by Joseph Cox ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2024
A fast-moving, exciting blend of white-hat technology and old-school gumshoe drudgery.
The FBI proves that if you can’t beat them, then joining them can work out just fine.
Investigative journalist Cox, co-founder of 404 Media, opens with a former football player named Owen Hanson, who graduated from real estate to sports betting to international drug trafficking. Though he made lots of money, he wasn’t smart enough to change the default passcode on his encrypted phone, which enabled the feds—aided by Australian police, since Hanson did much of his trade there—to track him. The author then moves to the crux of the story: the land-rush business in supposedly secure phones, which allowed criminals (and some legitimate businesspeople) to conduct their business without danger of being monitored. Through brilliant technosleuthing, investigators managed to break down the electronic security doors of a phone company called Phantom Secure, which sent its customers scurrying for a new provider. In a stroke of fraught genius, the FBI cooked up its own company, called Anom, which carried with it all sorts of problems—not least what might have happened if, too successful, “law enforcement knocked out Anom’s competition in the secure phone industry.” As Cox relates, that came close to happening; more problematic was that the FBI, after building up a customer base thousands strong, had a firehose of data to analyze. Still, it worked, so much so that one day a few yeas ago, police officials around the world, in a coordinated international operation—a “nonstop, intercontinental line of dominoes”—arrested hundreds of criminals and seized a dozen tons of cocaine, 1.5 tons of meth, and scores of illegal weapons, all courtesy of that fake phone company. Cox’s story is full of geekery, but it’s also a vivid, captivating tale of true crime and true punishment.
A fast-moving, exciting blend of white-hat technology and old-school gumshoe drudgery.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781541702691
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Truman Capote ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1965
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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