Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Criminals & Outlaws

I grew up in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston and became partners with James "Whitey" Bulger, who I always called Jimmy.

Jimmy and I, we were unstoppable. We took what we wanted. And we made people disappear--permanently. We made millions. And if someone ratted us out, we killed him. We were not nice guys.

I found out that Jimmy had been an FBI informant in 1999, and my life was never the same. When the feds finally got me, I was faced with something Jimmy would have killed me for--cooperating with the authorities. I pled guilty to twenty-nine counts, including...

Written by an inmate serving 45 years for a drug conviction when he was 23, this is an in-depth view living behind bars from the perspective of prisoners themselves. Sections of the book are based on length of imprisonment. Prisoners in Fort Dix, N.J., detail their unique experiences, thoughts, and feelings about life on the inside. Some describe the actions that lead to their confinement, or detail the complexities of living in all-male communities. Others reveal the ways they cope with their terms, or the expectations they have for life after prison.

Santos offers the...

When Ernie Lopez was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, his father beat him when he failed to bring home the expected eighty to ninety cents a day. When the beatings became unbearable, he took to petty stealing to make up the difference. As his thefts succeeded, Ernie's sense of necessity got tangled up with ambition and adventure. At thirteen, a joyride in a stolen car led to a sentence in California's harshest juvenile reformatory. The system's failure to show any mercy soon propelled Lopez into a cycle of crime and incarceration that resulted in his spending decades...

Inside the Crips is a memoir of Colton Simpson's life as a Crip -- beginning at the tender age of ten in the mid 70s -- and his prison turnaround twenty-five years later.

On August 9, 2001, 22 days after Archer--now known as Prisoner FF8282--was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury, he was transferred from a maximum security prison in London to HMP Wayland, a medium security prison in Norfolk. For the next 67 days, as he waited to be reclassified for an "open," minimum security prison, he encountered not only the daily degradations of a dangerously overstretched prison system but also the spirit and courage of his fellow inmates.
Purgatory: A Prison Diary, Volume 2, is Archer's frank, shocking, sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying...

Life on the Outside tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen years in Bedford Hills prison for selling cocaine--a first offense--under New York's Rockefeller drug laws. The book opens on the morning of January 26, 2000, when Bartlett is set free and returns to New York City. At 42, she has virtually nothing: no money, no job, no real home.

All she does have is a large and troubled family, including four children, who live in a decrepit housing project on the Lower East Side. "I left one prison to come home to another," Elaine says. Over the next months, she...

For more than 70 years, Al Capone has been equated with wealth, violence, and corruption. As America's most infamous criminal, he has intrigued, attracted, and repulsed the general public with his legendary criminal deeds. This concise biography separates the myth from the man. Beginning with a historical look at corruption in American society--along with a clarification of the terms Black Hand, Mafia, and Organized Crime--Capone is presented in his own time and place. A timeline summarizes the events of his life and career. A thorough bibliography of print and electronic sources will...

Motivated by greed and sadism--or perhaps by poverty and boredom--star-crossed lovers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow set out on a series of robberies throughout the American Southwest, many of which ended in murder. Frustrated by the suffocating poverty of the Great Depression, they were especially eager to target their oppressors--banks, store owners, and at times, the police. Their numerous crimes triggered an FBI manhunt, but their Robin-Hood ethos made them heroes in the eyes of many, establishing their place as legends of American folklore. This objective volume paints a realistic...

"Carolly Erickson is one of the most accomplished and successful historical biographers writing in English."
-The Times Literary Supplement

The First Elizabeth

"Even more readable and absorbing than the justly praised works of Tuchman and Fraser. A vivid and eminently readable portrait of history's favorite Tudor."
-The New York Times Book Review

"A masterpiece of narrative, a story so absorbing it is as hard to put down as a fine novel."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

Alexandra

"Gifted . . . breathless . . . heartbreaking . . . Erickson...