My Washington Times Review Of 'Gotti's Boys: The Mafia Crew That Killed For John Gotti'

The Washington Times published my review of Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew That Killed for John Gotti.

Much has written about the late Cosa Nostra Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, and there have been several films made about him.

In Anthony M. DeStefano’s “Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew that Killed for John Gotti,” the author recounts the well-known Gotti story, quoting liberally from other books on the mob boss, but he concentrates on the criminals who served under him.

“During the mid-1980s the big news in the world of organized crime was the rise of a once unknown gangster from Queens named John J. Gotti to head the Gambino crime family through the bloody elimination of the former boss, Paul Castellano. In a move that took much of the world of law enforcement by surprise, Gotti, a little-known hi-jacker and compulsive gambler, engineered the murder of ‘Big Paul,’ as Castellano was known, as much as a method of self-preservation than anything else,” Mr. DeStefano writes in his introduction to the book.

"With the rise of Gotti to leadership of Gambino family, one of the five Cosa Nostra groups in New York, the public was subjected to a barrage of superlatives about the man who had the daring to kill a major crime boss. ‘The Most Powerful Criminal in America,’ and ‘Al Capone in an $1, 800 Suit’ were just some of the ways Gotti was described. He was handsome, ambitious, ruthless, the journalists told us, all of which was true.”

Mr. DeStafano goes on to state that with so much already written about Gotti, what more could another book reveal? Plenty, he tells us. He notes that the FBI’s archives of public figures have become available since the 1990s. The once secret FBI files were made available to the author and he says that they proved most helpful in enabling him to see the interplay of events that brought about Gotti’s downfall.

“Reading through these materials, both old and new, it became clear that there was more to discover about the men who bonded with Gotti from the start of his career, killed for him and propelled him the top of the Gambino family,” Mr. DeStefano writes. “Without this band of criminals, Gotti would have never made it to the top of organized crime.”

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/21/book-review-gottis-boys/

My Washington Times Review Of 'Dateline - Liberated Paris'

The Washington Times published my review of Ronald Weber's Dateline – Liberated Paris. 

It was if Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur’s hard-bitten, cynical and profane crime-beat reporter characters from the 1928 play “The Front Page” were all assigned to cover liberated Paris in World War II.

In Ronald Weber’s “Dateline Liberated Paris: The Hotel Scribe and the Invasion of the Press,” an army of war correspondents converged on Paris after the Nazi Germans left the “City of Light” toward the end of the war.

As Mr. Weber explains, in the European combat zones of World War II, press camps were an integral part of Allied operations. Accredited war correspondents attached to combat units dressed in the uniforms of their countries and wore insignia that identified them as correspondents. They were treated as captains, although they wore no insignia of rank.

The correspondents were housed in buildings or tents and they were fed, briefed on war news, and given jeeps with military drivers for transportation by military public-relations officers. The correspondents’ copy, photos, radio broadcasts, field art and personal letters were reviewed by military censors before they were sent out by cable, teletype, mobile radio, or by land and air courier to the international media centers. The press camps followed the combat units as they moved on to new positions.

“The Hotel Scribe was one of several Allied press camps on the march from Normandy to Germany. It was also one of a kind,” Mr. Weber tells us. “Among other distinctive features, it was located in central Paris in a storied hotel that before the war was favored by foreign journalists and during the occupation became the Nazi headquarters for information and propaganda. It had a lounge bar and dining room, an experienced French staff, chambermaids, phone service, running water, electricity, and enough coal for some heat and warm baths in limited hours. It could accommodate as many as five hundred correspondents, as against the fifty or fewer of other press camps.”

The Scribe quickly took on an aura of journalistic legend and folklore, as a good number of correspondents chronicled the hotel as well as the war in their dispatches. The Scribe was also featured in several novels and nonfiction books by the correspondent residents and customers after the war.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/20/book-review-dateline-liberated-paris-by-ronald-web/

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Last Stone'

The Washington Times published my review of Mark Bowden’s true crime book, The Last Stone.

