Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Happy Thanksgiving





HAPPY THANKSGIVING







We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds — the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.  Caroline Myss



My older sister (who is 4'8) trying to block me out of the photo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University.
He is the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and Short Stories from a Small Town. He is also the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM




The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it makes some difference that you have lived and lived well.                                                                                                               Ralph Waldo Emerson



HERE'S MY LATEST BOOKS.....



This is a book of short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut.

Most of these stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot it.     

The collected stories are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.

Conversely many of the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of suicide (The Hanging Party, Small Town Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer) and natural occurring death. (The Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)

With the exception of Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate and depressed divorcee in Things Change, changes his life in Lunch Hour when asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the last story in the book) In The Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.

Although the book is based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like my memories of that place, everything remains the same.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town


The Valley Lives
By Marion Marchetto, author of The Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015
Short Stores from a Small Town is set in The Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While the short stories are contemporary they provide insight into the timeless qualities of an Industrial Era community and the values and morals of the people who live there. Some are first or second generation Americans, some are transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of Valleyite and wears it proudly. It isn't easy for an author to take the reader on a journey down memory lane and involve the reader in the life stories of a group of seemingly unrelated characters. I say seemingly because by book's end the reader will realize that he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely related characters.
We meet all of the characters during a one-day time period as each of them finds their way to the Valley Diner on a rainy autumn day. From our first meeting with Angel, the educationally challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to our farewell for the day to the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we meet a cross section of the Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not so ambitious, each life proves that there is more to it beneath the surface. And the one thing that binds these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so much a place (or a memory) but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a part of its inhabitants.
Let me be the first the congratulate author John William Tuohy on a job well done. He has evoked the heart of The Valley and in doing so brought to life the fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of pride. While set in a specific region of the country, the stories that unfold within the pages of this slim volume are similar to those that live in many a small town from coast to coast.



An award winning full length play.

"Cyberdate.Com is the story of six ordinary people in search of romance, friendship and love and find it in very extraordinary ways. Based on the real life experiences of the authors misadventures with on line dating, Cyber date is a bittersweet story that will make you laugh, cry and want to fall in love again."   Ellis McKay  

Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play. The play was also given a full reading at The Frederick Playhouse in Maryland in March of 2007.









In 1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/

By Dr. Wm. Anthony Connolly
This incredible memoir, No Time to Say Goodbye, tells of entertaining angels, dancing with devils, and of the abandoned children many viewed simply as raining manna from some lesser god.
The young and unfortunate lives of the Tuohy bruins—sometimes Irish, sometimes Jewish, often Catholic, rambunctious, but all imbued with Lion’s hearts—told here with brutal honesty leavened with humor and laudable introspective forgiveness. The memoir will have you falling to your knees thanking that benevolent Irish cop in the sky, your lucky stars, or hugging the oxygen out of your own kids the fate foisted upon Johnny and his siblings does not and did not befall your own brood. John William Tuohy, a nationally-recognized authority on organized crime and Irish levity, is your trusted guide through the weeds the decades of neglect ensnared he and his brothers and sisters, all suffering for the impersonal and often mercenary taint of the foster care system. Theirs, and Tuohy’s, story is not at all figures of speech as this review might suggest, but all too real and all too sad, and maddening. I wanted to scream. I wanted to get into a time machine, go back and adopt every last one of them. I was angry. I was captivated. The requisite damning verities of foster care are all here, regretfully, but what sets this story above others is its beating heart, even a bruised and broken one, still willing to forgive and understand, and continue to aid its walking wounded. I cannot recommend this book enough.

AMAZON REVIEWS

By jackieh on October 13, 2015
After reading about John's deeply personal and painful past, I just wanted to hug the child within him......and hug all the children who were thrown into the state's foster system....it is an amazing read.......
By Jane Pogoda on October 9, 2015
I truly enjoyed reading his memoir. I also grew up in Ansonia and had no idea conditions such as these existed. The saving grace is knowing the author made it out and survived the system. Just knowing he was able to have a family of his own made me happy. I attended the same grammar school and was happy that his experience there was not negative. I had a wonderful experience in that school. I wish that I could have been there for him when he was at the school since we were there at probably at the same time.
By Sue on September 27, 2015
Hi - just finished your novel "No time to say goodbye" - what a powerful read!!! - I bought it for my 90 year old mom who is an avid reader and lived in the valley all her life-she loved it also along with my sister- we are all born and raised in the valley- i.e. Derby and Ansonia
By David A. Wright on September 7, 2015
I enjoyed this book. I grew up in Ansonia CT and went to the Assumption School. Also reconized all the places he was talking about and some of the families.
By Robert G Manley on September 7, 2015
This is a wonderfully written book. It is heart wrenchingly sad at times and the next minute hilariously funny. I attribute that to the intelligence and wit of the author who combines the humor and pathos of his Irish catholic background and horrendous "foster kid" experience. He captures each character perfectly and the reader can easily visualize the individuals the author has to deal with on daily basis. Having lived part of my life in the parochial school system and having lived as a child in the same neighborhood as the author, I was vividly brought back to my childhood .Most importantly, it shows the strength of the soul and how just a little compassion can be so important to a lost child.
By LNA on July 9, 2015
John Tuohy writes with compelling honesty, and warmth. I grew up in Ansonia, CT myself, so it makes it even more real. He brings me immediately back there with his narrative, while he wounds my soul, as I realize I had no idea of the suffering of some of the children around me. His story is a must read, of courage and great spirit in the face of impoverishment, sorrow, and adult neglect. I could go on and on, but just get the book. If you're like me, you'll soon be reading it out loud to any person in the room who will listen. Many can suffer and overcome as they go through it, but few can find the words that take us through the story. John is a gifted writer to be able to do that.
By Barbara Pietruszka on June 29, 2015
I am from Connecticut so I was very familiar with many locations described in the book especially Ansonia where I lived. I totally enjoyed the book and would like to know more about the author. I recommend the book to everyone
By Joanne B. on June 28, 2015
What an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed. I cried. Once you start reading it's hard to stop. I was torn between wanting to gulp it up and read over and over each quote that started the chapter. I couldn't help but feel part of the Tuohy clan. I wanted to scream in their defense. It's truly hard to believe the challenges that foster children face. I can only pray that this story may touch even one person facing this life. It's an inspiring read. That will linger long after you finish it. This is a wonderfully written memoir that immediately pulls you in to the lives of the Tuohy family.
By Paul Day on June 15, 2015
Great reading. Life in foster care told from a very rare point of view.
By Jackie Malkes on June 5, 2015
This book is definitely a must for social workers working with children specifically. This is an excellent memoir which identifies the trails of foster children in the 1960s in the United States. The memoir captures stories of joy as well as nail biting terror, as the family is at times torn apart but finds each other later and finds solace in the experiences of one another. The stories capture the love siblings have for one another as well as the protection they have for one another in even the worst of circumstances. On the flip side, one of the most touching stories to me was when a Nun at the school helped him to read-- truly an example of how a positive person really helped to shape the author in times when circumstances at home were challenging and treacherous. I found the book to be a page turner and at times show how even in the hardest of circumstances there was a need to live and survive and make the best of any moment. The memoir is eye-opening and helped to shed light and make me feel proud of the volunteer work I take part in with disadvantaged children. Riveting....Must read....memory lane on steroids....Catholic school banter, blue color towns...Lawrence Welk on Sundays night's.
By Eileen on June 4, 2015
From ' No time to say Goodbye 'and authors John W. Touhys Gangster novels, his style never waivers...humorous to sadness to candidly realistic situations all his writings leaves the reader in awe......longing for more.
By karen pojakene on June 1, 2015
This book is a must-read for anyone who administers to the foster care program in any state. This is not a "fell through the cracks" life story, but rather a memoir of a life guided by strength and faith and a hard determination to survive. it is heartening to know that the "sewer" that life can become to steal our personal peace can be fought and our peace can be restored, scarred, but restored.
By Michelle Black on
A captivating, shocking, and deeply moving memoir, No Time to Say Goodbye is a true page turner. John shares the story of his childhood, from the struggles of living in poverty to being in the foster care system and simply trying to survive. You will be cheering for him all the way, as he never loses his will to thrive even in the darkest and bleakest of circumstances. This memoir is a very truthful and unapologetic glimpse into the way in which some of our most vulnerable citizens have been treated in the past and are still being treated today. It is truly eye-opening, and hopefully will inspire many people to take action in protection of vulnerable children.
By Kimberly on May 24, 2015
I found myself in tears while reading this book. John William Tuohy writes quite movingly about the world he grew up in; a world in which I had hoped did not exist within the foster care system. This book is at times funny, raw, compelling, heartbreaking and disturbing. I found myself rooting for John as he tries to escape from an incredibly difficult life. You will too!
By Geoffrey A. Childs on May 20, 2015
I found this book to be a compelling story of life in the Ct foster care system. at times disturbing and at others inspirational ,The author goes into great detail in this gritty memoir of His early life being abandoned into the states system and his subsequent escape from it. Every once in a while a book or even an article in a newspaper comes along that bears witness to an injustice or even something that's just plain wrong. This chronicle of the foster care system is such a book and should be required reading for any aspiring social workers.

