global
Geoff White
Reaktion Books, 2021
From Anonymous to the Dark Web, a dizzying account of hacking—past, present, and future.

“Brilliantly researched and written.”—Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

 
“A comprehensive and intelligible account of the elusive world of hacking and cybercrime over the last two decades. . . . Lively, insightful, and, often, alarming.”—Ewen MacAskill, Guardian

On May 4, 2000, an email that read “kindly check the attached LOVELETTER” was sent from a computer in the Philippines. Attached was a virus, the Love Bug, and within days it had been circulated across the globe, paralyzing banks, broadcasters, and businesses in its wake, and extending as far as the UK Parliament and, reportedly, the Pentagon. The outbreak presaged a new era of online mayhem: the age of Crime Dot Com. In this book, investigative journalist Geoff White charts the astonishing development of hacking, from its conception in the United States’ hippy tech community in the 1970s, through its childhood among the ruins of the Eastern Bloc, to its coming of age as one of the most dangerous and pervasive threats to our connected world. He takes us inside the workings of real-life cybercrimes, drawing on interviews with those behind the most devastating hacks and revealing how the tactics employed by high-tech crooks to make millions are being harnessed by nation states to target voters, cripple power networks, and even prepare for cyber-war. From Anonymous to the Dark Web, Ashley Madison to election rigging, Crime Dot Com is a thrilling, dizzying, and terrifying account of hacking, past and present, what the future has in store, and how we might protect ourselves from it.
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Crime of the Century
The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian's Perspective
Michael L. Kurtz
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Now a classic, Michael Kurtz’s Crime of the Century recounts the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and provides a detailed critical analysis of the investigations of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Kurtz outlines the major areas of controversy about the assassination and sifts all the known evidence before concluding that both official inquiries failed to evaluate the considerable evidence of an assassination conspiracy. Kurtz also examines each of the most prevalent conspiracy theories and shows how often they fail to fit the facts.

This third edition includes a new introduction, based on updated information about the assassination since the second edition was published in 1993, including material from the National Archives and several major recent interpretations of the events. Drawing on a variety of primary source materials from the National Archives and the FBI’s and CIA’s declassified assassination files, Crime of the Century remains a book of importance not only to students of the Kennedy assassination but also scholars of government response to political violence.

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Cry Rape
The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice
Bill Lueders
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Cry Rape dramatically exposes the criminal justice system’s capacity for error as it recounts one woman’s courageous battle in the face of adversity. In September 1997, a visually impaired woman named Patty was raped by an intruder in her home in Madison, Wisconsin. The rookie detective assigned to her case came to doubt Patty’s account and focused the investigation on her. Under pressure, he got her to recant, then had her charged with falsely reporting a crime. The charges were eventually dropped, but Patty continued to demand justice, filing complaints and a federal lawsuit against the police. All were rebuffed. But later, as the result of her perseverance, a startling discovery was made. Even then, Patty’s ordeal was far from over.
     Other books have dealt with how police and prosecutors bend and break the law in their zeal to prevail. This one focuses instead on how the gravest injustice can be committed with the best of intentions, and how one woman’s bravery and persistence finally triumphed.
 
Courage Award Winner, Wisconsin Coalition against Sexual Assault
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