Mark Bowden is mostly known as a writer who covers military conflict in such nonfiction books as “Black Hawk Down,” “Killing Pablo,” and “Hue 1968.” But he also wrote true crime books based on his journalism while he was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire,” was about a University of Pennsylvania dental student and later a practicing dentist who was the head of Philadelphia’s “Yuppie Conspiracy,” a major drug operation. “Finders-Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million,” was about a hapless, drug-addled South Philly man who found $1 million dollars that fell off an armored car — and lived to regret it.

Now Mark Bowden has returned to the scene of a crime he reported on in 1975 when he was a cub reporter for the Baltimore News-American. In “The Last Stone,” he offers a look back at a horrendous crime and writes the sad ending to the story.

On March 29, 1975 Katherine Lyon, age 10, and Sheila Lyon, age 12, went missing from a Washington, D.C., suburban area shopping mall. Despite full press coverage from Richmond to Baltimore and a full-court police effort, the two children were never found.

The book opens a week after the girls went missing and Lloyd Welch, an 18-year-old, seventh-grade dropout with a headband over long, thick brown hair parted in the middle and a sad effort at a mustache, walked into the Wheaton Mall in Maryland and told a security guard that he knew something about the missing girls. The security guard called the police and two detectives quickly showed up to question him.

“He was scrawny and acned and mean; life had treated him harshly, and it showed. And, man, could he talk,” Mark Bowden writes. “Lloyd was a con artist. Words tumbled from him pell-mell, as if their sheer number and urgency could persuade. Whatever was true in what he said came wrapped in slippery layers of guile.”

After the two girls vanished, area children were placed on lockdown. The case was given even more notoriety as their father, John Lyon, was a local radio personality. A week after the girls were reported missing, past the point most experts agree diminishes greatly the chance that the victims will be found alive, the cops in Montgomery County, Maryland, were desperate for information and a break in the case. They were flooded with tips, but none were useful.

Lloyd Welch was taken from the mall to police headquarters and questioned. Once a tape recorder was turned on, Mr. Bowden tells us, Lloyd did what he did best. He lied.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/14/book-review-the-last-stone-by-mark-bowden/

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with Mark Bowden about his book Hue 1968 via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/12/my-q-with-mark-bowden-author-of-hue.html 

My Washington Times Review Of Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather: 50th Anniversary Edition'

The Washington Times published my review of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather: 50^th Anniversary Edition.

Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather” became one of the best-selling novels in publishing history in 1969, and the novel continues to sell well today, perhaps due in good part to new generations of readers who flock to the novel after viewing director Francis Ford Coppola’s classic films that were based on Mr. Puzo’s novel.

Now, 50 years later, “The Godfather: 50th Anniversary Edition” has been released. The new edition offers an interesting introduction by Francis Ford Coppola, who recalls his collaboration with Mario Puzo on the screenplay for the film.

The powerful and compelling story of Vito Corleone, a New York Italian-American organized crime boss, and his three sons — Sonny, Fredo and Michael — can be described as almost Shakespearian. Between the successful novel and the classic films, the epic story of the Corleone family is perhaps better known to most Americans than Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Although highly romanticized, “The Godfather” is a fine fictionalized study of organized crime’s history in America. Nearly all the major events in the Mario Puzo novel (and the films) were based on true events in crime history.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/8/book-review-the-godfather-50th-anniversary-edition/

My Washington Times Review Of 'Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, And Violence'

The Washington Times published my review of Alex Berenson’s Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. 

Many people these days, it seems, believe that marijuana is a mostly harmless drug that helps to ease pain and relaxes people, like a good, stiff, alcoholic drink. But like alcohol, the effects of marijuana can be serious and even deadly.

Alex Berenson, a thriller writer and former New York Times reporter, has written a book that exposes the myths of marijuana at a time when many politicians are pushing for nationwide legalization.

In “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence,” Alex Berenson warns that the chemical in marijuana that causes one to “get high,” 9-tetrahdrocannabinol, commonly called THC, can cause psychotic episodes that can end in violence.