Failure is an opportunity. If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame. Therefore, the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes. She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others. Laozi








Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
JFK's pardons and the mob; Prohibition, Chicago's crime cadres and the staged kidnapping of "`Jake the Barber'" Factor, "the black sheep brother of the cosmetics king, Max Factor"; lifetime sentences, attempted jail busts and the perseverance of "a rumpled private detective and an eccentric lawyer" John W. Tuohy showcases all these and more sensational and shady happenings in When Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy: The Strange Case of Touhy, Jake the Barber and the Kidnapping that Never Happened. The author started investigating Touhy's 1959 murder by Capone's gang in 1975 for an undergrad assignment. He traces the frame-job whereby Touhy was accused of the kidnapping, his decades in jail, his memoirs, his retrial and release and, finally, his murder, 28 days after regaining his freedom. Sixteen pages of photos.

From Library Journal
Roger Touhy, one of the "terrible Touhys" and leader of a bootlegging racket that challenged Capone's mob in Prohibition Chicago, had a lot to answer for, but the crime that put him behind bars was, ironically, one he didn't commit: the alleged kidnapping of Jake Factor, half-brother of Max Factor and international swindler. Author Tuohy (apparently no relation), a former staff investigator for the National Center for the Study of Organized Crime, briefly traces the history of the Touhys and the Capone mob, then describes Factor's plan to have himself kidnapped, putting Touhy behind bars and keeping himself from being deported. This miscarriage of justice lasted 17 years and ended in Touhy's parole and murder by the Capone mob 28 days later. Factor was never deported. The author spent 26 years researching this story, and he can't bear to waste a word of it. Though slim, the book still seems padded, with irrelevant detail muddying the main story. Touhy is a hard man to feel sorry for, but the author does his best. Sure to be popular in the Chicago area and with the many fans of mob history, this is suitable for larger public libraries and regional collections. Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH

BOOK REVIEW
     John William Tuohy, one of the most prolific crime writers in America, has penned a tragic, but fascinating story of Roger Touhy and John Factor. It's a tale born out of poverty and violence, a story of ambition gone wrong and deception on an enormous, almost unfathomable, scale. However, this is also a story of triumph of determination to survive, of a lifelong struggle for dignity and redemption of the spirit.
     The story starts with John "Jake the Barber" Factor. The product of the turn of the century European ethnic slums of Chicago's west side, Jake's brother, Max Factor, would go on to create an international cosmetic empire.
     In 1926, Factor, grubstaked in a partnership with the great New York criminal genius, Arnold Rothstien, and Chicago's Al Capone, John Factor set up a stock scam in England that fleeced thousands of investors, including members of the royal family, out of $8 million dollars, an incredible sum of money in 1926.
     After the scam fell apart, Factor fled to France, where he formed another syndicate of con artists, who broke the bank at Monte Carlo by rigging the tables.
     Eventually, Factor fled to the safety of Capone's Chicago but the highest powers in the Empire demanded his arrest. However, Factor fought extradition all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but he had a weak case and deportation was inevitable. Just 24 hours before the court was to decide his fate, Factor paid to have himself kidnapped and his case was postponed. He reappeared in Chicago several days later, and, at the syndicates' urging, accused gangster Roger Touhy of the kidnapping.
     Roger "The Terrible" Touhy was the youngest son of an honest Chicago cop. Although born in the Valley, a teeming Irish slum, the family moved to rural Des Plains, Illinois while Roger was still a boy. Touhy's five older brothers stayed behind in the valley and soon flew under the leadership of "Terrible Tommy" O'Connor. By 1933, three of them would be shot dead in various disputes with the mob and one, Tommy, would lose the use of his legs by syndicate machine guns. Secure in the still rural suburbs of Cook County, Roger Touhy graduated as class valedictorian of his Catholic school. Afterwards, he briefly worked as an organizer for the Telegraph and Telecommunications Workers Union after being blacklisted by Western Union for his minor pro-labor activities.
     Touhy entered the Navy in the first world war and served two years, teaching Morse code to Officers at Harvard University.
     After the war, he rode the rails out west where he earned a living as a railroad telegraph operator and eventually made a small but respectable fortune as an oil well speculator.
     Returning to Chicago in 1924, Touhy married his childhood sweetheart, regrouped with his brothers and formed a partnership with a corrupt ward heeler named Matt Kolb, and, in 1925, he started a suburban bootlegging and slot machine operation in northwestern Cook County. Left out of the endless beer wars that plagued the gangs inside Chicago, Touhy's operation flourished. By 1926, his slot machine operations alone grossed over $1,000,000.00 a year, at a time when a gallon of gas cost eight cents.
     They were unusual gangsters. When the Klu Klux Klan, then at the height of its power, threatened the life of a priest who had befriended the gang, Tommy Touhy, Roger's older brother, the real "Terrible Touhy," broke into the Klan's national headquarters, stole its membership roles, and, despite an offer of $25,000 to return them, delivered the list to the priest who published the names in several Catholic newspapers the following day.
     Once, Touhy unthinkingly released several thousand gallons of putrid sour mash in to the Des Plains River one day before the city was to reenact its discovery by canoe-riding Jesuits a hundred years before. After a dressing down by the towns people Touhy spent $10,000.00 on perfume and doused the river with it, saving the day.
     They were inventive too. When the Chicago police levied a 50% protection tax on Touhy's beer, Touhy bought a fleet of Esso gasoline delivery trucks, kept the Esso logo on the vehicles, and delivered his booze to his speakeasies that way.
     In 1930, when Capone invaded the labor rackets, the union bosses, mostly Irish and completely corrupt, turned to the Touhy organization for protection. The intermittent gun battles between the Touhys and the Capone mob over control of beer routes which had been fought on the empty, back roads of rural Cook County, was now brought into the city where street battles extracted an awesome toll on both sides. The Chicago Tribune estimated the casualties to be one hundred dead in less then 12 months.
     By the winter of 1933, remarkably, Touhy was winning the war in large part because joining him in the struggle against the mob was Chicago's very corrupt, newly elected mayor Anthony "Ten percent Tony" Cermak, who was as much a gangster as he was an elected official.
     Cermak threw the entire weight of his office and the whole Chicago police force behind Touhy's forces. Eventually, two of Cermak's police bodyguards arrested Frank Nitti, the syndicate's boss, and, for a price, shot him six times. Nitti lived. As a result, two months later Nitti's gunmen caught up with Cermak at a political rally in Florida.
     Using previously overlooked Secret Service reports, this book proves, for the first time, that the mob stalked Cermak and used a hardened felon to kill him. The true story behind the mob's 1933 murder of Anton Cermak, will changes histories understanding of organized crimes forever. The fascinating thing about this killing is its eerie similarity to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas thirty years later, made even more macabre by the fact that several of the names associated with the Cermak killing were later aligned with the Kennedy killing.
     For many decades, it was whispered that the mob had executed Cermak for his role in the Touhy-syndicate war of 1931-33, but there was never proof. The official story is that a loner named Giuseppe Zangara, an out-of-work, Sicilian born drifter with communist leanings, traveled to Florida in the winter of 1933 and fired several shots at President Franklin Roosevelt. He missed the President, but killed Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak instead. However, using long lost documents, Tuohy is able to prove that Zangara was a convicted felon with long ties to mob Mafia and that he very much intended to murder Anton Cermak.
     With Cermak dead, Touhy was on his own against the mob. At the same time, the United States Postal Service was closing in on his gang for pulling off the largest mail heists in US history at that time. The cash was used to fund Touhy's war with the Capones.Then in June of 1933, John Factor en he reappeared, Factor accused Roger Touhy of kidnapping him. After two sensational trials, Touhy was convicted of kidnapping John Factor and sentenced to 99 years in prison and Factor, after a series of complicated legal maneuvers, and using the mob's influence, was allowed to remain in the United States as a witness for the prosecution, however, he was still a wanted felon in England.
     By 1942 Roger Touhy had been in prison for nine years, his once vast fortune was gone. Roger's family was gone as well. At his request, his wife Clara had moved to Florida with their two sons in 1934. However, with the help of Touhy's remaining sister, the family retained a rumpled private detective, actually a down-and-out, a very shady and disbarred mob lawyer named Morrie Green.
     Disheveled of not, Green was a highly competent investigator and was able to piece together and prove the conspiracy that landed Touhy in jail. However, no court would hear the case, and by the fall of 1942, Touhy had exhausted every legal avenue open to him.Desperate, Touhy hatched a daring daylight breakout over the thirty foot walls of Stateville prison.The sensational escape ended three months later in a dramatic and bloody shootout between the convicts and the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover.
     Less then three months after Touhy was captured, Fox Studios hired producer Brian Foy to churn out a mob financed docudrama film on the escape entitled, "Roger Touhy, The Last Gangster." The executive producer on the film was Johnny Roselli, the hood who later introduced Judy Campbell to Frank Sinatra. Touhy sued Fox and eventually won his case and the film was withdrawn from circulation. In 1962, Columbia pictures and John Houston tried to produce a remake of the film, but were scared off the project.
     While Touhy was on the run from prison, John Factor was convicted for m ail fraud and was sentenced and served ten years at hard labor. Factor's take from the scam was $10,000,000.00 in cash.
     Released in 1949, Factor took control of the Stardust Hotel Casino in 1955, then the largest operation on the Vegas strip. The casino's true owners, of course, were Chicago mob bosses Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray Humpreys and Sam Giancana. From 1955 to 1963, the length of Factor's tenure at the casino, the US Justice Department estimated that the Chicago outfit skimmed between forty-eight to 200 million dollars from the Stardust alone.
     In 1956, while Factor and the outfit were growing rich off the Stardust, Roger Touhy hired a quirky, high strung, but highly effective lawyer named Robert B. Johnstone to take his case. A brilliant legal tactician, who worked incessantly on Touhy's freedom, Robert Johnstone managed to get Touhy's case heard before federal judge John P. Barnes, a refined magistrate filled with his own eccentricities. After two years of hearings, Barnes released a 1,500-page decision on Touhy's case, finding that Touhy was railroaded to prison in a conspiracy between the mob and the state attorney's office and that John Factor had kidnapped himself as a means to avoid extradition to England.
     Released from prison in 1959, Touhy wrote his life story "The Stolen Years" with legendary Chicago crime reporter, Ray Brennan. It was Brennan, as a young cub reporter, who broke the story of John Dillenger's sensational escape from Crown Point prison, supposedly with a bar of soap whittled to look like a pistol. It was also Brennan who brought about the end of Roger Touhy's mortal enemy, "Tubbo" Gilbert, the mob owned chief investigator for the Cook County state attorney's office, and who designed the frame-up that placed Touhy behind bars.
     Factor entered a suit against Roger Touhy, his book publishers and Ray Brennan, claiming it damaged his reputation as a "leading citizen of Nevada and a philanthropist."
     The teamsters, Factor's partners in the Stardust Casino, refused to ship the book and Chicago's bookstore owners were warned by Tony Accardo, in person, not to carry the book.
     Touhy and Johnstone fought back by drawing up the papers to enter a $300,000,000 lawsuit against John Factor, mob leaders Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo and Murray Humpreys as well as former Cook County state attorney Thomas Courtney and Tubbo Gilbert, his chief investigator, for wrongful imprisonment.
     The mob couldn't allow the suit to reach court, and considering Touhy's determination, Ray Brennan's nose for a good story and Bob Johnstone's legal talents, there was no doubt the case would make it to court. If the case went to court, John Factor, the outfit's figurehead at the lucrative Stardust Casino, could easily be tied in to illegal teamster loans. At the same time, the McClellan committee was looking into the ties between the teamsters, Las Vegas and organized crime and the raid at the mob conclave in New York state had awakened the FBI and brought them into the fight. So, Touhy's lawsuit was, in effect, his death sentence.
     Twenty-five days after his release from twenty-five years in prison, Roger Touhy was gunned down on a frigid December night on his sister's front door.
     Two years after Touhy's murder, in 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered his Justice Department to look into the highly suspect dealings of the Stardust Casino. Factor was still the owner on record, but had sold his interest in the casino portion of the hotel for a mere 7 million dollars. Then, in December of that year, the INS, working with the FBI on Bobby Kennedy's orders, informed Jake Factor that he was to be deported from the United States before the end of the month. Factor would be returned to England where he was still a wanted felon as a result of his 1928 stock scam. Just 48 hours before the deportation, Factor, John Kennedy's largest single personal political contributor, was granted a full and complete Presidential pardon which allowed him to stay in the United States.
     The story hints that Factor was more then probably an informant for the Internal Revenue Service, it also investigates the murky world of Presidential pardons, the last imperial power of the Executive branch. It's a sordid tale of abuse of privilege, the mob's best friend and perhaps it is time the American people reconsider the entire notion.
     The mob wasn't finished with Factor. Right after his pardon, Factor was involved in a vague, questionable financial plot to try and bail teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa out of his seemingly endless financial problems in Florida real estate. He was also involved with a questionable stock transaction with mobster Murray Humpreys. Factor spent the remaining twenty years of his life as a benefactor to California's Black ghettos. He tried, truly, to make amends for all of the suffering he had caused in his life. He spent millions of dollars building churches, gyms, parks and low cost housing in the poverty stricken ghettos. When he died, three United States Senators, the Mayor of Los Angles and several hundred poor Black waited in the rain to pay their last respects at Jake the Barber's funeral.

