Download or read book The Mayfair Mafia written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This true crime history reveals the shocking career of the London mafia family that ran a thriving prostitution empire for decades. From the mid-1930s into the 1950s, one immigrant Italian family ran London’s thriving vice trade. The five Messina brothers imported prostitutes from the Continent on an industrial scale, acquiring British citizenship for the women by phony marriages. Taking 80% of these women’s earnings, the Messina family became fabulously wealthy, purchasing expensive properties, cars and influence. As this revealing and absorbing account describes, the brothers ruled with a ruthless combination of charm, blackmail and threats of disfigurement and death that were all too credible. It took a sensational Sunday newspaper exposé to get the authorities to put an end to their criminal reign. A series of dramatic arrests and trials followed, as one by one the brothers were imprisoned and deported for crimes including immoral earnings, attempted bribery and firearms offenses. Such was their fortune that numerous potential beneficiaries came forward, most recently in 2012. Dick Kirby, an author and former Metropolitan police officer, presents a vividly detailed and thoroughly researched narrative of the five Messina brothers in this revealing and riveting read.

Download or read book The Devil in the Kitchen written by Marco Pierre White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exhilirating memoir from the legendary Godfather of Bad Boy cookimg and a thrilling look behind the doors of a 3-star kitchen. Without question, the original rock-star chef is Marco Pierre White. Anyone with even a passing interest in the food world knows White is a legend. The first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin stars - and also the only chef ever to give them all back - is a chain-smoking, pot-throwing multiply- married culinary genius whose fierce devotion to food and restaurants has been the only constant in a life of tabloid-ready turmoil. In The Devil in the Kitchen White tells the story behind his ascent from working-class roots to culinary greatness, leaving no dish unserved as he relays raucus and revealing tales featuring some of the biggest names in the food world and beyond, including: Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay, Albert Roux, Raymond Blanc, Michael Caine, Damien Hirst, and even Prince Charles. With candid honesty and wicked humor, he gives us insight into what it takes to become a great chef, what it's like to run a 3-star kitchen, and why sometimes you really do need to throw a cheese plate at the wall.

Download or read book Buzzie and the Bull written by Ken LaZebnik and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzzie and the Bull chronicles a baseball year in the lives of two lifelong friends who couldn’t be more different: Buzzie Bavasi, the legendary general manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, and Al “the Bull” Ferrara, bon vivant, fountain of joy, and bench player. Their 1965 baseball journey encompassed a thrilling pennant race settled on the final day of the season, a city engulfed in flames, a perfect game, and a GM who extolled his friend the Bull as a hero in May and then banished him from the team to the depths of public purgatory in July. The partnership of these two characters—the general manager who valued fearlessness above all else and the crazy player who loved living on the edge—became the embodiment of champions who never choked in the clutch. Over seventeen years, Bavasi’s teams won eight pennants and four World Series titles. His approach deserves review, and his friendship with Ferrara illustrates the ground on which he staked his baseball career. The summer of 1965 proved Bavasi’s thesis that champions are built on players with one core characteristic: nerves of steel. Buzzie and the Bull offers a counterpoint to today’s focus on advanced statistical analysis that may be crowding out the important work of discovering a player’s unique human qualities: the intangibles. Gauge those intangibles correctly and you get an edge—and edges help win championships.

Download or read book Killers Kidnappers Gangsters and Grasses written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2022-10-07 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest thrilling book, much published crime author Dick Kirby draws on his fast moving policing service, much of which was with Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Squad and the Flying Squad. As if that was not enough he brings in accounts of fellow coppers during the final decades of the 20th century to add a fresh dimension. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that Kirby and his colleagues practiced their art in a markedly different style than that prevailing today. Corners were cut, regulations ignored and pettifogging rules trampled on in the wider public interest of bringing criminals to justice and preserving law and order. Above all the best senior detectives led fearlessly. Kirby describes front line policing where the public came first and the criminals a poor second. There are great stories of arrests, ambushes, fights and meeting informants in unlikely places. Eyebrows may be raised at the book’s contents but many will feel that there is no place in the fight against serious crime for ‘woke-ness’ and political correctness and regret the passing of no-nonsense law enforcement.

Download or read book The Brighton Police Scandal written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A welcome, detailed account of the background to the prosecution of Brighton police officers around 1957 and their Chief Constable.” —History by the Yard In the late 1950s the reputation of Brighton as a popular seaside resort took a sinister and notorious turn. After a series of drunken disturbances, suspicions were raised that the owner of the Astor Club, which became known globally as “The Bucket of Blood,” was bribing members of the town’s CID to ignore licensing hours. The situation escalated to the point where Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad was called in. Their investigation soon revealed that these bribes were the tip of a police corruption iceberg. Criminality among crooked cops had been going on for years. Provided money was paid, charges were dropped, previous convictions overlooked and evidence disappeared. Others were “fitted up” unless they paid up. Police were party to burglaries, assisting in the “fencing” of stolen property and protection payments from bookmakers, clubs and bars. During the scandal filled trial of the Chief Constable and CID ringleaders there was perjury, violent witness intimidation with one having his premises burnt to the ground. All this and more is described in this meticulously researched account of one of Britain’s most publicized police corruption scandals written with insider knowledge. “Another excellent book from an established writer on the history of police and crime . . . He does not pull any punches in considering what is good and not good policing.” —The Law Society Gazette