...“Most people will never have a psychotic episode while using marijuana. Some will have temporary breaks from reality. But an unlucky minority of users develop full-blown schizophrenia,” Mr. Berenson writes. “At this point, doctors have no way of predicting who they will be.” 

Mr. Berenson writes that the most important finding linking marijuana and psychosis is a 2017 468-page research report issued by the National Academy of Medicine titled “The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids.” The study reported that marijuana does not appear to cause lung cancer. But the study offers less good news when it comes to mental health. The study found strong evidence that marijuana causes schizophrenia and some evidence that it worsens bipolar disorder and increases the risks of suicide, depression and social anxiety disorder.

The higher the use, the greater the risk, the study concludes.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/20/book-review-tell-your-children-by-alex-berenson/ 

My Washington Times Review Of 'Handsome Johnny: The Life And Death Of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin'

The Washington Times published my review of Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin.

From the Prohibition era to the mid-1970s, Johnny Rosselli traveled first class through the nexus of Hollywood movies, Las Vegas gambling, shady business deals, secret government assassination plots and organized crime.

He always had money and tipped generously. He was always groomed perfectly. He was always with a beautiful actress. He was always seated at the best spot in a nightclub or restaurant. He was always in the company of wealthy and powerful men on the golf course and tennis court and at a card table. He was the intimate friend of movie studio bosses, casino bosses, major entertainers and notorious mobsters. He was called “Gentleman Johnny” or “Handsome Johnny.”

Johnny Rosselli lived a charmed life right up until he ended up dead in a 55-gallon oil drum floating in the Atlantic. 

Lee Server’s “Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin” offers a complete picture of a smooth operator who began life as Filippo Sacco in Frosinone, Italy, on July 4, 1905. Raised in Boston, his early travels took him across the country to Chicago, where he changed his name and then changed his life.

In the 1950s, the FBI noticed that Rosselli spelled his name differently at times. Sometimes with double “s” and sometimes with only one “s.” The FBI thought that when a man spells his name differently in different years, something is definitely wrong.

“He covered his tracks well — his origins, his early years. The FBI was sure he was not who he said he was. But who was he? What was he hiding?” Mr. Server writes. “For a guy whom everybody in law enforcement knew about for decades — one of Al Capone’s boy wonders, the Mob’s man in Hollywood, big wheel in Las Vegas, the hundreds of pages of police reports in which he figured, numerous arrests and trials, headline convictions — he was a mystery.”

You can read the rest of my review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/13/book-review-handsome-johnny-by-lee-server/ 

My Washington Times Review Of Roger Moore's 'A Bientot'

The Washington Times published my review of Sir Roger Moore’s A Bientot.

Although I much prefer Sean Connery’s dark and dangerous portrayal of Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond to Sir Roger Moore’s light and comedic approach, I was a huge fan of Mr. Moore’s portrayal of Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar in the 1960s TV series “The Saint.”

By all accounts, the late Mr. Moore was an intelligent and amiable man with a self-deprecating sense of humor. This comes across clearly in his books, such as “My Word is My Bond” and “Last Man Standing,” as well as his latest book, “A Bientot.”

The book was delivered to his publisher only days before he died on May 23 at the age of 89.

 “A Bientot” (French for goodbye or see you later) offers Mr. Moore’s take on growing old and a look back at what he has called an extraordinarily lucky and charmed life.

“The poet Dante believed old age starts at forty-five. The United Nations suggests it begins at sixty. Meanwhile, in 2016, the Daily Express newspaper reported that Britons do not see themselves as elderly until they are nudging eighty-five,” Mr. Moore writes at the start of his last book. “Well, as I write, I’m in my ninetieth year. Ninety! Where did those years go? But what is old age? Does it define us? Does it inhibit us? You can’t escape it, you can’t avoid it — well, you can, but the alternative isn’t to be recommended — so you just have to embrace it.”