Interesting Information on A Little Known Case
By Bill Emblom
Author John Tuohy, who has a similar spelling of the last name to his subject Roger, but apparently no relation, has provided us with an interesting story of northwest Chicago beer baron Roger Touhy who was in competition with Al Capone during Capone's heyday. Touhy appeared to be winning the battle since Mayor Anton Cermak was deporting a number of Capone's cronies. However, the mob hit, according to the author, on Mayor Cermak in Miami, Florida, by Giuseppe Zangara following a speech by President-elect Roosevelt, put an end to the harrassment of Capone's cronies. The author details the staged "kidnapping" of Jake "the Barber" Factor who did this to avoid being deported to England and facing a prison sentence there for stock swindling, with Touhy having his rights violated and sent to prison for 25 years for the kidnapping that never happened. Factor and other Chicago mobsters were making a lot of money with the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas when they got word that Touhy was to be parolled and planned to write his life story. The mob, not wanting this, decided Touhy had to be eliminated. Touhy was murdered by hit men in 1959, 28 days after gaining his freedom. Jake Factor had also spent time in prison in the United States for a whiskey swindle involving 300 victims in 12 states. Two days before Factor was to be deported to England to face prison for the stock swindle President Kennedy granted Factor a full Presidential Pardon after Factor's contribution to the Bay of Pigs fund. President Kennedy, the author notes, issued 472 pardons (about half questionable) more than any president before or since.
There are a number of books on Capone and the Chicago mob. This book takes a look at an overlooked beer baron from that time period, Roger Touhy. It is a very worthwhile read and one that will hold your interest.

GREAT BOOK FROM CHICAGO AND ERA WAS MY DAD'S,TRUE TO STORY
Very good book. Hard to put down
Bymistakesweremadeon
Eight long years locked up for a kidnapping that was in fact a hoax, in autumn 1942, Roger Touhy & his gang of cons busted out of Stateville, the infamous "roundhouse" prison, southwest of Chicago Illinois. On the lam 2 months he was, when J Edgar & his agents sniffed him out in a run down 6-flat tenement on the city's far north lakefront. "Terrible Roger" had celebrated Christmas morning on the outside - just like all square Johns & Janes - but by New Year's Eve, was back in the bighouse.
Touhy's arrest hideout holds special interest to me because I grew up less than a mile away from it. Though I never knew so til 1975 when his bio was included in hard-boiled crime chronicler Jay Robert Nash's, Badmen & Bloodletters, a phone book sized encyclopedia of crooks & killers. Touhy's hard scrabble charisma stood out among 200 years' worth of sociopathic Americana Nash had alphabetized, and gotten a pulphouse publisher to print up for him.
I read Nash's outlaw dictionary as a teen, and found Touhy's Prohibition era David vs Goliath battles with ultimate gangster kingpin, Al Capone quite alluring, in an anti-hero sorta way. Years later I learned Touhy had written a memoir, and reading his The Stolen Years only reinforced my image of an underdog speakeasy beer baron - slash suburban family man - outwitting the stone cold killer who masterminded the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Like most autobiographies tho, Touhy's book painted him the good guy. Just an everyday gent caught up in events, and he sold his story well. Had I been a saloonkeeper back then I could picture myself buying his sales pitch - and liking the guy too. I sure bought into his tale, which in hindsight criminal scribe Nash had too, because both writers portray Touhy - though admittedly a crook - as never "really" hurting anybody. Only doing what any down-to-earth bootlegger running a million dollar/year criminal enterprise would have.

What Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy author John Tuohy does tho is, provide a more objective version of events, balancing out Touhy's white wash ... 'er ... make that subjectively ... remembered telling of his life & times. Author Tuohy's account of gangster Touhy's account forced me - grown up now - to re-account for my own original take on the story.
As a kid back then, Touhy seemed almost a Robin Hood- ish hood - if you'll pardon a very lame pun. Forty years on tho re-considering the evidence, I think a persuasive - if not iron-clad convincing - case can be made for his conviction in the kidnapping of swindler scumbag Jake the Barber Factor. At least as far as conspiracy to do so goes, anyways. (Please excuse the crude redundancy there but Factor's stench truly was that of the dog s*** one steps in on those unfortunate occasions one does.)
Touhy's memoir painted himself as almost an innocent bystander at his own life's events. But he was a very smart & savvy guy - no dummy by a long shot. And I kinda do believe now, to not have known his own henchmen were in on Factor's ploy to stave off deportation and imprisonment, Touhy would have had to be as naive a Prohibition crime boss - and make no mistake he was one - as I was as a teenage kid reading Nash's thug-opedia,
On the other hand, the guy was the father of two sons and it's repulsive to consider he would have taken part in loathsomeness the crime of kidnapping was - even if the abducted victim was an adult and as repulsively loathsome as widows & orphans conman, Jake Factor.
This book's target audience is crime buffs no doubt, but it's an interesting read just the same; and includes anecdotes and insights I had not known of before. Unfortunately too, one that knocks a hero of mine down a peg or two - or more like ten.
Circa 1960, President Kennedy pardoned Jake the Barber, a fact that reading of almost made me puke. Then again JFK and the Chicago Mob did make for some strange bedfellowery every now & again. I'll always admire WWII US Navy commander Kennedy's astonishing (word chosen carefully) bravery following his PT boat's sinking, but him signing that document - effectively wiping Factor's s*** stain clean - as payback for campaign contributions Factor made to him, was REALLY nauseating to read.
Come to think of it tho, the terms "criminal douchedog" & "any political candidate" are pretty much interchangeable.
Anyways tho ... rest in peace Rog, & I raise a toast - of virtual bootleg ale - in your honor: "Turns out you weren't the hard-luck mug I'd thought you were, but what the hell, at least you had style." And guts to meet your inevitable end with more grace than a gangster should.
Post Note: Author Tuohy's re-examination of the evidence in the Roger Touhy case does include some heroes - guys & women - who attempted to find the truth of what did happen. Reading about people like that IS rewarding. They showed true courage - and decency - in a world reeking of corruption & deceit. So, here's to the lawyer who took on a lost cause; the private detective who dug up buried facts; and most of all, Touhy's wife & sister who stood by his side all those years.

