The Thinking Man's Gangster

Meyer Lansky: The Thinking Man's Gangster
Revised and expanded reprint of Little Man: The Gangster Life of Meyer Lanksy 
457 pages
© 2019 Robert Lacey

There's no such thing as a lucky gambler. There's only winners and losers, and the winners are the ones who control the game.

Meyer Lanksy is the mob associate of legend,  considered with Charles Luciano as the co-creator of the Commission governing the Sicilian mob in America. If Lansky had gone straight, an anonymous FBI agent is supposed to have said,  he could have been the chair of  General Motors.   Judging from Little Man, however,  that may not be the case: every time Lanksy tried to go straight, investing in television distribution or hotels, he lost money. Admittedly, it wasn't always his fault; he wasn't the only one to lose millions on Cuba when it went red.   Lanksy was, from childhood on, a gambler:  he had his introduction as a kid, watching craps games and realizing how it really worked, and  the whole of his fortune at his peak was built on casinos and gaming rooms -- whether in Florida, Nevada, or Cuba.  But Lanksy wasn't just the brains behind the brawn, the grey eminence in the background. Little Man  demonstrates that Lanksy was more than capable of being the brawn himself: he was a teenage union thug who  also tried to make a living for himself as a pimp -- but then came Prohibition, and the partnership with Luciano that would get Lanksy running.   Robert Lacey's biography is far more thorough than I had expected, though not in the most constructive of ways, and -- presumably, given its sources --   cleans and makes  as presentable as possible its subject.

To  be sure, Lanksy is an interesting fellow, with a character much different from those of other gangsters or mob associates. When the FBI first began a detailed investigation of him, they found a quiet man who preferred good, but not flashy, suits -- the kind that any respectable insurance broker or bank executive might wear.  The same was true for his house, which was comfortable but modest.  Lanksy himself was the epitome of self-control and reserve, so much so that his doctor thought such qualities were the cause of his stomach ulcers.   Lanksy left school early, but he was a devoted reader and used his adult wealth to retain a tutor.  The bulk of his illegal income, after Prohibition, came from gambling -- and in the thirties and forties,  law enforcement largely turned a blind eye or was an active participant.   In the fifties, however, moral and red panics meant more stringent and targeted laws, active enforcement, and constant investigation into  Lansky's deep-gray affairs.   Cuba allowed for a partial recovery, at least until Castro destroyed most businesses following his seizure of power --  and it was downhill from there.   The last stages of the book see a weary Lanksy taking refuge in Israel, only to be ousted after two years when he applies for citizenship; he's eventually  apprehended while trying to make for Paraguay,  although in the resulting trial he's acquitted. The state's evidence consisted largely of testimony from a gross loan shark who few on the jury believed.  Eventually cancer would do what the state could not.

Lacey's treatment of Lanksy is interesting; though not denying Meyer's association with men who did evil things, sitting in the shadow of evil and cooperating with it to his own gain, he largely depicts Meyer's business as being in the deep grey area, rather than darkly criminal.  Beyond his youth,  Lacey doesn't depict Lansky as doing anything more than promoting gambling and dodging taxes,  which would hardly make him a bad guy in many readers eyes. I'm sure there was more to him than that, but one can't deny Little Man's depth of coverage into Lansky's family life and the trials. The problem, I think, is that Lanksy's accomplishments were  so under the table -- no flashy murders or robberies, just subtle manipulation of funds -- that there's no positive evidence of him. Even his family didn't even really know how much he was worth, since he seemed to live near poverty for much of his endgame despite the FBI claiming he was worth $300 million.   What I appreciated most about Lacey's work is that he avoided the cutesey nicknames like Lucky and Bugsy in favor of proper ones, like Charlie and Ben. 

If someone is interested in Lansky and doesn't object to  movies with violence, Mobsters may be of interest. I watched it during my Mafia obsession, bought it later on, and have watched it since.   Lansky is depeicted second on the left -- without a Thompson. (In order, the actors are playing Charlie Luciano, Meyer Lansky,   Ben Siegel, and Frank Costello.) Of interest is the presence of Michael Gambon, playing one of the two bosses that Luciano disposes of on his rise to power.  The weird thing about this movie is that it refers to Marazano as Faranzano. I haven't the foggiest idea as to why.

American Detective

American Detective: Behind the Scenes of Famous Criminal Investigations
© 2018  Thomas Reppetto
312 pages

I've been playing through L.A. Noire lately, and its use of real-life crime (the Black Dahlia case)  prompted me to look for anything written about it. American Detective only mentions the Dahlia case,  using it in  Reppetto's history of American detective units,  their decline in the late 20th century, and the need for them to make a comeback.  Reppetto writes from both research and experience, having previous been a commander of detectives in Chicago.  American Detective is a mix of straightforward histories of various crimes and enterprises across the United States (mostly in larger cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and  Cleveland), and including serial killers, bank robbers, and organized crime.    The writing can be dry, especially when it's just one case after another, but Reppetto does warm up, especially when he shifts from fact-delivery to reflection.

  In covering the rise of municipal detective bureaus, Reppetto attributes their takeover of American policing to the complications of mobility and immigration, both of which required more focused, deliberate, and sustained investigations than ordinary patrolmen could offer.  At their prime, American detectives were an elite force  -- patrolling their city, constantly gathering information and building a network of informants who would come in handy in the event of an investigation. Corruption, political and otherwise, coupled with increasing bureaucratization which forced detectives to become specialists who worked cases instead of generalists who worked the city,  diminished their performance , while at the same time  politicians began touting approaches to law enforcement that  emphasized the role of the ordinary patrol officers.  Reppetto believes that "community policing" was never clearly defined, and argues that detective bureaus should reclaim their midcentury prominence. 


As a book, American Detective delivers a lot of interesting back stories behind famous personalities and crimes, along with less interesting ones. That may be a matter of taste, or delivery; I'd liken the book to sitting at a railway intersection and watching a train go by. There's much of interest, but there are also long stretches of literary boxcars,  fairly featureless.    There's a lot of little tidbits in here, though, so  if you're an avid reader of true crime, it's probably worth checking into.  Personally, having spotted that Reppetto has also done some works on the Sicilian Mafia, I may read a little more of him.

Ghost in the Wires

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
© 2011 Kevin Mitnick, William Simon. Forward by The Woz.
393 pages

CYBERPUNK introduced me to the story of Kevin Mitnick, a teenage phone phreaker turned celebrity hacker,  who boasted that he never used an outside program to break into a company. Instead,  all of his access was obtained by manipulating people within companies into giving him the information.  Writing later as a security consultant, he explained the workings of this manipulation in the book Art of Deception, which I referred to as "interesting but highly repetitive". Well....ditto for Ghost in the Wires.  It's the memoir of a serial, and apparently compulsive, hacker, whose obsession with accessing networks he has no authorization for,  and obtaining information he has no right to have,  utterly consumes his life.  He admits that hacking was like booze for him -- his entertainment, his addiction.  Even when he's barely escaped from one episode, he's already starting the other....and his enormous pride in getting one over on the hapless clerks,  alarmed security admins, and frustrated federal agents is so hubristic that he routinely calls the FBI or accesses their computer network during investigations to see how close they are to the scent. 

