Download or read book Corrupt City Saga written by Tra Verdejo and published by Urban Books. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Donald “Lucky” Gibson. He’s considered one of the best detectives around, until he joins his new unit, a team of corrupt cops who are just as bad as the criminals they are supposed to be catching. Lucky soon falls into the trap and becomes one more thug with a badge. Years of abusing his position have led to an out of control cocaine habit, the loss of his family, and a love affair with a young runaway prostitute, but Lucky has had enough. After an innocent black man is killed by his white partners, Lucky testifies against them. He uses the media to expose his dirty team, including his captain and the commissioner. Now Lucky is a marked man, and even the mayor wants him dead. Corruption does not begin to describe what the law enforcement and government officials represent. With trickery in each chapter, this must-read novel will have you cheering for the bad guys, while wondering who can be trusted, who is behind the foul events that unfold, and where the corruption will end. You won't be able to put this book down until you discover all the answers. Welcome to Corrupt City Saga, where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, and every character is a suspect. Tra Verdejo is entering the street lit scene with a raw style that will quickly put him on top.

Download or read book Corrupt City Saga written by Tra Verdejo and published by Urban Books. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Donald 'Lucky' Gibson. He's considered one of the best detectives around, until he joins his new unit, a team of corrupt cops who are just as bad as the criminals they are supposed to be catching. Lucky soon falls into the trap and becomes one more thug with a badge. After an innocent black man is killed by his white partners, Lucky testifies against them. He uses the media to expose his dirty team, including his captain and the commissioner. Now Lucky is a marked man, and even the mayor wants him dead.

Download or read book Corrupt City written by Tra Verdejo and published by Urban Books. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Donald "Lucky" Gibson, an African-America detective. He was considered one of the best, until he joined his last unit. He quickly became corrupted. Instead of catching criminals, these cops were acting like one. They were labeled legal thugs with guns. After years of abusing his badge which led to an out of control coke habit, losing his family and falling in love with a young runaway prostitute. Lucky had enough. One night after an innocent Blackman was killed by his white partners, he testified in court. He used the media to expose his dirty team including his Captain and the Commissioner. After that, he became a marked man. Even the Mayor wanted him dead, Welcome to Corrupt City This crime filled drama places you in the middle of the belly of the beast. Grab hold of your seat because this action packed, page-turner will have you falling off the edge with anticipation. Every twist is unexpected and every character is a suspect.

Download or read book Bad City written by Paul Pringle and published by Celadon Books. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability." —The New York Times For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds. On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow. But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom. Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.

Download or read book Corrupt written by Penelope Douglas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreams might be a heart’s desire, but nightmares are its obsession in the first novel of a dark romance series from New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas. Erika Fane’s boyfriend's older brother is handsome, strong, and completely terrifying. The star of his college's basketball team gone pro, he's more concerned with the dirt on his shoe than he is with her. But she saw him. She heard him. The things that he did, and the deeds that he hid... For years, Erika bit her nails, unable to look away. Now, she’s in college, but she hasn’t stopped watching him. He’s bad and the things she’s seen aren’t content to stay in her head anymore. Because he's finally noticed her. But Michael Crist knows the hold he has on Rika, how much she fears him. She looks down when he enters the room and stills when he’s close. He knows she thinks only of him. When Michael’s brother leaves for the military, leaving Rika alone and unprotected, he knows the opportunity is too good to be true. Three years ago she put Michael’s friends in prison, and now they’re free. Every last one of her nightmares is about to come true.

Download or read book The Failure of Governance in Bell California written by Thom Reilly and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How could this have happened?” The question still lingers among officials and residents of the small southern California town of Bell. Corruption is hardly an isolated challenge to the governance of America’s cities. But following decades of benign obscurity, Bell witnessed the emergence of a truly astonishing level of public wrongdoing—a level succinctly described by Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley as “corruption on steroids.” Even discounting the enormous sums involved—the top administrator paid himself nearly $800,000 a year in a town with a $35,000 average income—this was no ordinary failure of governance. The picture that emerges from years of federal, state, and local investigations, trials, depositions, and media accounts is of an elaborate culture of corruption and deceit created and sustained by top city administrators, councilmembers, police officers, numerous municipal employees, and consultants. The Failure of Governance in Bell California: Big-Time Corruption in a Small Town details how Bell was rendered vulnerable to such massive malfeasance by a disengaged public, lack of established ethical norms, absence of effective checks and balances, and minimal coverage by an overextended area news media. It is a grim and nearly unbelievable story. Yet even these factors fail to fully explain how such large-scale corruption could have arisen. More specifically, how did it occur within a structure—the council-manager form of government—that had been deliberately designed to promote good governance? Why were so many officials and employees prepared to participate in or overlook the ongoing corruption? To what degree can theories of governance, such as contagion theory or the “rover bandit” theme, explain the success of such blatant wrongdoing? The Failure of Governance, by Arizona State University Professor Thom Reilly—himself former county manager of Clark County, Nevada—pursues answers to these and related questions through an analysis of municipal operations that will afford the reader deeper insight into the inner workings of city governments—corrupt and otherwise. By considering factors arising from both theory and practice, Reilly makes clear, in other words, why the sad saga of Bell, California represents both a case study and a warning.