Crime don't pay, kids
Very good organized crime book. A rather obscure gangster story which makes it fresh to read. I do not like these minimum word requirements for a review. (There, I have met my minimum)

Chicago Gangster History At It's Best
ByJ. CROSBYon
As a 4th generation Chicagoan, I just loved this book. Growing up in the 1950's and 60's I heard the name "Terrible Touhy's" mentioned many times. Roger was thought of as a great man, and seems to have been held in high esteem among the old timer Chicagoans.

That said, I thought this book to be nothing but interesting and well written. (It inspired me to find a copy of Roger's "Stolen Years" bio.) I do recommend this book to other folks interested in prohibition/depression era Chicago crime research. It is a must have for your library of Gangsters literature from that era. Chock full of information and the reader is transported back in time.
I'd like to know just what is "The Valley" area today in Chicago. I still live in the Windy City and would like to see if anything remains from the early days of the 20th century.
A good writer and a good book! I will buy some more of Mr. Tuohy's work.

Great story, great read
ByBookreaderon
A complex tale of gangsters, political kickback, mob wars and corrupt politicians told with wit and humor at a good pace. Highly recommend this book.

One of the best books I've read in a long time....
If you're into mafioso, read this! I loved it. Bought a copy for my brother to read for his birthday--good stuff.


Shakespeare the Classicist



BY COLIN BURROW
The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a natural genius who had no need of art or reading. That tradition grew from origins which should make us suspect it. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson famously declared that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’. (Although what he actually wrote, ‘Though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek’, could be interpreted as a counterfactual statement—‘even if it were the case that you had’—rather than a simple statement of truth.) John Milton called Shakespeare ‘fancy’s child’, who would ‘warble his native woodnotes wild’. Both of these writers wanted to be thought of as classically learned, and both of them were effectively inventing Shakespeare as their own opposite. Neither gives simply reliable testimony about the historical Shakespeare.
Shakespeare read widely in the vernacular. Almost all of the big, fashionable books which were printed during his working career—John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles—are major sources for his plays. But he was also extremely well read by present-day standards in classical literature. We can be pretty sure he attended Stratford grammar school, where Latin literature was the main subject of study. At school and after he read a great deal of Ovid—who informs both the gruesomeness of Titus Andronicus (1593-4), the playfulness of Venus and Adonis (1593), and the seriousness of the later plays Cymbeline (1609-10) and The Tempest (1611-12). There is good evidence that he read and learned from Latin handbooks of rhetorical theory. His works also display knowledge of several tragedies by Seneca, and at least the first half of Virgil’s Aeneid. If you compared his knowledge of Latin literature with that of a recent classics graduate today, the chances are that Shakespeare would win the contest.
Why then was Shakespeare not regarded as a learned writer by his contemporaries? There are two main reasons. The first is that he did not have a university degree. Other writers from the Elizabethan period who did have degrees—or who, like Jonson, wanted to appear as though they did—often made a great show of their learning: they might quote in Latin, or make their readers know that they were using recent editions of classical texts. They also had a significant cultural investment in representing provincial grammar school boys as unlearned. So Shakespeare has been traditionally regarded as unlearned for one simple reason: cultural snobbery.
The second main reason why the extent of Shakespeare’s classical reading was not fully appreciated until the twentieth century is that he chose to display the learning that he had in very distinctive ways. Before around 1600 he could sometimes allude to classical texts onstage in a deliberately clumsy or archaic style. So in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the play of Pyramus and Thisbe is a retelling of a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But instead of artfully displaying his knowledge of that classical text Shakespeare has a group of rustics enact it in a deliberately topsy-turvy low style. In Hamlet the player recites a speech about the death of Priam and the grief of Hecuba, which is based on Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is composed in an almost excessively ‘high’ style, with antiquated diction and heavy alliteration. In those two works Shakespeare seems to be exaggerating the distance between his own dramas and the classical past, and to be underplaying his intimacy with the classics.
But Shakespeare’s classical learning also went unappreciated for so long for a further reason. He tended to learn from what he read rather than simply echoing it. This means that the traditional method of identifying ‘sources’ and ‘borrowings’ by looking for precise verbal parallels is a very unreliable means of determining which texts mattered to Shakespeare. Classical comedy, for instance, clearly influenced how Shakespeare constructed plots and how he thought about the human imagination, even if there are not many direct allusions to specific lines by Plautus and Terence in his plays. The early work The Comedy of Errors (1592-3) does draw very directly on a play about twins and confusion called the Menaechmi by Plautus. It doubles up Plautus’s sets of twins in order to multiply the comic confusions, but it also complicates Plautus in other ways. The Menaechmi was principally concerned with material losses and confusions, but Shakespeare made from it a play in which people become confused about who they are and what they know. A few years later in Twelfth Night (1599-1600) questions about the psychology of love and identity become such pronounced elements in the play that the material confusions of Plautus seem to have been left far behind—although at least one of Shakespeare’s early audience, John Manningham of the Inner Temple, did record in his diary that the play was ‘much like the comedy of errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus’.
In his later tragedies and comedies of love Shakespeare continued to address a series of questions which had been provoked by his reading of Plautus: ‘who am I?’, ‘what do I know?’, ‘am I part of an illusion?’. Those questions are explored in Troilus and Cressida (1601-2), and take on a tragic dimension with the delusions of Othello (1604-5). They are central to his depiction, throughout his career, of human beings as subject to illusion, imagination, and desire. And those questions Shakespeare was first prompted to ask by his reading in classical comedy.
There is, though, a curious irony here. It was Shakespeare’s ability to see beneath his source material, extract principles from it, and transform those principles that made him a great writer. But his ability to conceal and transform his reading had a secondary consequence: it made generations of readers fail to appreciate quite how learned Shakespeare actually was.
Colin Burrow is the author of Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (OUP, 2013) and the editor of The Complete Sonnets and Poems (OUP, 2002).