It's his compulsiveness that does him in time and again: even when he was relatively safe on the run, with a stolen identity (several, actually) and a comfortable job,  Mitnick is so consumed by his desire to hack that it attracts the attention of his employers, who  fire and investigate him. At one point while working there, for instance, he was on his cell phone putting on a presumably awful Japanese accent to convince an engineer that his counterpart in the Tokyo office needed him to upload cellphone source code to a server Mitnick had access to. One of his coworkers heard this outside the door and could only wonder what on earth was going on.)  When the FBI found his scent, it was because he was trying to collect the source codes for a UNIX release, as well as various next-gen cell phones that were hitting the market. Was he selling them to rival businesses? No. He was collecting them as trophies.  Mitnick is the movie villain who undermines himself by  pausing mid-kill to gloat at the hero, or  decides to consign him to a slow death in an elaborate trap.

This book was informative, however;  Mitnick proves to be far more dangerous than I'd previously believed. He wasn't  just exploring networks as portrayed in CYBERPUNK:   for him, there was no limit to the systems he'd compromise. The DMV, Social Security, Vital Records? Grist for the mill for Kevin to do what he wanted. Admittedly, his technical expertise is admirable, in the same way that Napoleon's army or the Luftwaffe  were technically admirable.  He certainly wasn't just relying on people giving him information, as  he frequently applied patches to systems to give himself  backdoor access later on. What's less admirable is Mitnick's ability to lie to so many people so habitually, to manipulate them like switches on a board. The act is deeply disturbing in itself, but  what happened to the hundreds of receptionists, clerks, and engineers who became Mitnick's unwitting dupes? 

While I began this book guardedly sympathetic to Mitnick (impressed by his talents, a little wary of his lying), by the end I regarded him as a compulsive, hubristic ass. I'm glad he's turned semistraight, in managing to squelch his desire to thwart everyone else,  but the book has virtually no information on that. Was there any soul-searching at all, or was it just a mercenary decision?   Mitnick may be a nice guy in person; he's friends with Steve Wozniak, who has experience with egotistical personalities before  and would presumably recognize it in Mitnick,  but based on this book I wouldn't trust him.

Related:
Exploding the Phone
Books by Kevin Mitnick

Flying high in rockets and opiods

Well, folks, Christmas is over, and so is 2018 -- almost.  Below are the final comments or reviews for 2018: Dreamland and Rocket Girls,   two very different histories. One is inspiring, the other....so very not.

First up, Rocket Girls!  Call to mind the space race, and very likely the people who come to mind are German scientists and lantern-jawed American airmen, the right-stuff hotshots who explored beyond the atmosphere.  The story of American rocketry begins before the sixties, however, and from the beginning it involved both sexes. In Rocket Girls we visit the early days of rocketry, even during World War 2.  This is really a history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of its inception and early work, as told through serial biographies. Well over a dozen women's contributions are chronicled here,  and they include a Chinese dissident and the first African-American hired to a technical position at the JPL.   Although the women's work in computing trajectories, and working out by hand how different materials and propellant mixes might chance results is increasingly supplanted by IBM's computers,  I really enjoyed the extensive on-the-ground history of the JPL. The amount of work that went into every launch  -- of everything from antiaircraft missiles to probe launches -- is awe-inspiring, and the July lunar landing seems even more incredible.

Not quite as uplifting but lamentably important is  Dreamland, a history of the opiod crises in America.  The historical narrative considers two stories that converge into one. The first is the rise of a black tar heroin distribution network in the United States, in which a small village in Mexico revolutionized drug marketing to make buying safe, easy, and satisfying - at least until the high wore off. The second story is the rise of prescription opiods in the United States, as aggressive marketing to local general practitioner  wore down decades of reluctant to freely prescribe strong pain medications for fear of addiction.  Spurred by a small study whose import was amplified far beyond reality to think that opiods could never become addictive so long as they were being used for physical pain,  optimistic physicians and ambitious pharmaceuticals undermined the previously existing framework for addressing pain and replace it with it with pills. Use pills, and if they don't work, use more pills.   When medical patients became addicts and their doctors became concerned,  the addicts were able to get their fix from the new  heroin distributors, the "Xalisco Boys" as the author calls them.  All they had to do was call a number and meet a car at a given location, and they were in business.  The prescription pills also became big business in themselves on the black market, creating pill mills so openly phoney that they operated out of portable trailers and subscribed OxyContin to lines of hundreds.   The two narratives interlace together incredibly well, and as sad a history as this is, it bears considering.   There's also a bit of philosophy in the title and the deliery; Quinones opens with an attractive look at an Ohio town's pool and community center, a place called Dreamland, where the people of the town came together and shared their lives -- as children they played in the pool, as teens they necked in the high grass, and as adults they came with their kids to experience the wading pool all over again. But then another dreamland, a private one where people dropped out of life and hid themselves in their rooms, lost in their own drug-addled minds, took over. Although the destruction of that Ohio town's park had more to do with economics than drugs,  it's a very effective image.



That wraps 2018 up;  later this week I'll do a best-of-posting and share some data pie.  I've got a couple of books at the ready, but don't imagine I'll be finishing either one up before tonight.    Because of another outburst of spam (all in Arabic or Farsi, which is...interesting.), I've had to impose moderation, but I'll check on a daily basis, and this explosion of nonsense ever ebbs I'll turn the moderation off.

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11
© 2006 Lawrence Wright
480 pages

"[...] we're told that they were zealots, fueled by religious fervor...religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any  ******* sense? " - David Letterman,  first show post-attack. 9/17/2001

Despite the efforts of Sunday School teachers who wanted to convey the fact that the end of the world was imminent, I didn't pay a great deal of attention to foreign affairs in middle school. One of those teachers dedicated a wall in her classroom not to Bible verses and theology, but to ominous news stories hinting at the imminent coming of the Endtimes.  Most prominent on the board and in my memory was a large article on the USS Cole bombing in 2000, organized by the same people who would later attack New York. After that 9/11, that seemingly random attack made more sense in context, and in Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower, the Cole bombing has a prominent place. Looming Tower is a history of al-Quaeda, of the ideological background of bin laden and his followers, as well as a chronicle of their activities. Although bin Laden did not create the jihadist fervor popularly known as Islamism, Wright contends that bin  Laden was the indispensable figure behind the movement, organizing smaller groups into an international force and financing it with his dead father's fortunes.

Westerners may find it easy to dismiss terrorists as the dregs of society, casting blame on their woes and failures on the easy target of the west. Far from being uneducated rubes, however, many of the key members of al-Queda and its related organizations were members of their society's elite: they were born into wealth and privilege, and (excepting bin Laden) spent considerable time in the west.  The intellectual progenitor of Islamism, as we might term the virulently anti-western ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam which  has been sweeping the middle east in increasingly strong waves since the mid-20th century,  actually lived in small-town America during the 1950s. There,  after being initially impressed by its wealth, he (Sayyid Qutb) grew contemptuous of America, regarding it as decadent and materialist.Qutb's writings, made more attractive by his death as a prisoner back im Egypt,  remain relevant for consideration today -- for while many jihadists are directly motivated by contempt of the West's creation of Israel, and DC's continuing support of it,    they also have a fundamental contempt for western ideals -- Christianity included, which one describes as too idealistic.  These jihadists were fundamentally opposed to western thought -- capitalism, communism, etc -- because of its materialistic basis, and despite their backgrounds in medicine or engineering rejected the scientific worldview as inadequate. Bin Laden never traveled westward, but rather east; it was in Afghanistan that the pious business prince grew to think of himself as a leader of men and after he was repelled from the Sudan he would retreat to the very same cave-structure he carved out during the Afghan war. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden met men who would be his future allies in destruction, and it was there that he establish training camps for his plans of violence on his targets.