Download or read book Killing the Poormaster written by Holly Metz and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 25, 1938, in the early days of the welfare system, the reviled poormaster Harry Barck—wielding power over who would receive public aid—died from a paper spike thrust into his heart. Barck was murdered, the prosecution would assert, by an unemployed mason named Joe Scutellaro. In denying Scutellaro money, Barck had suggested the man's wife prostitute herself on the streets rather than ask the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, for aid. The men scuffled. Scutellaro insisted that Barck fell on his spike; the police claimed he grabbed the spike and stabbed Barck. News of the poormaster's death brought national attention to the plight of ten million unemployed living in desperate circumstances. A team led by celebrated attorney Samuel Leibowitz of &“Scottsboro Boys&” fame worked to save Scutellaro from the electric chair, arguing that the jobless man's struggle with the poormaster was a symbol of larger social ills. The trial became an indictment &“of a system which expects a man to live, in this great democracy, under such shameful circumstances.&” We live in a time where the issues examined in Killing the Poormaster—massive unemployment, endemic poverty, and the inadequacy of public assistance—remain vital. With its insight into our social contract, Killing the Poormaster reads like today's news.

Download or read book Grafters and Goo Goos written by James L. Merriner and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the roles of politicians and reformers in Chicago against a backdrop of social history from 1833-2003.

Download or read book We Own This City written by Justin Fenton and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • The astonishing true story of “one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city NOW AN HBO SERIES FROM THE WIRE CREATOR DAVID SIMON AND GEORGE PELECANOS “A work of journalism that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit but can stand as the inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war.”—David Simon Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging, and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year, in a city of just 600,000 people. Facing pressure from the mayor’s office—as well as a federal investigation of the department over Gray’s death—Baltimore police commanders turn to a rank-and-file hero, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, to help get guns and drugs off the street. But behind these new efforts, a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scale was unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city’s drug and gun crisis, Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. With other members of the empowered Gun Trace Task Force, Jenkins stole from Baltimore’s citizens—skimming from drug busts, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes, and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent. Their brazen crime spree would go unchecked for years. The results were countless wrongful convictions, the death of an innocent civilian, and the mysterious death of one cop who was shot in the head, killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify against the unit. In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.

Download or read book A Bright and Guilty Place written by Richard Rayner and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year The Los Angeles Times • The Washington Post Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir.

Download or read book The Wrong Stuff written by Marcus Stern and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2007-08-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles the celebrated war hero and congressman whose deeds shocked the nation when he was unveiled as the most corrupt congressman in United States history, charting his rise and fall and exposing the seedy side of American politics.

Download or read book Busted written by Wendy Ruderman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vein of Erin Brockovich, The Departed, and T. J. English's Savage City comes Busted, the shocking true story of the biggest police corruption scandal in Philadelphia history, a tale of drugs, power, and abuse involving a rogue narcotics squad, a confidential informant, and two veteran journalists whose reporting drove a full-scale FBI probe, rocked the City of Brotherly Love, and earned a Pulitzer Prize . In 2003, Benny Martinez became a Confidential Informant for a member of the Philadelphia Police Department's narcotics squad, helping arrest nearly 200 drug and gun dealers over seven years. But that success masked a dark and dangerous reality: the cops were as corrupt as the criminals they targeted. In addition to fabricating busts, the squad systematically looted mom-and-pop stores, terrorizing hardworking immigrant owners. One squad member also sexually assaulted three women during raids. Frightened for his life, Martinez turned to Philadelphia Daily News reporters Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker. Busted chronicles how these two journalists—both middle-class working mothers—formed an unlikely bond with a convicted street dealer to uncover the secrets of ruthless kingpins and dirty cops. Professionals in an industry shrinking from severe financial cutbacks, Ruderman and Laker had few resources—besides their own grit and tenacity—to break a dangerous, complex story that would expose the rotten underbelly of a modern American city and earn them a Pulitzer Prize. A page-turning thriller based on superb reportage, illustrated with eight pages of photos, Busted is modern true crime at its finest.

