Breaking the Code

Breaking the Code: A True Story by a Hells Angel President and the Cop Who Pursued Him, by Pat Matter and Chris Omodt. A highly respected Hells Angel president. An honest, hard-working cop. Both of their lives on totally different paths until their worlds collide... "With no holds barred, Omodt and Matter rip back the curtain of seedy reality and toss you headlong into the complex relationships of biker gangs and the cops whose job it is to pursue them. The writing is graphic, truthful, revealing and explores both sides of the law-the right side, and the wrong side-with equal detail. For lovers of true crime writing this is a must-read." - Mark Reps, author, Sheriff Zeb Hanks crime series "The story of an adversarial relationship that turned into one of the most unlikely, remarkable friendships I've ever been exposed to. And, as written by the two protagonists, BREAKING THE CODE is told in the most authentic voice you'll ever read. Beyond the true crime audience, this is a story filled with so much humanity it must be experienced by all readers." - Ali Selim, writer and director of the award-winning film, Sweet Land

Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano

Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger's Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld, by Howie Carr. Martin Scorsese's The Departed barely touched on his story. Now radio talk-show sensation, crime reporter, and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr takes us into the heart of the life of Johnny Martorano.

For two decades, Martorano struck fear into anyone even remotely connected to his world. His partnership with Whitey Bulger and the infamous Winter Hill Gang led to twenty murders... for which Johnny would serve twelve years in prison. Carr also looks at the politicians and FBI agents who aided Johnny and Whitey, and at the flamboyant city of Boston, which Martorano so ruthlessly ruled.

A plethora of paradoxes, Johnny Martorano was Mr. Mom by day and man-about-town by night. Surrounded by fast-living politicians, sports celebrities, and showbiz entertainers, Johnny was charismatically colorful--as charming as he was frightening. After all, he was, in the end... a hitman. Click here for more information or to order or download.

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagans Motorcycle Club

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagans Motorcycle Club, by Anthony "LT" Menginie and Kerrie Droban. By the time he was thirteen, he already had attended thirteen funerals. Abandoned by his mother, and with his father, “Mangy” Menginie—president of the Pagans Motorcycle Club, Philadelphia chapter—in jail, Anthony “LT” Menginie is raised inside the Pagans and inducted into a life of sex, violence, drugs, and organized crime.

In Mangy’s absence, LT finds a father figure in the Saint, a club member who helps teach him the difference between the club members you respect…and those you fear. The author recounts the power struggles that occur when Mangy is released from jail and tries to resume his role as father and president. Soon all hell breaks loose when Mangy betrays the club by going over to the rival Hells Angels, helping to touch off the “Biker Wars” in Philadelphia. The chapter’s new president grooms LT to one day confront his father for his treachery. Faced with an impossible decision, LT has to decide where his loyalties lie.

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son is a voyeuristic glimpse into the shocking and hypnotic underworld of notorious “one-percenter” biker clubs, hit men, drug dealers, and the other individuals who operate under no other rules than the “club code.” But more than this, Menginie’s story is the gritty and powerful true tale of surviving amid personal trials and tragedies, and of one man’s determination to escape to a better life. Click here for more information or to order.

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The Rise And Fall Of The Dillinger Gang