The Looming Tower is not a history of 9/11; itself : coverage of the day  is largely limited here to the death of John O'Neill, a colorful agent-in-charge of the FBI who had been doggedly hunting al-Queda operatives before his retirement in 2001. He chose to steer into his golden years by taking a post as chief of security for the World Trade Center, and a month later he perished there while leading people to safety.  Despite the fact that the CIA was also tracking al-Quaeda operatives,  internal security measures and concerns over jurisdiction stymied the information-sharing that might have led to O'Neill realizing  there were targets constituting an active threat within the US. Most of the subject material covers leading Egyptian and Arabian figures who would build jihadist movements in their countries, attempting to achieve takeovers in Egypt and the Sudan, and fighting abroad in Afghanistan.  The history indicates that Osama's war on the United States despite its status as an ally of the anti-Soviet jihadist, was not caused by DC's later support of secular dictators against more religious populaces.. Instead, Osama's attitude toward the US had already hardened, and he wanted to take the fight to the United States as soon as the USSR had withdrawn: having defeated one demonic superpower through prayer (and American-made Stinger missiles), he wanted to destroy the other.   Then, a new caliphate could sring into being and regain its medieval might --and more.

DC is now seventeen years into a war that Osama bin laden wanted it to fight.  That war has led to a succession of others, multiplying  with now grim predictability, creating other threats like ISIS. While that gangster-state  has now been reduced to a brand name for murder,  it is a safe bet that some other  threat will arise from the region.  Today DC is currently supplying al-quaeda in Syria, recalling the days when DC armed jihadists fighting the Soviets, only to find their "allies" were only weapon to turn said weapons against DC when the Soviet threat was passed. DC is also funding and supplying the Saudi enterprise of systematically destroying Yemen, in full knowledge of the fact that the Saudis are a leading sponsor of terrorism and its subjects constituted the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.  DC has learned nothing, it seems,  and is seemingly content to waste lives and resources until the heath death of the universe. (Sources linked above include The New York Times, The American Conservative,  The Huffington Post,  and the Cato Institute. Reality is not partisan.)

Inside the mind of a thief

This is a related video for A Burglar's Guide to the City. It's an interview between a Plano City police officer and a three-time offender (Michael Durden) about his experience breaking into homes.  According to the interview,  Duren was a 'thief' and not a home invader -- he avoided running into people, carefully casing homes and limiting his time there to five to seven minutes.  In the video he answers questions about what attracts or deters him from a home,  how he might obtain entry, and how he prioritized targets inside.   I took some notes for those who are curious but not interested enough to watch a 40 minute video.  (I live in high-crime county, so  security issues are never far from my head!)  

 A news story about the interview can be read here.  

NOTES:

• A well-kept home with a nice fence indicates a target worth robbing.  Durden avoided poorly-kept or ill-maintained homes.
• Older burglar alarms rely on a wired connection to the telephone system which can be easily cut. Wireless or cellular systems are a stronger deterrent.
• Simple devices that remotely turn on lights or play sounds on certain triggers (like someone knocking on the door) are a deterrent.
• Cameras which face down at an angle can be defeated with a cap;  cameras at face level are better for identification, but should be concealed. 
• Active, nosy neighbors can deter a would-be burglar, as can a car left parked in the driveway.
• Speaking of neighbors, if  you're out of town for a few days you should ask one to collect your papers/mail. A full mailbox and a driveway littered with papers are an obvious sign that no one is home. A poorly-kept house in a wealthy neighborhood may also give away the fact that its owners are on vacation.
• Burglars or package thieves can  case neighborhoods by jogging or walking. 
• Cul de sacs are generally harder for a burglar to operate in: with no through traffic, he's more likely to be spotted as a nonresident. 
• Transparent doors that allow a good view of the home are attractive but incredibly foolish. Would be thieves can case the inside, looking for  potential entrypoints, the presence of people, or the alarm system, simply by approaching the home and knocking. 
• For the same reason, windows should be closed and shuttered if no one is at home, as they allow for studied surveillance of the interior.  
• Lights left on when no one is at home might deter a potential thief,  but said lights should not be left on in the rooms near front/back entries, as they make it easier for thieves to look for security vulnerabilities. 
• Small dogs, even the yappy kind, won't stop a home invader. Larger dogs probably will. Interestingly, dogs often give away the presence of an owner by looking for them once they become alarmed. 
• Inside the home, the primary target for Durden was the master bedroom, as he focused on jewelry and cash.  If the home was obviously expensive but little jewelry was out, that indicated the presence of a safe.  Safes are often 'hidden' in the closet. A better place would be the attic or garage, hidden among tools. 
• Care should be taken about personal information, like drivers' licenses,  checkbooks, etc;  a passing-through thief can use the documents or the information in them to committ identity theft later. 

The Rooster Bar

The Rooster Bar
© 2017 John Grisham
352 pages

The third year of law school is supposed to be the easiest, but for Todd,  Mark, and Zola...eh, not so much. Their best friend just committed suicide, leaving behind a tangled web of conspiracy on his apartment wall. Zola's Senegalese parents were just picked up by customs for deportation,  the guys' families are likewise unstable, they're all unemployed, and between them they owe over half a million dollars in student loans.   Not that all that debt has given them anything in return:  half of their school's graduates fail the bar exam, a fact they've picked up on much too late. They're all a semester away from graduation, and after that loom the licensing exam and impossible loan payments   With the banks holding all the aces, what's left to do but kick over the table? 

 Todd and Mark have an idea:  stop going to law school, and start going to the courthouse to hustle cases, small fry that they can do cash jobs for, under assumed identities.  With all of the lawyers crawling around DC, like rats in a landfill, who would know they didn't have licenses? They'll use their last student loans as startup money, hit the streets, and see if they can't scrape up a living.  They were headed for bankruptcy anyway, so why not go for broke? The Rooster Bar follows the two guys (and Zola,  who is distracted by her family and dubious about the scheme to the point that she never nets any cases) as they embark on a life of deceit, fraud, and confidence games,  though one of them has a bigger fish in mind. The same company that owns their diploma mill also owns the bank they borrowed the money from, through the usual legal shell game that protects them from antitrust suits.  The guys would love to take vengeance on the racket, not just for ruining their lives but from driving their friend to suicide. Surely there's a way.

Well, yes. It seems implausible, but as Grisham points out in his afterward, he played fast and loose with the facts for the story's sake.  ("Especially the legal stuff,"says he.  That's nice to know when it's a novel about the legal profession.)   Although  this is a fresh story -- and an interesting one, as readers see the characters having to learn the ropes -- the way it develops is not too dissimilar from The Litigators, in that some characters' ambitious idea goes...awry in a Wile E. Coyote fashion. Just like the Coyote, however, repeatedly falling off of cliffs, blowing up bombs next to their heads, and launching themselves into the stratosphere  doesn't stop Todd and Mark from rebounding.

The Rooster Bar is more memorable than The Whistler,  but I'd still put it near the bottom of the second tier, as far as Grisham books go. Good title, though.

A Burglar's Guide to the City

A Burglar's Guide to the City
© 2016 Geoff Manaugh
304 pages

There's really no resisting a title like that, is there?  Mind, it's not accurate;  this isn't a guide to how burglars read architecture, a catalog of vulnerabilities that homeowners and businesses can use to check their own weak spots.  The core message of the book, expressed repeatedly with great effusion, is that burglars see and use buildings differently from other people.  Manaugh goes into slight details, but his background as an art historian shows: he's more interested in the idea of burglars interpreting architecture than the details. Consequently, readers are given a great deal of entertainment as he delves into various cases, and even tries to learn skills himself (including lockpicking, from a cop),  but not much in the way of practical security information.

Burglary as defined requires architecture;   breaking and entering isn't possible with something to break into.   But burglars are connected to architecture at a deeper level, writes Manaugh; they are like the characters of The Matrix, who can read the lines of flowing green code and interpret vulnerabilties. They  are plugged into the Matrix of physical form and can manipulate it  at will -- and they do, using buildings in unexpected ways.  They will shimmy up rain gutters to access ledges, shove themselves through ventilation ducts,  take sliding doors off rails, or even carve through drywall to out-flank security alarms.  Some architectural manipulation can be quite elaborate, using the urban form itself.  Consider a case from Los Angeles in the 1980s: a group of  burglars with possible Public Works connections used that city's massive storm drainage system to tunnel into a bank and empty its vaults.   Few burglaries are so thought out, however; most are hasty and opportunistic. Even then, they can use buildings in ways they weren't intended: a massive oak door might be breached simply by breaking the glass windows framing it, then reaching in and opening the door.  Roofs hold back water; no one expects them to provide an entry for an thief.

A Burglar's Guide to the City abounds in interesting cases and general information. I had no idea that Los Angeles operates full time air patrols, for instance: I assumed police helicopters are so expensive by the hour that they're dispatched only in extreme situations, the kind that call for SWAT teams.  Easily the most interesting case for me was the story of Roofman, who used his study of McDonalds' basic building plan and operational policies to invade  and rob several dozen franchises. After being imprisoned, he escaped and took refuge in a Toys R Us, where he built a hiding place and carved into the empty building next door.   From there, surrounded by toys, he used stolen baby monitors from Toys R Us itself to observe employees and plan a  full heist. Fortunately for them, the random dropping-by of a sheriff's deputy foiled the Candy from a Baby stickup.


In short, this book was more fun than informative, but worth the time.

Related:
If you are interested in understanding your home from a security standpoint, I would suggest an ebook I read last year called "Kick Ass" Home Security, written by a retired police sergeant.  It's purely functional reading, like an instructional manual, but I found it helpful.  The essential lesson I remember, beyond any technical information, is that most burglaries are crimes of opportunity -- the less inviting you make your home to casual intrusion, the less likely you are to be burgled.

Crime, private and public sector

Let's start the week off with two birds and one stone!    

Earlier in the week I was finally able to get access to No Place to Hide, by Glenn Greenwald, on his encounter with Edward Snowden and the stories that led to.  For those hiding under rocks,  Edward Snowden was a civilian contractor working for the NSA until he exposed part of their globe-spanning surveillance apparatus in 2013/2014. While employed by the CIA and NSA, Snowden became increasingly concerned with the scope, ambition, and dubious legality of his employers' programs, and decided to begin documenting what he was seeing.  After methodically collecting reports for months on end, throughout several assignments, Snowden contacted a reporter with an established reputation for criticizing both the government and a complicit media.    Greenwald, after  recounting his first contact with Snowden,  then shares information from the stories he filed with The Guardian before switching into an argument against the surveillance state, and a condemnation of the establishment media, particularly the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I daresay no one will be surprised to learn that I'm far more a supporter of Snowden than the NSA -- not because I believe the NSA is  part of some evil conspiracy, but because I have certain strongly-held believes on the nature and consequences of power, and know that the construction of an inescapable surveillance apparatus is Bad News. When Greenwald says global, he means global;   the book mentions numerous programs, not just the email-tapping ones, and between them they cover pretty much everyone but the crew of the International Space Station.   It can't all be to fight terrorism: what do terrorists have to do with Brazilian gas companies, and why is NSA surveillance being shared with US agricultural departments?   Those who believe that the NSA are swell chaps who wouldn't countenance abuse of their data may sleep soundly, but what happens when someone with less scruples is in charge?  As the current administration demonstrates, we no longer require even the pretense of civility from those those who want to operate the beastly machine that is DC.

More recently I read through Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Intrusion.  Mitnick was partially featured in Cyberpunks, a teenage telephone 'phreaker' turned pioneering computer hacker. Since his release from prison Mitnick has used his reputation and experience in intrusion to sell himself as a cybersecurity consultant. The Art of Intrusion collects 'true crime' stories of computer-based or related intrusions;   ranging from illicit exploration to digital skulduggery.   A lot of data is omitted for the protection of the persons and companies mentioned, but a lot of the stories seem dated, for the book's publication year, and others are so technical I am not sure who would be reading them. I did find quite a bit of interest, however, in the chapters on penetration testing and social engineering. I still do not like Mitnick's term for an art he and his friends practiced, and one which remains a security threat:  obtaining information and access through human, instead of technological, means. Mitnick shares the stories of  analysists, who -- performing audits on companies, and attempting to breach their security -- were able  access highly sensitive areas within buildings simply by chatting up coworkers and 'acting' like they belonged there.  This also involved technical assistance, like a fake id that security guards didn't vet too closely.    Mitnick claimed in his trial that he relied on social engineering, not computer programs, to access as much as he did, and he has previously authored a book called The Art of Deception that documents the psychological strategies used in this kind of 'engineering'.  As someone with a work-related interest in security,  I may look around for a copy.

CYBERPUNK

CYBERPUNK: Hackers and Outlaws on the Computer Frontier
© 1991 Katie Hafner
400 pages

Cyberpunk takes readers back to the early days of hacking, when it was so old-school that computers weren’t involved. Using three case  in the United States and western Germany,  Katie Hafner’s history introduced readers in 1991 to the general idea of hacking, and her history sheds some light on what hackers were, what they did, and what they might want. It’s a fun look at early internet history, with the net as we know it developing slowly  throughout the course: ARPAnet, the internet’s predecessor, only appears halfway in.

The story begins with telephone lines, which -- in the mid-20th century -- bored teenagers began to examine with great interest.  Kevin Mitnick and Susan “Thunder” met over their mutual interest in learning to detect the patterns used by telephone switching systems and reproducing the sounds to manipulate their way through the boards, arranging free phone calls for themselves. (This was a bit of a cultural education for me -- evidently there were conference call lines advertised where people called in and just chatted with whoever was also on the circuit, a telephone chatroom!)  When the systems became controlled via computers,  Kevin, Susan, and a few more of their friends began tinkering with them.  (For readers born in the eighties, whose first computers came with web browsers, it takes a bit of chewing to realize that Mitnick and Thunder were literally dialing other computers;  telephone and computer network access systems were much more closely related)  Their explorations would eventually led to purloined and privileged accounts on sensitive systems across the United States; Susan had a particular interest in looking at military hardware.  The group weren’t plundering records for profit.

Although this group acquired an enormous amount of access via its steady experimentation, little was involved in the way of programming. They weren’t creating bugs to invade systems;  at most they rooted through the dumpsters of phone and computer-access companies looking for manuals, notes, and other juicy bits of detritus. The manuals not only allowed them to understand the systems they were ‘phreaking’, but often included passwords from people who hadn’t yet developed any sense of security.  They also engaged in what Hafner calls ‘social engineering’ -- lying, essentially, and obtaining information by talking to telecommunications and networking personnel under different guises -- almost exactly like phishing, but they did it in person. Eventually an interpersonal feud led to one of the crew being turned in, and the tip was used to great effect by a security specialist who had been doggedly tracking their excursions.