Download or read book Scotland Yard s Murder Squad written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1906 the Metropolitan Police Commissioner was asked by the Home Office to make available skilled investigators for murder inquiries nationwide as few constabularies had sufficiently skilled – or indeed, any - detectives. Thus was born the Reserve Squad, or Murder Squad, as it later became known. Despite a reluctance by some forces to call upon The Met, the Murder Squad has proved its effectiveness on countless occasions with its remit extended to British territories overseas. A particularly sensitive case was the murder of a local superintendent on St Kitts and Nevis. A former Scotland Yard detective, the author uses his contacts and experiences to get the inside track on a gruesome collection of infamous cases. Child murderers, a Peer’s butler, a King’s housekeeper, gangsters, jealous spouses and the notorious mass murderer Dr Bodkin Adams compete for space in this spine-chilling and gripping book which is testament to the Murder Squad’s skills and ingenuity - and the evil of the perpetrators. Brimming with gruesome killings, this highly readable book proves that there is no substitute for old fashioned footwork and instinct.

Download or read book The Racetrack Gangs written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “So if you’re a fan of Peaky Blinders and want to read the true stories behind those characters and tales . . . this is the book for you.” —Britain’s Gangland Magazine Between the two World Wars, there was a dramatic upsurge of violence as rival criminal gangs vied for rich pickings from bookmakers at racetracks throughout England. With ready access to cash, “bookies” were a magnet for mobsters’ blackmailing demands. Refusal to pay resulted in severe punishment. Their justified fears spawned a ready “protection” market. Conflict between rival gangs were frequent and increasingly violent. Charles “Darby” Sabini with his brothers ran “The Italian Mob” who clashed with Billy Kimber and his Brummagen Hammers. Uneasy partnerships were formed but seldom lasted. The Sabinis were friendly with the Cortesi family until a rift resulted in one of the Cortesis shooting Harryboy Sabini. Other gangs such as The Titanics and The Nile Mob were ready to fill voids. As well as broken alliances, internal friction and members changing sides resulted in bloodshed on the streets, in pubs and clubs and on the courses. Public order was so threatened that the Flying Squad was tasked with the eradication of the problem and, in 1936, the celebrated Battle of Lewes Racecourse brought matters to a bloody conclusion. This well researched and gripping account describes the vicious dramas played out in the 1920s and 1930s.

Download or read book Missing Presumed Murdered written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former Scotland Yard detective examines real cases of murder in which accused criminals were convicted without a body found. Murders in any form, and the more gruesome the better, hold a morbid fascination to the British public but never more so than when the bodies of the victims are never found. Aside from the lack of closure for relatives and friends, this factor creates problems for police and prosecutors and has macabre appeal for the public. Muriel McKay, wife of a senior News of the World Executive was kidnapped in 1969. Although her body, believed to have been fed to pigs, was never found, the perpetrators were convicted. The same fate was suffered by the business partner of a Polish farmer. James Camb murdered a glamorous actress feeding her to sharks but this did not stop women flocking to see him in court. John Haigh confessed to disposing of his nine victims in acid. Again, his trial was a sell-out. Dick Kirby, former Scotland Yard detective turned best-selling crime writer has ‘unearthed’ a fascinating collection of disappearances such as the dismemberment of a gay man’s wife who had threatened to expose him in the 1950s. Later, when a woman’s head was discovered near his home, he confessed only to find that it dated from Roman times. These and numerous other cases make Missing, Presumed Murdered a riveting, if grisly, read.

Download or read book Scotland Yard s Casebook of Serious Crime written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real-life stories of cops vs. criminals from a veteran of the Metropolitan Police and author praised for his “engaging style” (Joseph Wambaugh, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Harbor Nocturne). Dick Kirby, former long-serving Met officer and bestselling author, recounts the policing of the twentieth century, when uniformed officers were visibly part of the community, patrolling their beats and protecting the public’s property. Detectives detected, cultivating informants and, like their uniform counterparts, knowing the characters on their manor. What’s more, they were backed by their senior officers, who had on-the-job experience. Drawing on both celebrated and lesser known cases, Kirby describes in plain speak crime-fighting against merciless gangsters, desperate gunmen, inept kidnappers, vicious robbers, daring burglars, and ruthless blackmailers. Using his firsthand knowledge, he highlights the often-unconventional methods used to frustrate and outwit hardened criminals—and the satisfaction gained from successful operations. Praise for Dick Kirby’s previous books “A gritty series of episodes from his time in the Met—laced with black humor and humanity.” —East Anglian Daily Times “A great read with fascinating stories and amusing anecdotes.” —Suffolk Norfolk Life Magazine

Download or read book Summary of Marco Pierre White s The Devil in the Kitchen written by Milkyway Media and published by Milkyway Media. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get the Summary of Marco Pierre White's The Devil in the Kitchen in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "The Devil in the Kitchen" is the autobiography of Marco Pierre White, a celebrated chef with a reputation for perfectionism and a fiery temperament. White's journey begins with his childhood in Leeds, marked by the loss of his mother and the influence of his chef father. His father's strict discipline and gambling habits, along with White's dyslexia and loneliness, shaped his resilience and outsider perspective...