Download or read book City of Dreams written by Beverly Swerling and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping epic of two families—one Dutch, one English—from the time when New Amsterdam was a raw and rowdy settlement, to the triumph of the Revolution, when New York became a new nation’s city of dreams. In 1661, Lucas Turner, a barber surgeon, and his sister, Sally, an apothecary, stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven weeks at sea. Bound to each other by blood and necessity, they aim to make a fresh start in the rough and rowdy Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam; but soon lust, betrayal, and murder will make them mortal enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, Lucas and Sally make choices that will burden their descendants with a legacy of secrets and retribution, and create a heritage that sets cousin against cousin, physician against surgeon, and, ultimately, patriot against Tory. In what will be the greatest city in the New World, the fortunes of these two families are inextricably entwined by blood and fire in an unforgettable American saga of pride and ambition, love and hate, and the becoming of the dream that is New York City.

Download or read book City of Angels written by Tracie Peterson and published by Bethany House. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The courtrooms of 1903 Los Angeles are a man's world -- until Kit Shannon arrives ...

Download or read book Kingdom of Corruption written by Bella Di Corte and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My husband had been keeping a secret from me-a secret that would irrevocably change the course of our lives. He was the son of one of the most ruthless men alive, and an heir to the infamous Fausti crime family. They were beautiful, powerful, ruthless-royalty in their beloved Italy and beyond. Though I was under their protection, the monster who craved me would stop at nothing to have me. He demanded blood as the price for revenge. The clandestine life my husband led pulled us deeper into a dangerous world, and his vengeance came at my expense. I became the one with a secret to keep-a secret that might kill me in the end. Book IV in an eight-part Royal Organized Crime Romance saga.** Previously released as The Beautiful Years IV **

Download or read book City of God written by Beverly Swerling and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He has sworn to protect the innocent through the ages... Malcolm is a newly chosen Master, a novice to his extraordinary – and dangerous – powers. When his lack of control results in a woman's death he's determined to fight his darkest desires, denying himself all pleasure...until fate sends him bookseller Claire. Yet nothing can prepare safety-conscious Claire for powerful medieval warrior Malcolm sweeping her back into his time. In this treacherous world Claire needs Malcolm to survive, but she must somehow keep him at arm's length. For Malcolm's soul is at stake – and fulfilling his desires could prove fatal...

Download or read book They Wished They Were Honest written by Michael F. Armstrong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In fifty years of prosecuting and defending criminal cases in New York City and elsewhere,Michael F. Armstrong has often dealt with cops. For a single two-year span, as chief counsel to the Knapp Commission, he was charged with investigating them. Based on Armstrong's vivid recollections of this watershed moment in law enforcement accountability—prompted by the New York Times's report on whistleblower cop Frank Serpico—They Wished They Were Honest recreates the dramatic struggles and significance of the Commission and explores the factors that led to its success and the restoration of the NYPD's public image. Serpico's charges against the NYPD encouraged Mayor John Lindsay to appoint prominent attorney Whitman Knapp to chair a Citizen's Commission on police graft. Overcoming a number of organizational, budgetary, and political hurdles, Chief Counsel Armstrong cobbled together an investigative group of a half-dozen lawyers and a dozen agents. Just when funding was about to run out, the "blue wall of silence" collapsed. A flamboyant "Madame," a corrupt lawyer, and a weasely informant led to a "super thief" cop, who was trapped and "turned" by the Commission. This led to sensational and revelatory hearings, which publicly refuted the notion that departmental corruption was limited to only a "few rotten apples." In the course of his narrative, Armstrong illuminates police investigative strategy; governmental and departmental political maneuvering; ethical and philosophical issues in law enforcement; the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the police's anticorruption efforts; the effectiveness of the training of police officers; the psychological and emotional pressures that lead to corruption; and the effects of police criminality on individuals and society. He concludes with the effects, in today's world, of Knapp and succeeding investigations into police corruption and the value of permanent outside monitoring bodies, such as the special prosecutor's office, formed in response to the Commission's recommendation, as well as the current monitoring commission, of which Armstrong is chairman.