From here, Hafner moves to a group in Germany whose hacking begins to resemble what we in the 21st understand it to be. Initially, they too were interested only in the thrill of entering computer systems.  Unlike the American group, “Chaos” did experiment with programs to do their work for them -- and unlike the Americans, some of the Germans became interested in converting their skills into currency. Specifically, they approached East German border guards (who connected them to KGB personnel), offering to sell them information obtained through the networks.   The Soviets’ real interest was in the actual software -- compilers, especially -- but they were willing to engage in occasional business.  (Chaos also claimed to be working on behalf of world peace, since if a balance of power was maintained, war was less likely.)

The third act in Hafner’s book concerns the “Morris worm”, the invention of a son of the NSA who invented a self-spreading program to explore the size of the internet. An error in judgement allowed the program to collect several instances of itself on one machine, consuming their memory, and causing system after system to grind to a halt.  The worm infected ten percent of all machines then connected to the internet. Needless to say, this unexpected attack caused a panic, and in the resulting trial some members of the cyber-communications industry were out for blood despite it being fairly obvious that the culprit hadn’t intended any harm and had in fact sent off anonymous warnings within a couple of hours of noticing that his creation had gone berserk.  Although a zealous prosecutor -- and an equally zealous witness, the man who had led the hunt for the Mitnick intrusion -- did their best to incarcerate Morris, in the end the judge erred on the side of mercy and concluded with a sentence of community service, probation, and a large fine.

Cyberpunk was quite the education for me.  My interest in the early days of the internet, and in particular the quasi-libertarian ethos of some of the personalities attracted to it, first interested me in the volume.  Most of the people cataloged here are quirky individuals, all uncomfortable in school but obsessive about learning the ins and outs of different systems.  They were driven to explore a new world, to prove themselves masters of it -- but they were also inspired by the literature they were reading. From time to time books like Shockwave Rider,  Neuromancer, and the Illumantus Trilogy show up. (Interestingly, the latter was used as a staple of one of the hacker characters in David Ignatius' The Director..)   Although Hafner was recounting these cases to an early 1990s audience just starting to explore the consumer-oriented internet,  the cases as arranged offer a look at the internet and its cultured as they evolved.  I enjoyed it enormously.

As a side note: the case of Kevin Mitnick continues provoking controversy, with numerous books authored by him and others arguing with one another over the "truth".  According to this book's epilogue, Hafner's own account is "80%" true.

Kingpin

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
© 2011 Kevin Pulsen
288 pages

If Meyer Lanksy had gone straight, a contemporary of his noted, he could have rivaled Nelson Rockefeller. Maybe the same could be said for Max Butler, only a few years older than Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of becoming a billionaire, however, Butler’s genius and entrepreneurial risks landed him in prison for thirteen years with a $30 million dollar debt to pay off. Kingpin recounts his beginning as a teenager given to pranks, discovering the internet as a place with ample opportunities for play, and follows his slide into crime. Although Butler attempted to direct his skill and curiosity towards creative purposes -- becoming a ‘whitehat’ security consultant, a hacker for the good guys -- his early experiences with the Justice Department gave Butler a chip on his shoulder, and he continued to flirt with darkness, unable to resist tests of his skill.

Butler entered the scene just as hacking’s very character was changing. A generation of telephone ‘phreakers’ turned programmers whose motivation had been exploring the technology itself was giving over to those who saw in the internet an opportunity for quick money. Central to this story, and Butler’s evolution as a criminal, is credit card fraud. Although he tended to get into trouble as a kid, Butler wasn’t malicious at heart: he liked to push the boundaries, especially when he could experiment with his skills. When he began stealing card numbers, he did so from other fraudsters, and used a similar justification when he began compromising the systems of banks: they were the utter bad guys, constantly luring poor people into debt. What were they but crooks pretending to be legitimate? Time and again Butler contemplated going straight, but he’d see an opportunity for showing off and couldn’t fail to take it up. One of his most dramatic achievements is covered early on, when he single-handedly effects a takeover of several underground forums, combining their databases into his own and deleting the originals from the internet. It was a hostile takeover that made Butler the king of a carding empire, netting him a $1000 a day just from stealing, selling, or using credit card data.

Kingpin is the fascinating history of not just a man, but of a criminal industry. Because of creative minds like Butler’s, identity theft doesn’t just threaten people who thoughtlessly throw sensitive information into the trash. Butler’s bread and butter was milking restaurants’ point of sale systems -- those machines shoppers use for credit card transactions -- so anyone who uses a credit card in stores is vulnerable. In recent years, for instance, customers of Target and Wendy’s have been exposed. The government and businesses have attempted to respond by moving to cards with an embedded chip which is nominally more difficult to extract data from, but after reviewing Butler’s many adventures it’s hard to believe anything will be secure for very long.

Good reading for a bit of ‘modern’ true crime, told by someone like Butler who once practiced the dark arts, but who managed to stay on the straight and narrow.

Related:
Spam Nation, Brian Krebs

The Dark Net

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
© 2015 Jamie Barlett
320 pages

In middle school, the Internet was a distinct place, a world apart from 'real life'.  Now it has grown so ubiquitous that it's as exciting as the paved street outside my house.  When I first heard of the dark net a few years ago, I caught a whiff of the old excitement - there are still places that haven't been bulldozed into boringness! While I had no interest in exploring the dark alleys of the internet, I took comfort in knowing they were there.  Jamie Barlett's  The Dark Net promises to reveal a little of what goes on in the digital shadows,  but its true real subject is the human condition, and how it is interacting with the possibilities that the internet and its shadows provide.  Barlett mixes criminal voyeurism and philosophical debate about the nature of freedom to great effect.

Barlett examines two different 'dark nets'; the first is the submerged internet, websites which are only accessible with certain programs and certain knowledge.  Virtually all of the websites we use on a daily basis exist both above the surface and a little below it; for instance,  banks  have ample public areas for potential customers to explore, but certain rooms, like our individual account pages, are slightly submerged and accessible only through our username and password. But there's a deeper level to the web,  websites that require specific browsers and knowledge of their URL to appear. (One address  Barlett finds here actually requires a series of cookies from other websites:  users must visit a set of websites in a particular order before being able to load the target successfully, otherwise, an attempt to load the address will produce a completely-different looking site.)  On these hidden pages -- accessibly only through secure browsers -- anything is for sale, from illicit drugs to lives, but there are also safe havens for whistle-blowers to upload documents to the media, or hide from opinion-policing.

Connected but not limited to this is the second 'dark' aspect that Barlett explores, the effect that the internet's anonymity and diverse opportunities have on the human psyche. Here he catalogs support groups for destructive behavior: websites promoting anorexia and suicide, for instance,  or which radicalize political opinions and produce bombers out of disaffected coeds.  The websites he explores here operate on the surface net -- places like 4chan and reddit -- but the behavior promoted reveals the darkness inside the human soul itself,  its capacity for brutality.  In one case, a woman who foolishly posts a photo of herself without clothing is identified by background information, and the 4chan residents promptly start sending the photos to everyone on the woman's facebook page to publicly humiliate her.