All major religious traditions carry basically the same message that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives. Dalai Lama
             
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. Washington Irving
             
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home. Mother Teresa
             
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. Maya Angelou
             
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.Theodore Hesburgh
             
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Khalil Gibran
             
If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love. Maya Angelou
             
You can't blame gravity for falling in love. Albert Einstein



It's Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the books contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what

From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age seven through seventeen, in foster care.  Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were wrong.  It was not all right to be a foster kid.
During my time in the system, I was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age seventeen.
In the course of my stay in foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers" and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only blocks away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family, means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had continuous problems with the law.
 Today, almost nothing about foster care has changed.  Exactly what happened to me is happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now.  The system, corrupt, bloated, and inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.  Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have lived through it.
Yet there is a suspicion among some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and is at odds with a satisfying life.  Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder of the public treasuries.
 None of that is true; in fact, all that sort of thinking does is to blame the victims.  There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked to be there.  Foster kids are in foster care because they had nowhere else to go.  It's that simple.  And believe me, if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are doing the plundering.
 We need to end this needless suffering.  We need to end it because it is morally and ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous wealth.
 Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world a better place.  And if we cannot accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of foster care and here's how to do it.  We have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to the world.  You have the power to improve the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves.  All you need is the will to do it.
 If the American people, as good, decent and generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and with their money, they would stop it.  But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in this work, you can help to change all of that.  You can make a difference.  You can change things for the better.
We can always change the future for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up (or tweet out) because it's your country.  Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these kids, because you are the other guy.


We cannot build a future for foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time to start that change is today.

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write. Nicholas Boileau




WHY I’M BOYCOTTING CENTRAL PARK AND WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID IT TOO


 So my wife and I are regular visitors to New York City, one of the finest places on earth, truly it is. And we were enjoying ourselves tremendously until we walked into Central Park. The second we reached the edge of the sidewalk outside the park we were assaulted hyper-aggressive hawkers and pamphleteers who followed us into the park
One clown, from Russia I suspect, tried to sell me a map of the park for ten dollars, the same map they were giving away free in a Kiosk ten feet away.
I told him to give me ten dollars or I would beat him up.   
He was outraged, at first, that I was robbing him.
“You’re going to rob me right here on a public street?”
“Yeah, why not” I said “You were going to rob me”
He gave me three dollars and I left him alone.
We were dogged every inch of our way by foul mouth drive by pedicabs….. A Pedicab is, basically, a rickshaw and by all reports they are filthy and unhealthy to sit in……asking us if we wanted to pay $3.00 A MINUTE to ride through the most walkable park in the world. When we said no, and we said no over twenty five times in one hour, we were called “Cheap ass white mother fuckers” and other things.
They blocked our path and the path of other pedestrian who made the mistake of entering the park.  At an exit on to the street, about fifty pedicabs created an obstacle course that forces park goers through a gamut of leering, foul mouth hoodlums.  As we walked through the narrow line of Pedicabs, just in front of a family with four small children, the topic of conversation between the Pedicabs concerning “Bang’s the ass off that fat ass white bitch”
They drive between couples and families interrupting peaceful conversations offering tours yet said one New Yorker public official “They don’t know the first thing about the park or its history. Some of them don’t even know its Central Park and very few of them speak English”
Nice huh? They are, as the New York Times as pegged them, an urban pest but they are more than that they are racist terrorist to tourist.
They’re obnoxious, dangerous, overpriced and threatening and the city is flooded with complaints from tourist but yet according to The Post, as of May 2015, the police haven’t issued a single ticket against a Pedicab driver.
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said says he can’t put more police pressure on the Pedicabs because of the odd mix of laws that protect the Pedicab drivers and not the tourist or visitors to the park.
“It’s New York,” Bratton said. “A good example of that is these characters in those pedicabs. I took a good look at that because they drive me crazy. You could have not designed a more complex, more unworkable set of laws and rules and regulations than this city has managed to create around that issue.
“I spent three hours with the city’s top attorney on this stuff and I came out of it totally confused. So how would you expect a cop in the field that doesn’t have the hours to sit there and ask questions to go out and enforce this Byzantine system of laws that we have?”
The stories of these scum bags over charging tourist are legendary, with the favorite being the “add on fee” charged at the end of the ride because the driver wasn’t happy with the price he charged to get his victim into cab in the first place.
They have the stench of a hustler all over them, the same smell that most people outside of New York wrongfully assume is the natural odor of the city overall. 
They are not regulated, and let’s face it, their third world hustlers who scuff at regulations would anyway so don’t regulate them; ban them out of existence.
There are actually Pedicab defenders, of sorts, who bemoan what they assume are the horrid working conditions for the thugs driving the Pedicabs. What they fail to understand that is poor working conditions does not allow these punks peddling the bikes to terrorize the tourist who are peddling a couple of hundred million dollars a year into the city’s economy.
Pedicabs are New York’s New Windshield creeps of the new millennium. I’m told these creatures aren’t around town in the winter but we’re not fazed by that. We’re still going to boycott the park until the park authority and the city does something about these leaches. 

GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..

 Ruly \ROO-lee\ obedient, orderly.  Ruly and unruly are of the same 15th-century vintage, but the former never caught on the wayunruly did. The more common unruly is also the older of the pair: ruly was formed by a process called "back-formation" fromunruly. Ultimately, both words come from reuly, a Middle English word meaning "disciplined." Reuly in turn comes from Middle English reule, a predecessor of rule.

Entrapreneur (in-truh-pruh-NUHR, -NOOR, -NYOOR) An employee who works as an entrepreneur within an established company, having the freedom to take risks and act independently. A blend of intra- (within) + entrepreneur, from French entreprendre (to undertake), from Latin inter- (between) + prendere (to take). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ghend-/ghed- (to seize or to take), which also gave us pry, prey, spree, reprise, surprise, osprey, prison, impregnable, impresa,pernancy, and prise.

Nebula \NEB-yuh-luh\ any of numerous clouds of gas or dust in interstellar space 2: any of the very large groups of stars and associated matter that are found throughout the universe; especially: a galaxy other than the Milky Way galaxy — not used technically The word traces back to the Latin word (spelled the same way as our modern term) for "mist" or "cloud." In its earliest English uses in the 1600s, nebula referred to a cloudy speck or film on the eye that caused vision problems. It was first applied to great interstellar clouds of gas and dust in the early 1700s. The adjective nebulous comes from the same Latin root as nebula, but the first uses of nebulous in the astronomical sense don't appear in English until the late 1700s, well after the discovery of interstellar nebulae.



The Observation and Appreciation of Architecture


The future is round: why modern architecture turned doughnut-shaped


From GCHQ to the Apple campus, huge disc-like buildings are popping up around the world. As artist Simon Denny warns, they betray a world with no corners in which to hide
Steven Rose
 “Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it,” Buckminster Fuller once said. Unfortunately, the public thought the same when the architect tried to flog them his circular houses. But if we’re not living in circles in the 21st-century, we’re increasingly finding ourselves working in them. The circle is emerging as a key modern form for office buildings and a way of organising people. Stepping out of them may no longer even be an option.
Three sculptures in a new show at the Serpentine Gallery bring this looping train of thought to mind. They’re not really sculptures, more architectural models of the headquarters of three institutions: the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, funky online retailer Zappos in Las Vegas, and Apple’s new campus, currently under construction in California. Each model has been tipped on its side, to accentuate the fact they are all circular.
This is more than just a coincidence. The models are by Simon Denny, a New Zealand artist who tackles the culture, impact and jargon of new technology. Previously, he’s made works that honour the tech maverick Kim Dotcom and mock the garish graphics of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) internal communications, as revealed by the Snowden leaks.
Now, Denny is scrutinising how similar hacking culture is to “contemporary radical management practices”. Chief among them is “holacracy”, or rather, Holacracy® – a public idea that’s also a privately owned concept, which is about right for this strange new world.
For those not up on their radical management slang, Holacracy is a “complete system for self-organisation” that replaces traditional hierarchies with a supposedly more efficient system of autonomous teams of employees called “circles”. “More like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic organisation,” is how Zappos chief Tony Hsieh put it earlier this year. (Though he’s still the boss, so it’s not entirely un-hierarchical.)
Zappos, now owned by Amazon, is the biggest company so far to adopt Holacracy. It abolished all job titles and managers in late 2014, just as it moved into its new HQ, formerly Las Vegas City Hall. Zappos is the epitome of the trendy tech startup made good. Its motto is “deliver WOW through service”. It talks of its workforce in terms of “community” and “family”. And its circular campus is like a management diagram writ large.
Over at Apple, it’s a similar story. Their new campus, designed by Norman Foster and due to finish next year, is an elevated, four-storey, minimalist ring, utterly of a piece with Apple’s sleek products. Apple has not explicitly adopted Holacracy, but its innovation-seeking methodology has much in common with it. “The concept of the building is collaboration and fluidity,” an Apple exec told local planners. “We wanted this to be a walkable building – that’s why we eventually settled on a circle.”
Against all expectations, GCHQ is alsoflirting with Holacracy. It even won a business award last year for “creating the right environment for innovation and collaboration” (even if the creators themselves could not be identified). Former hackers as well as government suits roam the curved corridors of “the Doughnut”, as GCHQ’s base is known. This is not unusual, shows Denny. Big organisations are increasingly adopting the techniques of hackers, such as “hackathons”, where employees are encouraged to be playful, creative, even subversive. “Today, commercial organisations and hacking groups deploy a mixture of top-down and bottom-up techniques: a tension designed to enable directed, effective activity and also maintain the messiness necessary for the next thing to emerge,” he says.
Top-down and grassroots, private and public, secrecy and transparency, democratic freedom and Orwellian control – Denny’s work warns us that the boundaries are no longer visible.
All of this might sound eerily familiar to readers of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle. The story takes place at a fictional boundary-pushing West Coast social media outfit – a walled garden of cutting-edge tech, employee benefits and great parties. But those high principles of “transparency” and “openness” start to get sinister, to the point where workers are endorsing Animal Farm-style slogans such as “privacy is theft” and “secrets are lies”. Eggers never really describes the architecture of The Circle, only hinting at “brushed steel and glass” and a vast, rambling campus where “the smallest detail had been carefully considered”.
Architecture has always reflected its creators’ power structures, though for most of western history it’s taken a more classical form. See Giuseppe Terragni’s rigorously ordered 1930s Casa Del Fascio, commissioned by Mussolini as the National Fascist Party headquarters – a perfect half-cube. Or Terry Farrell’s monolithic MI6 building in London (the one James Bond’s enemies seem to love blowing up). But Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was one of the first to apply this new circular logic – to the HQ of CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster. Rather than a skyscraper, he folded the building back in on itself to create a gigantic loop, in the name of operational efficiency.
That’s not to say that all circular buildings represent some emergent 21st-century order. It is interesting, though, that past precedents have usually been buildings designed for spectatorship: sports stadiums or, more resonantly, panopticon prisons, where inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring so they’re visible to guards in a central observation tower. Take away that tower and you have the Apple campus.
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible,” Paul Klee once said. For many artists today, surveillance has become central to that mission. As well as Denny you could include those who are turning surveillance infrastructure against itself, such as Jill Magid, who co-opted Liverpool’s citywide CCTV network for her art, and James Coupe, whose video installation Swarm used surveillance algorithms to “profile” gallery visitors, then composite them into demographically similar groups. Or Mishka Henner, who creates aerial images of sites like US military bases using Google Earth.
But perhaps the leader in this field is Trevor Paglen, best known for his ultra-long-range pictures of “secret” US military sites (as featured in Laura Poitras’s Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour). Paglen has also shot spy satellites in the night sky, projected absurd NSA and GCHQ codenames on public buildings, and photographed idyllic locations, including a deserted Long Island beach, that conceal major internet and surveillance infrastructure. “I try to learn how to change my own vision,” he says, “so that when I walk around every day, I can see the fact that this is happening – because these are often abstract things – then try to show people how to see them.”
Paglen also made a short film on a surveillance flight around GCHQ’s “Doughnut”, which played before Citizenfour in cinemas last year. Its name – what else? – is Circles.

                                 THE ART OF PULP





With chapter and verse, writer-in-residence helps students find their poetic voice

Janene Holzberg
For The Baltimore Sun

A photo of an unidentified musician enthusiastically playing the drums — his head thrown back and eyes squeezed shut — was all the inspiration Garrett Krakat needed.
Laura Shovan, an Ellicott City poet and teacher, was visiting River Hill High School last week as the 24th writer-in-residence for the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society and had handed out one-of-a-kind portrait postcards to two English classes.
Displaying a sample postcard depicting a jowly man with a frighteningly intense gaze, Shovan first urged each of the 10th- and 12-grade students to explore senses other than sight to concoct a fictional back story as the basis for a poem.
"Is this man a professor?" she asked, to get imaginations whirring. "Can you hear him grinding his teeth? Is he a smoker, and can you smell his tobacco?"
After listening to Shovan's sample scenarios, Krakat went to work and soon came to the front of the media center to read aloud his first-person verse about the performer on his postcard.
"The song is caught in the clouds of smoke. No one hears the notes but only my mind and soul," he recited, swiftly conjuring up the image — and aroma — of a cigarette smoke-filled nightclub filled with unappreciative, distracted guests.
"Way to represent," English teacher Diane Curry said to the 10th-grader.
Shovan, who has taught for the Maryland State Arts Council since 2002 and has a novel-in-verse scheduled for April publication, said later she was impressed by the insight and talent demonstrated by River Hill students during her hourlong workshop.
"It's hard to ask people to write on the spot like that, yet doing that gets them out of the feeling of needing to wait for inspiration," she said, noting that most students are hesitant to try their hand at poetry, much less share it with others. "It's responding to the right-now and seeing what that means."
Using vintage postcards as prompts is proving to be a hit, but Shovan said she has also used paint chips and sound clips as points of entry into writing.
"It's important to look at writing like any other skill and to put the focus on practice instead of polish," she said of writing regularly to improve technique and build confidence. "It's about creating a new habit that stretches you."
HoCoPoLitSo, as the 41-year-old nonprofit is known, has been arranging writer-in-residence visits since 1980, with the aim of exposing students to professional writers of all kinds. Writers also visit Howard Community College and the Homewood Center, site of the county's alternative-learning high school.
Participating authors have run the gamut from fiction writers and poets to journalists and memoir writers, said Susan Thornton Hobby, a HoCoPoLitSo consultant.
"What all of these writers have in common is a love of words, and the capability to spark and fan the flame of conversation about literature in English classes and poetry clubs," she said.
All but three of the county's 13 high schools have set dates for Shovan to visit, and those three are expected to come on board soon, said Nancy Czarnecki, coordinator of secondary language arts for the public school system.
"I've been on the receiving end of writer-in-residence visits, and I've seen firsthand the authors' enthusiasm and passion for what they do," said the former English teacher, who most recently taught at Marriotts Ridge High School.
Visiting poets "teach the kids to play with language and show them that writing doesn't have to be so serious and heavy-handed," she said. "I've seen kids who weren't at all interested in poetry get really excited about it, and that's an amazing thing."
After applause subsided for the poems shared by Krakat and senior Brianna Mentle, English teacher Kristin Mitchell announced she would award extra credit to her 12th-grade students who finish writing their postcard poems and turn them in — and that grabbed students' attention.
"To many of them, poetry seems so esoteric, but Laura's poetry is very accessible," Mitchell said later. "This workshop presents a time when students are not worrying about learning for learning's sake, and they can just enjoy the experience."
Shovan said after the workshop that she hopes to start a public reading series in Howard County during her one-year residency with HoCoPoLitSo, something hinted at in her introduction to the students by the nonprofit's high school liaison, Kathleen Hurwitz.
"It's important to write and share poetry together," Hurwitz, a retired English teacher, told the students. "When you share together, you value the thoughts and ideas of your peers, and you value your own voice."
Shovan said Howard County is the only jurisdiction among Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Montgomery counties that doesn't have a regular reading series — which she defined as an informal open-microphone night where everyone who signs in gets to read.
"We really need [a series] because right now there's a big hole here," said Shovan, who hopes to get a series underway by March after locating a venue and applying for grant money. She said she plans to dedicate some nights to student-authors.
"The first couple times reading aloud can really be anxiety-inducing," she said, even in the casual setting she envisions. "But when you go back and do it month after month, that all begins to change."
As Shovan's River Hill visit drew to a close, sophomore Lena Jackson said her main take-away was that "poetry isn't just expression; it's painting a picture. The depth of the writing can even make you taste and hear beyond what it makes you feel."
Asha Kunchakarra, also a 10th-grader, said she believes the observation techniques Shovan taught them were not only interesting ways to approach writing, but "will help me out later in life."
Shovan said the intent of the writing workshops is to prove to students that others want to hear what they have to say, and that's powerful knowledge to have as they prepare to face new academic and life challenges.
"We're all afraid of exposing our true selves by writing a poem," Shovan said. "But something special happens when you take the parameters off."



Long-lost Faulkner play published for the first time



By Hillel Italie  

NEW YORK — “’Twixt Cup and Lip,” written soon after World War I and being published for the first time, is a one-act comedy in which a modern, free-thinking woman finds herself courted by two men and changes her mind at the last moment.
Compared to other plays from the 1920s, “’Twixt Cup and Lip” was not uncommon with its matter-of-fact references to sex and drinking and the characters’ unending cigarettes. Even now, audiences might laugh at such lines as “Marriage is stylish again you know” and “I thought all men papered their room with actresses and fat girls in bathing suits.”
But the name of the playwright is the real attraction: William Faulkner.
Written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, “’Twixt Cup and Lip” was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli, who over the past few years has also tracked down long-lost and obscure works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. The play appears in the Strand’s holiday issue, which went on sale Friday.
“Faulkner wrote this at a time of great change in society especially for women,” Gulli told The Associated Press recently.
“This work is unique in that it showed a side of Faulkner that was comical yet that at the same time explored the nascent theme of the independent jazz era female which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker carried on further.”
Faulkner, who died in 1962, is an acknowledged giant of American fiction, but in his early years was more likely to write plays and poetry. Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, believes “’Twixt Cup and Lip” was written in the early 1920s, when Faulkner was part of a theater group at the University of Mississippi.
The play’s title is lifted from an old English expression “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” meaning a seemingly settled event can still unravel. But readers will find nothing suggesting the tragic vision and anguish about the Southern past that made “Absalom, Absalom,” ‘’The Sound and the Fury” and other Faulkner novels some of the most influential and haunting works of the 20th century. “He’s showing a knack for comedy and a knack for dialogue, too,” says Rieger, noting that years later Faulkner worked on Hollywood screenplays. “You’re not seeing the trademarks from his more famous works, although the techniques he’s perfecting here would serve him well.”
Around the time he wrote “’Twixt Cup and Lip,” Faulkner also worked on the one-act “The Marionettes,” a romance based on Faulkner and his high school girlfriend (and future wife) Estelle Oldham. Rieger says “’Twixt Cup and Lip” also may be drawn from Faulkner’s relationship with Oldham.
“Not long before he worked on those plays, Estelle had caved to her parents’ pressure and married another man,” Rieger said. “Faulkner may have had some resentment that she didn’t stand up for them and used the play as a kind of wish fulfillment — imagining her as more independent.”




GREAT WRITING
  
Through the deep silence of the deserted avenue, the carts made their way towards Paris, the rhythmic jolting of the wheels echoing against the fronts of the sleeping houses on both sides of the road, behind the dim shapes of elms. A cart full of cabbages and another full of peas had joined up at the Pont de Neuilly with the eight carts carrying carrots and turnips from Nanterre; the horses plodded along of their own accord, their heads down as they moved forward at a steady but lazy pace, which the upward slope reduced still further. The wagoners, lying flat on their stomachs on beds of vegetables, were dozing with the reins in their hands and their greatcoats, in thin black and grey stripes, over their backs. Every now and then a gas lamp, looming out of the darkness, would illuminate the nails of a boot, the blue sleeve of a smock, or the peak of a cap, in the midst of this huge mass of vegetables—bunches of red carrots, bunches of white turnips, and the rich greenery of peas and cabbages. All along the road, and the neighbouring roads, in front and behind, the distant rumbling of carts signalled similar convoys travelling through the night, lulling the dark city with the sound of food on the move.

Madame François’s horse Balthazar, a very fat animal, led the procession. He plodded on, half asleep, flicking his ears, until, reaching the Rue de Longchamp, he gave a start and came to a sudden halt. The horses behind bumped into the carts in front, and the procession stopped amid a clanking of metal and the cursing of wagoners shaken from their sleep. Madame François, sitting with her back against a plank that kept her vegetables in place, looked round, but could see nothing in the dim light shed by a small square lantern on her left, which illuminated little more than one of Balthazar’s gleaming flanks.  From The Belly of Paris (Chapter 1 p. 3) by Émile Zola.

MISH MOSH..........................................
               

Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ˌmash, -ˌmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century

Illustrated grocery list Michelangelo would create for his illiterate servants.

used tires

Hitlers office


This is what a pug looked like before selective breeding, quite the difference.

Prison in El Salvador

Mercury



DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD? 
I DO


Glasgow (by Giulia Bellato)

Gold Finials, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Gruyeres, Switzerland



TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY



Benedetto "Benny" