“On October 23, 1935 a rusty, steel-jacketed .45 slug tore through the body of Dutch Schultz. The Beer Baron of the Bronx and king of Harlem’s numbers racket had finally gone too far.” Schultz had defied the underworld’s “Big Six” by vowing to gun down Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey, an act that would have brought enormous heat down on the New York mob. Chronicles his rapid rise, fueled by Prohibition, his “Gotham bloodbath” war with rival Mad Dog Vincent Coll, and the details of his famous restaurant rub-out. Schultz, born Arthur Flegenheimer, age 33, got hit relieving himself at a urinal in the Palace Chop House, in Newark, New Jersey. He then walked out, clutching his side, and collapsed at a nearby table, where the famous “death photo” was taken. He actually died later in a hospital of peritonitis. His “deathbed swan song,” recorded by the police is a wiseguy’s ode to motherhood, America, the devil, paranoia, guilt, friends and promises, peppered with food slang of the times (dog biscuits [money), onions [girls), and pretzels [Germans]). Written by an editor of the New York Post, on staff in the ‘30s. GR

Publisher: Da Capo
Paperback: 337 pages
Illustrated

Outlaw urban history from the author of Evidence. Presents the Goodfellas side of the immigrant experience in Old New York, from 1840 through 1919. “There were times,” writes the author, “when this project was new, when my research would get the better of me and I would almost lose track of what year it was outside. At least once, late at night, and under the influence of alcohol and architecture and old copies of the Police Gazette, I staggered around looking for a dive that had closed 60 or 80 years before, half expecting to find it in mid-brawl. This kind of hallucination is not difficult to sustain, even now, on certain empty streets where the buildings are the same ones that were once chockablock with blind tigers, stuss joints and bagnios. An extraordinary number of edifices survive that formerly housed the worst deadfalls in the city, from Kit Burn’s Rat Pit to McGurk’s Suicide Hall. I was instinctively drawn to such places.” Shows where we got the Bowery Boys, the Mickey Finn, Hell’s Kitchen, the “joint,” “dope” and Dixie. Look for the book The Gangs of New York, written in 1929, for more dirty details. GR

Publisher: Vintage
Paperback: 414 pages
Illustrated

Pornography goes to war. “Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement and systematic attempts to impregnate—all in the name of ‘ethnic cleansing.”’ It’s the old Nazi Holocaust gambit brought into the ‘90s with a sicko porn twist. With this war, states the author, pornography emerges as a tool of genocide. One witness writes: “Some massacres in villages as well as rapes and/or executions in camps are being videotaped as they’re happening… In front of the camera, one beats you and the other—excuse me—fucks you, he puts his truncheon in you, and he films all that… We even had to sing Serbian songs… in front of the camera.” Told in political and social essays and interviews with some 20 women, primarily of Muslim origin, and three Serbian perpetrators. GR

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 232 pages

“Terry returned to the nature of the job. ‘This guy told me he could do anything you wanted …’
‘Would you do it to the girl, or do it to the mother?’ Wanda asked. ‘The girl is harder to get rid of. The mother ain’t no problem, once you get rid of the girl …’
‘I think if a car wrecked, where they both died, if the car blew up or something, it might be different,’ Wanda mused. ‘An impact, an explosion or something, you know what I’m talking about? Then it wouldn’t look so obvious… ‘
‘This guy, he don’t like doing children, alright?’ Terry explained. ‘Seventy-five hundred dollars is the most for both of them to be dead …’
‘Well, I have to find some money, I need to get some money,’ Wanda explained.” GR

Publisher: Birch Lane
Hardback: 256 pages
Illustrated

A good read for “armchair ghouls” as well as a guide to the killing streets of Murdersville, U.K. “Find and visit major murder sites all over London. Maps show the distribution of murders and provide a handy key to murderers’ names.” Details locations of all the classic cases: Jack the Ripper’s first stop and slash in Buck’s Row; the Kray twins’ Stoke Newington flats, where they partied and popped shotguns; Dr. Crippen’s murder house, where he sliced and diced his wife; Reg Christie’s gruesome garden (he planted four bodies); and Dennis Nilsen’s Cranley Gardens flat, where the fat of his last victim clogged the drains after cooking. GR

Publisher: Academy Chicago
Paperback: 272 pages
Illustrated

When the legend has more propaganda value than the truth, print the legend. “There is no evidence whatsoever that Richard III, a man conspicuous for his loyalty to his brother Edward in a power-hungry age, murdered his brother’s children, totally unnecessarily, to gain a throne from which they were in any case legally barred. Moreover, he never announced their deaths, so what could he have hoped to gain by them?” Contemporary records are examined, revisionist histories are examined, the bones of “two young boys” are examined, and Richard’s hump disappears along with his guilt. GR

Publisher: Academy Chicago
Paperback: 215 pages
Illustrated

“Artificial Aim: While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clerimston, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Thirsty were threatened by a Mr. Robert Clear. ‘He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,’ said Mr. Thirsty. ‘Telling him that her purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do any more than frighten him off but, unhappily for us all, he died.’”
The British author of Rumpole of the Bailey recounts tales and anecdotes of “the most famous representatives” of the criminal world, both fictional and factual and, in the case of Mr. Thirsty, accidental. GR

Publisher: Oxford University
Hardback: 431 pages

The middle-class crime of the century, or, as the book cover puts it, “the crime that broke our hearts!” October 1993—a 12-year-old suburban California girl is kidnapped from her own bedroom. “Sean Anthony Bush watched videos with his friend Aaron Thomas in the rental unit Thomas leased in Eve Nichol’s back yard. Bush had a clear view of his neighbor’s back porch. He recalled seeing a ‘thick’ man walking up the home’s back steps at about 10 pm. Bush told police the man crouched down and glanced through the home’s back windows.” (Bush and Thomas ignored this!) Meanwhile, Polly “decided to move the slumber party from her room into the living room so the girls could spread out their sleeping bags. When she opened her bedroom door, the bogeyman stood waiting. He was big and held a kitchen knife. Polly let out a soft gasp. The nightmare on Fourth Street had begun.” GR

Publisher: Pinnacle
Paperback: 264 pages
Illustrated

“They only love the men who kill!” And there are 14 reasons why these desperate Doras think that the only good men are behind bars. “They are women from all across America—women who have given up their families, careers and even their freedom to be with the men they love. From housewives to nurses to lawyers and teachers, from best-selling authors (Danielle Steel) to Hollywood sex-kittens (Sue Lyon), they all share one shameful secret: their lust-driven obsession for America’s deadliest killers.” GR

Publisher: Pinnacle
Paperback: 300 pages
Illustrated

Since 1900, serial crimes have gone from less than 50 in a decade to more than 300 by the year 2000. Who are the creeps that are lustmording our citizenry? Find out in this in-depth sequel to Hunting Humans. “A behind-the-screams look at America’s murder epidemic… Using case histories of more than 800 serial killers, the author looks for patterns and answers… Includes the word-for-word statements of convicted serial killers talking about sex, murder, life and death.” Plus the actual forms used by the FBI to profile murderers. GR

Publisher: Loompanics
Paperback: 165 pages
Illustrated