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Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories N/A This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. |
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At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel William Rempel In this riveting and relentless nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter William C. Rempel tells the harrowing story of former Cali cartel insider Jorge Salcedo, an ordinary man facing an extraordinary dilemma—a man forced to risk everything to escape the powerful and treacherous Cali crime syndicate.
Colombia in the 1990s is a country in chaos, as a weak government battles guerrilla movements and narco-traffickers, including the notorious Pablo Escobar and his rivals in the Cali cartel. Enter Jorge Salcedo, a part-time soldier, a gifted engineer, a respected businessman and family man—and a man who despises Pablo Escobar for patriotic and deeply personal reasons. He is introduced to the godfathers of the Cali cartel, who are at war with Escobar and desperately want their foe dead. With mixed feelings, Jorge agrees to help them.
Once inside, Jorge rises to become head of security for Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, principal godfather of the $7-billion-a-year Cali drug cartel. Jorge tries to turn a blind eye to the violence, corruption, and brutality that surround him, and he struggles privately to preserve his integrity even as he is drawn deeper into the web of cartel operations. Then comes an order from the godfathers that he can’t obey—but can’t refuse. Jorge realizes that his only way out is to bring down the biggest, richest crime syndicate of all time.
Thus begins a heart-pumping roller-coaster ride of intensifying peril. Secretly aided by a pair of young American DEA agents, Jorge races time and cartel assassins to extract damaging evidence, help capture the fugitive godfather, and save the life of a witness targeted for murder. Through it all, death lurks a single misstep away.
William C. Rempel is the only reporter with access to this story and to Jorge, who remains in hiding somewhere in the United States—even the author doesn’t know where—but has revealed his experience in gripping detail. Salcedo’s is the story of one extraordinary ordinary man forced to risk everything to end a nightmare of his own making. |
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The Associated Press Stylebook 2009 (Associated Press Stylebook & Briefing on Media Law) The style of the Associated Press is the gold standard of news writing. With The AP Stylebook in hand, you can learn to write with the clarity and professionalism for which the Associated Press is famous. Fully revised and updated, this new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries—including more than 200 new ones—detailing the AP’s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation and word and numeral usage. New entries include anti-spyware, high-definition, iPhone, outsourcing, podcast, text messaging, social networking, snail mail, WMD and Wikipedia. You’ll also find answers to such widespread questions as: • How should bankruptcy and mergers and acquisitions be covered?
• When should the names of government bodies or businesses be spelled out and when should they be abbreviated?
• What are the general definitions of the major religious movements?
• Which companies do the big media conglomerates own?
• Who are all the members of the British Commonwealth?
• What constitutes “fair use”?
• How should box scores for baseball games be filed, and how should sports terms like minicamp and wild card be used
• What exactly does the Freedom of Information Act cover? With invaluable additional sections on the unique guidelines for business and sports reporting and on how you can guard against libel and copyright infringement, The AP Stylebook is the one reference that all writers, editors and students cannot afford to be without. |
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Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff James B. Stewart Bestselling author James B. Stewart investigates our era's most high-profile perjurers, revealing the alarming extent of this national epidemic. America faces a crisis: an explosion of perjury and false statements occurring at the highest levels of business, politics, sports, and culture. In Tangled Webs, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James B. Stewart applies his investigative reporting and storytelling skills to four dramatic cases, all involving people at the top of their fields: Martha Stewart, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Barry Bonds, and notorious financier Bernard Madoff. Stewart draws on extensive interviews with participants-many speaking here for the first time- and previously undisclosed documents to show how such successful role models found themselves accused of criminal deception. |
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Coping with Cross-Examination and Other Pathways to Effective Testimony Stanley L. Brodsky Health professionals, substance abuse counselors, psychologists, handwriting analysts, and experts on physical evidence will be interested in this book that teaches readers about the typical techniques attorneys use to challenge experts' credibility and the basis of their opinions. Pointers on preparation and effective narrative style are included, backed by findings from the emerging literature on the assessment of expert testimony. |
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Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong Brandon L. Garrett On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases. (20110529) |
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Testifying in Court: Guidelines and Maxims for the Expert Witness Stanley L. Brodsky Stanley Brodsky's Testifying in Court stands out because it deals with mastering the psychological and emotional experience of being in court. The emphasis is not on laws and rules of evidence or procedure. The book leads the reader step by step through the demands and pitfalls of courtroom testimony and questioning. Humorous illustrations and witty observations are used to put the prospective witness at ease. 7/91. |
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Target Blue Robert Daley It was a year of trauma, possibly the most traumatic in NYPD history. The so-called Black Liberation Army laid ambushes and shot cops in the back. In New York alone they assassinated four, machine gunned two others, assaulted others with guns and knives. A new commissioner, swearing to end corruption and bring the force into the modern age, took over, even as two mafia dons got whacked, the biggest jewel robbery in the city's history took place, and Sgt Durk and Patrolman Serpico brought on the Knapp Commission, which began to put cops in jail. Meanwhile, in the corridors of headquarters men with stars on their shoulders undermined the new commissioner where they could while jostling constantly for position and power. |
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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet Daniel J. Solove Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private livesoften of dubious reliability and sometimes totally falsewill follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy. Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free. |
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Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program Pete Earley For decades no law enforcement program has been as cloaked in controversy and mystery as the Federal Witness Protection Program. Now, for the first time, Gerald Shur, the man credited with the creation of WITSEC, teams with acclaimed investigative journalist Pete Earley to tell the inside story of turncoats, crime-fighters, killers, and ordinary human beings caught up in a life-and-death game of deception in the name of justice.
WITSEC
Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program
When the government was losing the war on organized crime in the early 1960s, Gerald Shur, a young attorney in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, urged the department to entice mobsters into breaking their code of silence with promises of protection and relocation. But as high-ranking mob figures came into the program, Shur discovered that keeping his witnesses alive in the face of death threats involved more than eradicating old identities and creating new ones. It also meant cutting off families from their pasts and giving new identities to wives and children, as well as to mob girlfriends and mistresses.
It meant getting late-night phone calls from protected witnesses unable to cope with their new lives. It meant arranging funerals, providing financial support, and in one instance even helping a mobster’s wife get breast implants. And all too often it meant odds that a protected witness would return to what he knew best–crime.
In this book Shur gives a you-are-there account of infamous witnesses, from Joseph Valachi to “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, of the lengths the program goes to to keep its charges safe, and of cases that went very wrong and occasionally even protected those who went on to kill again.
He describes the agony endured by innocent people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in a program tailored to criminals. And along with Shur’s war stories, WITSEC draws on the haunting words of one mob wife, who vividly describes her life of lies, secrecy, and loss inside the program.
A powerful true story of the inner workings of one of the most effective and controversial weapons in the war against organized crime and the inner workings of organized crime itself–and more recently against Colombian drug dealers, outlaw motorcycle gang members, white-collar con men, and international terrorists–this book takes us into a tense, dangerous twilight world carefully hidden in plain sight: where the family living next door might not be who they say they are. . . |