True Crime Round up 2021

Dark and Stormy Book Club

Mafia Hitman Lib/E: Carmine Dibiase, the Wiseguy Who Really Killed Joey Gallo
by Michael Benson, Frank DiMatteo, Eric Jason Martin
Published September 28th 2021 by Citadel Press
Who really killed Crazy Joe Gallo? It wasn't Frank The Irishman Sheeran as he claimed. Sober, he was nothing, but drunk he would blow your head off. That's how Pete the Greek described Carmine Sonny DiBiase, the Colombo crime family hitman who'd been terrorizing Manhattan's Little Italy since he was a kid. After beating and robbing a local tailor and doing time in reformatory, Sonny set up operations at the Mayfair Boys Civic and Social Club, an illegal poolroom where he shot and killed his best friend on Christmas day . . . A prime suspect of this and other crimes, Sonny went on the lam and off the grid for seven years. He then surrendered himself to police, was tried for murderm and sentenced to death. But after a second trial, he walked away a free man--free to kill again. Joey Crazy Joe Gallo and his President Street mob waged a deadly Mafia civil war with the Colombo crime family, and in particular, Carmine the Snake Persico. And on that fateful night of April 7, 1972, in a Little Italy restaurant, Gallo was assassinated . . . by Carmine Sonny DiBiasi . . . This is the true story of who really whacked Crazy Joey Gallo on that fateful night of April 7, 1972.
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence
by Becky Cooper
Published November 10th 2020 by Grand Central Publishing
1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.
We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
Notes on a Killing: Love, Lies, and Murder in a Small New Hampshire Town
by Kevin Flynn, Rebecca Lavoie
Published April 2nd 2013 by Berkley
Weaver and fiber artist Edith “Pen” Meyer knew her friend Sandy Merritt’s relationship with a married man was wrong. She had even urged Sandy to take out a restraining order against Kenneth Carpenter. Which was why her call to Sandy on February 23, 2005, seemed to come from out of the blue. During it, she told Sandy to drop the restraining order and get back together with Ken.
Pen was never seen again.
One man stood to gain from Pen’s disappearance: Ken Carpenter. But evidence was bleak: no blood, no DNA, no body. Until detectives found notes hidden beneath a leather chair that turned out to be a playbook for murder…