The Rise And Fall Of The Dillinger Gang, by Jeffery S. King. As the roaring twenties faded and the Great Depression began, several inmates of the Indiana prison system began an association that eventually erupted into violence and death across the Midwest. One of the members of the group, John Dillinger, spent time at both the Indiana State Reformatory at Pendleton and the state prison at Michigan City from 1924 to 1933. History of a sort was in the making, and the idea of the Dillinger gang was born behind these walls. Paroled in May 1933 after serving a prison term for attempted robbery, Dillinger organized a gang that spread terror across the Midwest from 1933 to 1934, perhaps killing as many as 16 persons and robbing as many as 20 banks. He escaped jail twice and was declared "Public Enemy No. One" before being killed by FBI agents in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DILLINGER GANG is about the nine major members of the Dillinger Gang: John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Homer Van Meter, Eddie Green, Harry Pierpont, Charley Makely, Russell Lee Clark, John Hamilton, and Thomas Carroll. With the exception of Clark, who received a life sentence behind bars, all of the gangsters met violent deaths before the end of 1934. While several serious full-length biographies have been written about Dillinger and one on Nelson, there are no major biographies of the other gang members.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DILLINGER GANG corrects this oversight. Utilizing FBI files, court records, prison records, local newspapers, and books as sources, Jeffery S. King provides insight into crime conditions in the 1920s and the war on crime in the early 1930s. The rise of the FBI and bureau officials Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover is an important part of the story, as is background information about the extensive criminal activities of the Dillinger gangsters before they joined the gang and the ultimate fates of the Dillinger-era lawmen and criminals.

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Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., by Luis J. Rodriguez. By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as drugs, murder, suicide, and senseless acts of street crime claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation. Achieving success as an award-winning Chicano poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more -- until his son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in Always Running, a vivid memoir that explores the motivations of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants. At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-learned lesson for the next generation.

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A Wayward Angel: The Full-Story of the Hell's Angels by the Former Vice-President of the Oakland Chapter

A Wayward Angel: The Full-Story of the Hell's Angels by the Former Vice-President of the Oakland Chapter, by George Wethern and Vincent Colnett. We all know about the Hell's Angels: toughs on Harleys terrorizing the law-abiding; wild brawls and wild sex; drugs and cruelty, beatings, and even murder. Their barbarism, we think, is horrifying, but it's also perversely fascinating, for there's an alluring freedom in such nihilism. Still, nobody knows what it's like to be an Angel except an Angel - an Angel like George Wethern, for many years the vice president of the Oakland Chapter.

Until he found himself in reluctant service to the courts, Wethern was the quintessential Angel, tough as they come, one of the most important drug dealers on the West Coast - a man who loved bikes, fights, women, and drugs; a man who knew the deepest secrets of Angel life. Arrested, strung out, in despair, he bought a precarious freedom by testifying in several major trials against Angel's members - and then disappeared into the witness protection program.

A Wayward Angel is a powerful book, not for the squeamish, and a vivid portrait of the chaos of late twentieth-century California, the awful collision of the drug scene and the alienation of modern life – a story uniquely American, terrifying because it's real. We witness killings, million-dollar drug deals, "picnics" that are nothing short of orgies, and the sometimes bizarre inner workings of the biker club.

Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang

Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang, Colton Simpson and Ann Pearlman. Colton (“C-Loc”) Simpson was a Crip. Beginning at the impossibly tender age of ten in the mid-1970s, Simpson’s world was defined in terms of war. By the time he quit—the first gang member allowed to do so—he’d risen through the ranks to become Stabilizer and later, General. Simpson was the son of Dick Simpson, a ballplayer for the California Angels, but even before he became a gangbanger, his childhood was tough. Raised by his grandmother at the edge of Los Angeles’s South Central, Simpson didn’t turn to the streets so much as become engulfed by them: without asking to be part of the gang, his induction into the Crips involved running down an alley while the members opened fire on him as he ran.

Simpson was an elite gang soldier, loyal to a fault, participating wholly in a system whose rules and unique ethics he quickly mastered. But Simpson’s run at the top of the Crips was cut off by betrayal, injury, and a prison stint that plunged him into an even fiercer war beyond gang violence: the war in Calapatria prison between the Crips and the corrections officers. It’s impossible not to care about the youth Simpson was, or about Simpson’s fellow gangbanger Smiley, or about Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who eventually married Simpson in prison. INSIDE THE CRIPS is an intimate detailed look at gang life in the 1970s-1990s, and at the same time a story of both buoyant camaraderie and devastating loss. It places the reader in the center of the rush that comes from participating in gang violence and puts the extraordinary life and times of one Crip into a larger context.