Despite this catalog of horrors, from child pornography to terrorist communities, The Dark Net  is not a polemic against the evils of new-fangled technology.  Early on, he writes about the enthusiasm early adopters had for the internet, the generation of 'cypherpunks'  who viewed the digital world as their long-waited escape from the medieval dreariness of nation-states and castles of control and surveillance. The internet was anonymity and freedom -- liberty.  Although the internet was normalized relatively quickly in the 1990s and early 2000s, saturating the geeks' playground with boring e-businesses and teenagers posting their journals online, technology did arrive to give the cyphers more of what they wanted: anonymous browsing via browsers like Tor, and secure modes of payment like Bitcoin.  Just as the lightless ocean depths create extraordinary creatures, so to have the pressures of illicit marketplaces created  new ways of communicating and doing business, creating payment structures that  allow some degree of trust but without legal exposure.  Just as PGP encryption for secure messages has filtered down into email clients like Thunderbird, so too  may multisignature escrow accounts for online payments one day appear above the surface for those who prefer not to use credit cards online for mundane security reasons.

The Dark Net is disturbing reading at times, particularly the chapter on child pornography.  There are lessons to be learned here, though, like the ways that highly specific interest groups amplify their members' devotion as they enter into an echo chamber where increasingly more strident views and increasingly more antagonistic behavior are viewed as perfectly acceptable. (Barlett believes, for instance, that child pornography grows off of increasingly compulsive consumption of ordinary pornography, as the user requires increasingly more provocative content to engender excitement.) The conclusion is worth reading in itself, as Barlett uses two people -- a technohumanist and an anarcho-primitivist -- to examine different views of freedom. Although both view the present state of things as unattractive for shared reasons, their solutions are utter opposites.  Ultimately, although there's much here to give one pause about human nature, I still find myself faintly relieved to know (as I did in reading A Renegade History of the United States) that rebellion lives.

Related:
The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, Nate Anderson
#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Cass Sunstein. Book about how highly specific internet filters and communities lead to increased polarization and disaffection.
Spam Nation, Brian Krebs

El Narco

El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
© 2012 Ioan Grillo
336 pages

El Paso, Texas, can boast one of the lowest metropolitan crime rates in the United States. Immediately opposite it on the Rio Grande, however,  Ciudad Juarez, has until recently been regarded as North America's murder capital.  Juarenses are not exceptionally violent people. but their city is one of the battlegrounds in a decade-long melee for money.  El Narco, the product of a journalist who has reported on Mexico for years, covers the origins and growth of drug-trafficking  gangs in this country so far from God and so close to the United States.   Grillo's review of the guerra contra los drogas  reveals how far-reaching the cartel wars are, not only creating a horrific bodycount, but eroding the legitimacy of government and civil order, and creating subcultures obsessed with death.

In the beginning, Mexico's narcotics farmers were surprisingly like Appalachian hill people,   who found corn liquor a lot is easier to make money off of than corn. Like America's hill people, they were organized by familial clans and sometimes competed for territory.  Prohibition in both the United States and Mexico led, in due time, to organized groups superseding the clans in many respects, but not until the end of Mexico's one-party state did the cartels run wild.   From 1929 to 1994, the 'institutional revolutionary party' held complete command in Mexico, with control so complete  that Grillo maintains throughout the book that Mexican democracy only began in 1994.  When they finally ceded power, however, their systems for maintaining order -- corrupt as they were -- disappeared with them, and ever since Mexico's leaders have been trying to fill the vacuum.

I don't live anywhere near the US-Mexican border, but in an age of global news it's hard to miss occasional stories of massacres. The most bloody violence pools around the main routes northward, as Mexico's gangs are not only moving their own goods but transporting merchandise from South America.  Because the industry is so lucrative, it's highly attractive to men and women from economically depressed areas, despite the violence. Gangland allure works its usual magic,  as disadvantaged people are drawn to the spectre of wealth, influence, and the aura of being a tough guy.  That aura is aggrandized by the Mexican tradition of corridos,  ballads that tell stories and celebrate or mourn the lives of their subjects.   Cartel smugglers and gunmen have become the heroes of a growing  library of narcocorridos,  celebrated as poor men who have made it rich by defying the man.  Considering how much of Mexico's local and state governments in the contested areas are compromised by the cartels -- sometimes local police work directly for the gangs --  one wonders how much of the man there is to defy.   Certainly the federal government and army are doing their best, but the narcos are creating their own variants of Mexican culture: one  cartel seems to have its own cult,  and another psuedo-catholic cult is centered on the worship of a female Death Angel.  As the cartels branch out into other areas of crime, like extorting protection money and kidnapping for ransom, Grillo warns that what Mexico is facing is less than a prolonged spat of gang fighting, and more like a Syrianesque insurgency.

As Grillo documents, Mexico has tried valiantly to crush the narcos through sheer force,  targeting leaders and using the movement of money to trap them.  Grillo believes that prohibition ultimately creates the financial incentive fueling these gangs, but there's little grounds for hope that drug prohibition in the US will end anytime soon: while many states are giving up on marijuana, the present attorney general is an implacable supporter of the drug war police state.  And even if a miracle happened, how long would it take for Mexico to recover from this poison that has been seeping into its soil for twenty years?

Disturbing but gripping reading.

Mean Streets

Mean Streets: Confessions of a Nightime Taxi Driver
© 2002 Peter McSherry
256 pages

Mean Streets takes readers into the dark side of Canada, or at least the dark side of Toronto. Ever since the 1970s, Peter McSherry has been driving the night shift at various cab companies,  writing about the strange people and stories the night produces along the way. In this volume many columns he's submitted to taxi publications are collected and organized in particular categories --  his experiences with drug dealers, prostitutes, and criminals on the lam, for instance, or the shady practices of tax firms -- spanning his time driving. McSherry isn't simply witness to many of these stories, but an unwilling participant in them; he is often threatened or solicited, and in his younger days was known to give chase to people who tried to stiff him on the cab fare.  Being far removed from Canada, I tend to imagine it as a bland, safe sort of place, nice to visit but not that exciting. McSherry's account certainly presents a different picture! His Toronto is just as grimy and unruly as New York City. with affair after affair recorded here that are worthy of depiction on COPS.   I didn't realize Canada, or at least Toronto, had the sort of racial strife that still besets the United States, though its came from Britain's colonial heritage, rather like France's does today.  Driving a cab was an education for McSherry, too;  originally an idealist who went to school to teach children and believed the best in everyone,  his experiences being cheated by bosses, customers, and city officials alike definitely create a world weariness.  With that, though, comes a genial tolerance both of people's failings (including his own), though he's definitely no pushover.   He readily ignores teenagers, drunks, pushy pimps, and others on the street who bitter experience has taught him are more trouble as fares than they're worth -- and if push comes to shove, he's as ready with a right cross as he is with a kind word. (Melissa Plaut, in her Hack, also learned to discriminate against teenagers, though she felt bad about it.)

Those interested in learning about the business practices of cab companies won't find too much here beyond the 1970s,  but the memoir has the usual appeal to those who like "a day in the life"  tales or true crime stories.  I noticed that McSherry prefers to drive as an independent contractor, just like Melissa in Hack;  this allows himself and other drivers to work as much or as little as they choose to, depending on their circumstances.

McSherry is, at least of 2014, still writing about driving even as he hits 70.