Mr. Moore’s charmed life began in London on Oct. 14, 1927. The son of a policeman, Mr. Moore trained as an actor, served in the British army, and came to fame on British TV as “Ivanhoe” in the 1950s. He replaced James Garner in 1960 on “Maverick” and first appeared as “The Saint” in 1962. “The Saint” ran until 1969. In 1971 he starred in “The Persuaders” with Tony Curtis and in 1973 he starred in his first Bond film, “Live and Let Die.” He would go on to portray James Bond in six more films, finally giving up the role after 1985’s “A View to a Kill.”

But it was his more than 25 years as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador advocating children’s causes that he was most proud of. He was knighted by the British queen for his UNICEF work in 2003.

He was also a lifelong supporter of the British Conservative Party.

“A Bientot” offers Mr. Moore’s musings, along with anecdotes, sketches, photos, complaints about growing old, and abundant humor.

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

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/14/book-review-a-bientot-by-roger-moore/

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Hemingway Library Edition'

The Washington Times published my review of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Hemingway Library Edition.

I’ve been an Ernest Hemingway aficionado since I was a teenager and read all of his novels, but it was not until a few years later that I discovered his short stories, which were even more powerful than his great novels.

In the mid-1970s I was in my early 20s and serving on a U.S. Navy tugboat at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland when I came across several paperback collections of his short stories in a Glasgow book store. Like his novels, the interesting and insightful stories were about crime, hunting, fishing, boxing, bull-fighting, rugged individualism, grace under pressure, and love and war. To use a simile that Hemingway, a boxing aficionado, might approve of, his short stories deliver like a right cross.

… This collection, edited by Hemingway’s grandson, Sean Hemingway, with a foreword by Hemingway’s son Patrick, is the fourth in a series of annotated editions of his work. The book offers some of his best known stories, such as “The Killers,” “Fifty Grand,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (three of my favorites), as well as a few unpublished stories and his early drafts and notes.

“Ernest Hemingway is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His writing, with its powerful, understated prose and economy of words, has influenced countless writers,” Sean Hemingway writes in his introduction to the collection. “More than any other writer of his time, Hemingway changed the course of literature and furthered the written expression of the human condition. His novels, such as ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ have entered into the canon of world literature, but it is arguably his contributions to the art of the short story that are his greatest literary achievement.”

… In the book is an early draft of “Fifty Grand.” The story has a beginning that Hemingway removed prior to publication based on a recommendation from fellow novelist and friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway later regretted the cut.

“Up at the gym over the Garden one-time somebody says to Jack, “Say, Jack, how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” and Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/21/book-review-the-short-stories-of-ernest-hemingway-/ 

My Washington Times Review Of Michael Connelly's 'The Late Show'

The Washington Times published my review of Michael Connelly’s The Late Show.

Crime novelist Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch crime series, offers a new character with Los Angeles Police Detective Renee Ballard in his latest and 30th novel “The Late Show.”

Consigned to the midnight shift in Hollywood — called the “late show” by the cops — as an unofficial punishment after she filed a sexual harassment complaint against her supervisor, Lt. Robert Olivas, Detective Ballard remains a sharp, feisty and dedicated investigator, but she’s stuck performing limited, unsatisfactory work for a once up-and-coming detective and a go-getter who likes to see things through.

As the novel begins the 32-year-old detective deals with a couple of cases that she liked to, needed to, see through to completion and insure that justice is done. But the first problem is her partner on the midnight shift, Detective Jenkins, who is happy with his night job, even volunteered for it, as he had a sick wife at home and he wanted to be home when she woke up in the morning.

 “It was their main point of contention in their partnership. They worked the midnight shift, the late show, moving from case to case, called to any scene where a detective was needed to take initial reports or sign off on suicides. But they kept no cases,” Mr. Connelly writes. “They wrote up the initial reports and turned the cases over to the appropriate investigative units in the morning. Robbery, sexual assault, burglary, auto theft, and so on down the line. Sometimes Ballard wanted to work a case from beginning to end. But that wasn’t the job and Jenkins was never inclined to stray one inch from its definition.”

… Like his Bosch crime novels, the Renee Ballard story is a realistic and largely accurate portrayal of cops working crime, and crime working cops. The novel reminds me somewhat of former LAPD Sgt. Joseph Wambaugh’s classic cop novels. 