Download or read book Googling Arthur written by Tyne O'Connell and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book IRA Terror on Britain s Streets 1939 1940 written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2021-04-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is little known today that, in January 1939, the IRA launched a bombing campaign, codenamed The S - or Sabotage - Plan on mainland England. With cynical self-justification, they announced that it was not their intention to harm human life but in just over a year, more than 300 explosive devices resulted in 10 deaths, 96 injuries and widespread devastation. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and many other towns and cities were targeted. On 25 August 1939, detectives in London defused three devices set to detonate that afternoon at 2.30 and arrested four terrorists. At the same time an identical bomb exploded in Coventry city centre killing five civilians and injuring 50, the highest body count of the campaign. Numerous arrests were made nationwide but ill-trained personnel and additional national security resulting from the threat of Nazi invasion caused the campaign to falter and fade away in early 1940. The author, a former detective, is well qualified to write this book, having spent 18 months in Northern Ireland combatting terrorism, for which he was commended by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Imbert, for displaying ‘courage, dedication and detective ability’.

Download or read book Mafialand formerly published as Shadowland written by Douglas Thompson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mafialand is a revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller spanning much of the twentieth century, a page-turning chronicle of an elaborate Mafia plan to 'invade' Europe using 1960s London as a bridgehead. The capital city of the Swinging Sixties was also a world of gambling, guns and gangsters. Several veterans of the era are astonished that they survived it and some feel protected enough - now that most of the killers are themselves dead - to reveal to bestselling author Douglas Thompson the details and secrets of one of history's greatest criminal conspiracies, and of how world-champion boxer Freddie Mills really died. Mafialand (previously published as Shadowland) recounts events from the viewpoint of the pawns as well as the kingmakers. Brutal, terrifying and intrigue-packed, it is an account of the Mob's Machiavellian global manipulation of governments and officials. All the big players of Mob history are here, controlled by the gangster genius Meyer Lansky, but so are the hit men, the fixers, the hoodlums and the wiseguys.

Download or read book Scotland Yard s Flying Squad written by Dick Kirby and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the famed London police unit, by a former member and author who “knows how to bring his coppers to life on each page” (Joseph Wambaugh, New York Times–bestselling author of The Onion Field). Since 1919, Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad has been in the forefront of the war against crime. From patrolling London’s streets in horse-drawn wagons, it has progressed to the use of the most sophisticated surveillance and crime-fighting equipment. The Squad targeted protection gangs who infested British racecourses and greyhound tracks, and later the highly effective Ghost Squad was formed to tackle black-marketeering in the aftermath of the Second World War. As crime soared in the 1950s and ’60s the Flying Squad, or C8 Department as it was now known, became involved in the most serious cases nationwide—The Great Train Robbery, the Brink’s-Mat robbery, The Millennium Dome and Hatton Garden heists. Today the ruthless drug and people trafficking gangs that seek rich pickings in London and elsewhere are in their sights. Despite many high-profile successes, allegations of corruption have haunted the Flying Squad, and after the conviction of officers in 2001 there was a very real possibility of disbandment. Yet this most famous of police units survived—and today continues to fight and be feared by the hardest of criminals. This book draws on firsthand accounts to tell the Flying Squad’s thrilling story, and includes a foreword by John O’Connor, a former commander. “A book that true crime aficionados will want to read.” —Washington Times

Download or read book The Hagley Wood Murder written by M. J. Trow and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which too place eighty years ago. In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right. McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime!

Download or read book Gifts Favors and Banquets written by Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Download or read book Supermob written by Gus Russo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-12 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is investigative reporter Gus Russo's most explosive book yet, the remarkable story of the "Supermob"-a cadre of men who, over the course of decades, secretly influenced nearly every aspect of American society. Presenting startling revelations about such famous members as Jules Stein, Joe Glaser, Ronald Reagan, Lew Wasserman, and John Jacob Factor-as well as infamous, low-profile members-Russo pulls the lid off of a half-century of criminal infiltration into American business, politics, and society. At the heart of it all is Sidney "The Fixer" Korshak, who from the 1940s until his death in the 1990s was not only the most powerful lawyer in the world, according to the FBI, but the enigmatic player behind countless twentieth-century power mergers, political deals, and organized crime chicaneries.