Related:

• Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About my Life and Started Driving a Cab, Melissa Plaut
• Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cab Driver, Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Columbine

Columbine
© 2009 Dave Cullen
417 pages

Columbine. I remember it, of course.  I was in eighth grade when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turned their high school into a bloody spectacle. That day on April 20th, 1999, is always referred to as a school shooting, but that label misses the point. Harris and Klebold weren't shooters, they were failed bombers.  They didn't turn the cafeteria and library red with blood because they had a score to settle with the jocks, they wanted to depart a world of inferiors in a blaze of glory.  Dave Cullen's Columbine is a disturbing history of the April attack, one which draws extensively from the corpus of material the two deliberately left behind.  Cullen's history has a target, though, as he aims to rebuke not only the media for creating and perpetuating various myths about the horror, but the sheriff's department for negligence and deception.   Most importantly, Cullen maintains that Harris and Klebold were not abused loners who 'snapped', but psychologically disturbed individuals who planned the attack for more than a year.

Columbine is a receptively easy read. Cullen is a journalist, and knows how to grease the runners to captivate readers with a story. The problem is the grisly subject -- or subjects. The graphic nature of the shootings isn't dwelt on overmuch, but through Cullen's research considerable time is spent in the head of Harris and Klebold. This is, to say the least, a toxic atmosphere. Cullen's thesis is that Harris was a clinical psychopath, one who could lead a double life. In society, he could be productive and charming, convincing adults into purchasing guns on his behalf, and even dating a twenty-something despite being a kid working at a pizza parlor.   By himself -- in his journals, with people he regarded as confederates -- Eric was full of contempt for society, for virtually everyone.  He acted out his contempt in 'missions' of petty vandalism and theft,  and when confronted by authority figures, could always manipulate them into believing he was repentant.  Eric was joined in these missions by Dylan Klebold, a depressive misfit who nontheless managed to snag a prom date; both boys had active social lives.

There is no doubt that the April attack was a methodically planned horror instead of a loner's 'snap'.  Not only did the boys ramble and rave in their bloodlust for months prior, but the equipment took time to purchase and put together --  for their bombs were homemade concoctions, based on plans from the internet.  The April 20th attack itself was a multi-stage drama of the horrific: first, a diversionary bomb in the outskirts of the city to draw police away, then several massive explosions would rock the school cafeteria at peak traffic time.  Hundreds would be killed by the inferno, and as students streamed out of the exits, Eric and Dylan would be waiting for them with intent of sweeping up survivors with gunfire  before their inevitable demise at the hands of the police. Still worse, their cars, parked in areas where emergency services would establish a perimeter, were rigged to blow after their deaths, adding still more chaos and death.  This is no impulsive revenge quest, but a premeditated campaign of war against the humanity they loathed. Fortunately for the students of Columbine,  all of the bombs failed to explode. and the murderous pair soon lost interested in shooting people after the first dozen, resigning themselves to self-slaughter.

Their campaign of death should not have been an ambush. Cullen notes that Eric's sociopathy, his contempt for the world, often displayed itself in the arrogant way he and Dylan both leaked information.  Harris' toxic website often broadcast his hatred for the world,  and numerous people were aware that they had guns and were experimenting with pipe bombs. The police, having previously arrested the pair for breaking into a van and stealing equipment from it, even had a warrant for a search of Eric's house -- one which was never executed.  Although Cullen labors to dispatch many minor myths associated with the Columbine attack -- the pair's association with a 'trench coat Mafia', the sole targeting of 'jocks', etc --   he rebukes local authorities far more seriously for their negligence in following up on Harris, and for attempting to conceal how high he had already registered as a potential threat from the public.

Cullen's case is simple: Eric Harris was a psychopath who essentially co-opted the suicidal tendencies of his manic-depressive buddy into an attempt  to depart a world they loathed in a manner that demonstrated their superiority over the zombies.  Some parts of his argument are stronger than others: for instance, the numerous heavyweight bombs, which would have killed hundreds indiscriminately, indicate that the two weren't just after jocks. (The intense planning obviously belies any impulsive snap, of course.)    The case for Eric's sociopathy strikes me as solid as well. Less convincing is the utter denial that Harris and Klebold were bullied, as Cullen points to their circles of friends and the fact that Harris was a bully as well.  A bully can be bullied; the two categories are not exclusive, and Klebold strikes me as an easily-bullied sort of personality. While Harris' journals are nothing but wrath and rage, Klebold is more relatable, alternating between wrath and idolization of a girl.  Numerous students have also testified in interviews that the two were subjects of abuse -- but who in a modern high school is not?  

It is never easy to dwell on this kind of rage, and strong stomachs are definitely required to endure constant exposure to Harris' utter lack of humanity.  Cullen's interesting approach -- alternating build-up and aftermath chapters -- kept me glued to the pages, and I'm grateful for a history that indicates how Columbine attempted to climb back to its feet after the attack, to reclaim the school and honor those who perished.  Columbine's story after the fact is also difficult, though, riven with lawsuits and slow-to-heal psychological wounds. But the school survives still, and these days much has changed: police have different active-shooter protocols now (immediate engagement, no more waiting for SWAT)  threats of violence are often met with zero-tolerance policies, and it is doubtful in the post 9/11 world that teenagers could get away with leaving mysterious dufflebags in the school cafeteria, ticking away.  Although a cry for stricter gun laws follows every shooting in the United States -- understandably -- Columbine also points to the limits of those laws, as the culprits' most potentially dangerous weapons, the bombs, were fashioned from ordinary consumer goods. Thank heavens Harris had to put them together at the last minute for want of safe storage space, otherwise his serial bombing might  have succeeded.   Those with intent to harm will find a way to try it; good security policies are needed to counter these threats. At Columbine, I couldn't help but notice that the sole guard was off at lunch during the attack. One guard for 2000 students?!  My high school had two deputy sheriffs, and we couldn't have boasted a thousand students on a good day.  (Of course, we were post-Columbine.)

Columbine is haunting, effective reading.

Related:

• The Ashes of Waco, Dick Reavis. The boys' April 20th assault was allegedly timed to 'honor' Timothy McVeigh, whose own bombing was allegedly revenge for the Waco massacre. 

The Pawnbroker

The Pawnbroker
© 2014 David Thurlo, Aimée Thurlo
304 pages

Charlie and Gordo are two Afghan War vets returning to civilian life, but as it turns out, parts of Albuquerque aren't that much safer than Kabul. When their friend and attorney is gravely injured in a drive-by targeting someone else, the two are obliged by honor to find and wreak vengeance on the shooters. The Pawnbroker opens with the drive-by and is loaded with fist fights and shoot-outs; Charlie and Gordon's roles in these affairs is gamely tolerated by the ABQ PD, in part because one of their officers is the live-in girlfriend of the attorney . Perhaps the definitive scene is the two leads, standing back to back and taking down a gang of tattooed gangstas with Krav Maga. The scene is later described as being one out of Rush Hour. It's accurate, because this is a buddy-cop movie in book form, but instead of two suited lady-charmers, we have two working class soldiers turned business partners. The book is filled with the kind of action Rush Hour provides, although the wisecracking isn't quite as abundant. The plot is reasonably tangled, so it's an enjoyable thriller for passing time.

Comments welcome, but I'm somewhere in the mountains..

Send More Idiots

Send More Idiots
© 2014  Tony Perez-Giese
324 pages

"What do you think of El Paso?"

"It's an armpit."

"I live here, and I don't even take offense to that."

Jon Lennox' kid brother just disappeared in Mexico. He didn't run off  with a woman, though, he disappeared in a place where the streets are paved with gunshells and which the neighbors call "Murder City",  Juarez.   Everyone else has written Chris off as another cartel casualty, even though he was a real estate broker unconnected to the drug trade, but Jon  can't let it rest.  Setting up shop in a seedy hotel in El Paso, he tries to make connections in the area that will help him discover what became of his brother.  His allies will include a telephone line-woman whose favorite word is "Cállate!", a disgraced cop, and an Iraq war vet on disability who still lingers in the Fort Bliss area to stay close to his brothers-in-arms.  In pursuit of a man's rescue, or just a strike back against the leading cartel, the three stumble into unspoken agreements between the American DEA and the lead gunman in Juarez, resulting in several shootouts and a climax at a Star Trek convention.

Send More Idiots is the opposite of bland, beginning in action and never resting. The moments between periods of active danger are filled with heated debate and discussion, as Jon tries to work out his next move and everyone tells him he's a lunatic who is going to get himself killed.  His allies are no less dangerous:  the cop has his own private revenge motive, the vet's improvised weaponry has a tendency to electrocute the user, and the linewoman's cousin is sleeping with the mob. The characters all have a vibrancy to them -- they're audacious, desperate, and completely entertaining. No less lively is the background of El Paso-Juarez,  both gritty in their ways. The narrative frame is also unusual, the story is being delivered by...the missing person. He's not very active, but every so  often he refers to 'my brother' Jon, and we're reminded, yep - -the object of Jon's search is the one telling the story, so something is up.  The characters suspect that something's up with Jon, too: instead of leaving it to the private investigators and police authorities, he's actively going into narco clubs looking for el jefe. It's as if he wants to get into trouble, and many of those who know him suspect that this episode for him is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for adventure, an opportunity to stop being the responsible-but miserable lawyer, an obedient husband-and-son, and do something outstanding and courageous.

Send More Idiots is one of the faster-paced novels I've read this year, full of comic action. Definitely one to remember..

Comments welcome, but I'm on an adventure of my own until October!

Bratva

Sons of Anarchy: Bratva
© 2014 Christopher Golden
256 pages

For Jax Teller, the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club has always been his family, its members his brothers. His father started the Sons, with a philosophy directly inspired by Emma Goldman. But over the years they became little more than another gun-and-drug-running biking gang,  and now they're not the only family in Jax's life. Not only does he have two boys to protect, but in the process of rescuing one from kidnappers, he discovered a half-sister in Ireland. Now that sister, Trinity, has gotten herself in bed with the Russian mob, who are falling apart in civil war.   In Bratva, Jax and two of his brothers ditch their colors to find out where one Russian kingpin is holed up, while not being killed by another.  It's the first unexpected foray into licensed fiction for the Sons series, not counting graphic  novels by the same artist.  Most of the characters are new (Russians and a slew of north Vegas residents destined for cemetery plots), but the three Sons in play (Jax, Chibbs, and Opie) sound in character. Gemma Teller-Morrow certainly does. The plot is fairly reminiscent of one of the episodes, with criminal politics, corrupt or complicit authorities, and a bloodbath at the end. The only thing that's missing is the show's soundtrack, which alternates between furious and melancholy rock.  It's fun enough if you're in the mood for lots of plotting, biking, and shooting,  and has enough background info that you don't need to be a viewer of Sons to roll with the plot.

Related:

• Rebels; A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers, Daniel Wolf. Sociology meets motorcycle clubs,
• Under and Alone, William Queen. In which an ATF agent infiltrates the Mongols. 
• The Aging Rebel, from a biker who describes Sons as 'cynical, shallow, and remarkably stupid'.
• Sons of Anarchy, Vol 1, Christopher Golden. Evidently he's written graphic novels, too.

Armed and Dangerous

Under and Alone: The Hunt for One of America's Most Wanted Criminals
© 2007 William Queen and Douglas Century
224 pages

When William Queen started as an ATF agent in the Los Angeles area, all the cops around agreed on one thing:  enemy #1 was that psycho who lived in the mountains, Mark Stephens.  He wasn't part of a gang, and he didn't have a pattern. He simply appeared from the wilderness every few weeks to stick pistols into the mouths of dope dealers and demand his money.  While he hadn't managed to kill anyone yet, he was an object of terror to cop and criminal alike, and daredevil Queen knew this was a man that needed taking down.   Armed and Dangerous is a semiautobiographical account of the months Queen spent working on a case against Stephens,  with reports of other busts mixed in, like that of a raid against a gang of skinheads.   To infiltrate them, Queen used a persona he'd been playing around with, that of a southern biker with fondness for dope and tenuous ties to a Klan-based organization. (That persona would become his full-time identity later on when he infiltrated the Mongols, recorded in Under and Alone)

 Although Queen's account builds toward finally convincing his bosses that infiltrating the mountain wilderness and hunting for Stephens' camp is worthwhile, Stephens' actual arrest is tame  after the dangerous climb and the escape amid a forest fire.  What isn't tame is William Queen himself,  a Vietnam special forces vet who tried racing until it proved too expensive a hobby.  He's definitely an adrenaline junkie, but happily his energies are targeted against actual psychopaths instead of blowing up people's homes to serve warrants, warrior-cop style.   This is a fast read, and not as substantial as Under and Alone, but fitting if you're in the mood for eighties cops heroics.

Related:
Under and Alone: the True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, William Queen

Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thieves
© 2015 Adam Levin
288 pages

 Looking for a growth industry? Try identity theft. Over a third of Americans have experienced some degree of outside use of their accounts, and that number will only rise as our personal data is collected in more and more places.  News reports may have alerted citizens to the need to destroy physical mail carrying their social security number and other personal information, but  even the most vigilant of privacy-protectors can’t stop outside forces from sacking institutions that use that data. Big box stores, transnational health insurance providers, even the federal government: all are vulnerable.  In Swiped, Levin maintains that if a given reader hasn’t already experienced identity theft, the odds are good that they will in the near future.   Instead of consoling oneself with the pleasant notion that such a crime can’t happen to them, he urges readers to minimize their risk, monitor their accounts, and take precautions to manage the damage.

Personal cybersecurity, covered in only a chapter of books like Future Crimes, takes center stage here, and with chapters especially devoted to identity theft arising from tax fraud and healthcare systems,  it makes for an especially pertinent read for tax season. The heaviest burden for action against identity theft is laid on the individual, for we are much more quick-footed about adapting behavior to threats than institutions, and have the most control over releasing information. Regardless of the precautions taken -- the savvy exercised -- at some point Levin believes that most people's personal accounts will be compromised.  He recommends constant scrutiny of personal records: daily bank check-ins, thorough examinations of "benefits received" from insurance companies, etc.  Finally, Levin urges readers to have an action plan for when -- not if -- they are compromised.  Know what accounts you need to freeze, what forms to file -- and don't think it stops with your death, either, because there are plenty of operators who comb the obituaries for accounts to borrow. While his emphasis is on personal vigilance, Levin also has chapters detailing ideas for business security culture, and national-level legislation.   Swiped is fast and abounding with ideas on 'data hygiene', and its emphasis on action rather than alarm makes it an welcome follow-up to Data and Goliath and Future Crimes.

Related:
Ten Don'ts On Your Digital Devices, Daniel G. Bachrach, Eric J. Rzeszut