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/24/book-review-the-late-show/ 

My Washington Times Review Of Don Winslow's 'The Force'

The Washington Times published my review of Don Winslow’s The Force.

Don Winslow has stated in interviews that he has always wanted to write a book about New York City cops.

He says he was influenced heavily in his youth by books and films from the 1970s, such as “The French Connection,” “Serpico” and “Prince of the City.” There are many passages in Mr. Winslow’s new crime novel, “The Force,” that are reminiscent of those gritty and realistic cop books and films.

Mr. Winslow’s previous novels, “The Power of the Dog” and “The Cartel,” covered the Mexican drug cartels. In those fine novels he accurately and vividly portrayed the cartel’s mass murders and mass corruption. In “The Force,” Mr. Winslow covers what one might call “ground zero” in the war on drugs — the streets of New York City.

The main character in “The Force” is NYPD Seargent Danny Malone, an Irish-American rogue cop who is the boss of an elite squad called Manhattan North Special Task Force, better known as “Da Force.” But with nearly all of the police officers portrayed as corrupt in the novel, one gets the impression that Danny Malone is not a rogue at all. He is simply very good at being a bad cop.

Mr. Winslow calls Da Force “the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest.” And, I might add, the most corrupt. Assigned to fight drugs and guns, as guns kill and drugs incite the killings, the squad is a holy terror to the drug traffickers and gangs on the streets. The squad provides aid and security to the citizens of the poor community, but they also steal money and drugs from the criminals and otherwise abuse their authority.

The novel, written from the viewpoint of Malone, opens with Malone in a federal lock-up. Him, a hero cop. The son of a hero cop. And most of all, we are told, a guy who knows where all the skeletons are buried, because he put half of him there himself.

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/2/book-review-the-force/ 

My Washington Times Review Of Stephen Hunter's 'G-Man'

The Washington Times published my review of Stephen Hunter’s G-Man.

“Don’t shoot, G-Man,” Machine Gun Kelly cried out to the federal agents who were moving in to arrest him in 1933. The term later came to be synonymous with FBI special agents.

As Bryan Burrough noted in his excellent true crime book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34,” J. Edgar Hoover publicly mandated that all agents have a law degree, but he quietly, and wisely, also hired Southwestern lawmen to compliment his lawyer-agents. These “Cowboys,” as they were known, were knowledgeable about firearms and had considerable experience with gunfights against armed and desperate criminals. As the federal agents were going up against violent bank robbers such as Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger, the Cowboys were needed to back up the inexperienced agents with law degrees.

In Stephen Hunter’s thriller “G-Man” Charles Swagger, a World War I hero and sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas, is one of the Cowboys. The Justice Department’s Division of Investigation, later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, needed men in like Charles Swagger to go toe-to-toe with the violent bank robbers and gunmen of the 1930s.

In Mr. Hunter’s series of thrillers about the fictional Swagger family, Charles Swagger is the grandfather of Bob Lee Swagger, a former Vietnam War Marine sniper, and father of Earl Swagger, a former World War II Marine Medal of Honor winner and Arkansas state trooper. All of the Swaggers are gunmen and Mr. Hunter, a gun enthusiast, writes knowledgeably about guns.

“G-Man,” the 10th in the series, alternates between Charles Swagger’s story in 1934 and Bob Lee Swagger’s present day story. Bob Lee Swagger is an elderly, tall, and lanky man, looking more like Clint Eastwood than Mark Wahlberg, who portrayed the former sniper in the film “Shooter,” or Ryan Phillippe, who plays Bob Lee Swagger in the TV series “Shooter.”

… All of the infamous criminals and famous lawmen from the Depression-era make an appearance in the novel and Mr. Hunter places Charles Swagger at the center of every famous gunfight.

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/21/book-review-g-man/ 

My Washington Times Review Of 'John Le Carre: The Biography'

My review of Adam Sisman's biography of John le Carre appears in the Washington Times today.

“I’m a liar,” John le Carre explained to Adam Sisman, his biographer. “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”

John le Carre, 84, aka David Cornwell, is a spy novelist who has received critical acclaim as well as commercial success since 1964 when he published “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” The former British intelligence officer has published 21 espionage novels, including the Cold War classic, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” which was made into a fine BBC TV seven-part series that starred the late, great Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Mr. le Carre has led an interesting life, as we learn from the biography. Born in 1931 in Poole, England, he had an unhappy childhood. His father Ronnie was a notorious con man who served time in prison for fraud, and his mother deserted the family when Mr. le Carre was only five. His motherless childhood and his ambivalent feelings toward his crooked father have influenced nearly all of his fiction, especially “A Perfect Spy,” which Mr. Sisman says is Mr. le Carre’s most autobiographical novel.  

... I’ve been a reader and admirer of Mr. le Carre since the 1960s, although I don’t subscribe to his leftist views and his anti-Americanism. His later novels are not as good as his earlier ones, in my view, as they are marred by his political shrillness. Yet I continue to read Mr. le Carre because he is, after all, a fine writer.

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/1/book-review-john-le-carre-the-biography/

My Washington Times Review Of Ray Kelly's ‘Vigilance: My Life Serving America And Protecting Its Empire City’

The Washington Times published my review of Ray Kelly's Vigilance: My Life serving America and Protecting Its Empire City. 

Feb. 26, 1993 marked the day that “the modern age of Islamic jihadi terrorism came to New York ,” Ray Kelly tells us in his new book, “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and protecting Its Empire City.”

On that day terrorists bombed the World Trade Center. A 1,500-pound explosive device was left in a rented truck in the center’s parking garage, and had it been placed in a more strategic area of the garage, the bomb just might have toppled the north tower into the south tower. Thankfully, it was not. But the towers, as we all know, would fall in the second attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Kelly had been New York City’s police commissioner just over four months when the first attack occurred. Six people were killed and 1,042 people were injured in the blast, including 88 firefighters and 35 police officers.Mr. Kelly describes the sad and chaotic time and the ensuing investigation.

The investigation discovered that al Qaeda, a terrorist organization not well known at the time, was responsible for attack. The operation was planned by Ramzi Yousef, who later claimed in a U.S. Court, “Yes, I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it.”

In “Vigilance” readers learn about Mr. Kelly's remarkable life and impressive resume.

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/18/book-review-vigilance-my-life-serving-america-and-/?page=all#pagebreak

My Washington Times Review of "U.S. Marshals: Inside America's Most Storied Law Enforcement Agency"

My review of Mike Earp's U.S. Marshals: Inside America's Most Storied Law Enforcement Agency appeared today in the Washington Times.

Deputy U.S. Marshal: How often did you draw your gun?

Retiring FBI agent: Never. You?

Deputy U.S. Marshal: Seven times before lunch.

On Sept. 24, the U.S. Marshals Service celebrated its 225th anniversary, making them the country’s oldest law enforcement agency — and, according to Mike Earp, being a deputy U.S. marshal is one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement. The deputy U.S. marshals are involved in more gunfights and physical altercations with criminals than the FBI or any other federal law enforcement agency.

In his book, “U.S. Marshals,” Mr. Earp, a former associate director of the Marshals Service and a relative of legendary Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp, offers tales from the deputy marshals who track and arrest the criminals that law enforcement considers the “worst of the worst.”

Mr. Earp retired as the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. Marshals Service in 2012 after 29 years of service. As the associate director for operations, he supervised all operational divisions and programs for the agency.

His book is based on interviews with more than 50 current and former deputies and recounts some of the agency’s greatest and most dangerous cases. There are stories about the chase and capture of violent outlaw bikers, drug traffickers and murderers. There are also stories of well-known fugitives the marshals captured, such as the escaped prisoner and convicted spy Christopher Boyce, New York mobster and stone-cold killer Charlie Carneglia and D.C. sniper John Muhammad.

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/11/book-review-tales-from-the-marshals-who-hunt-the-w/?page=all#pagebreak

 

Note: Above is a photo of Mike Earp, courtesy of Kaitlyn Kennedy at HarperCollins.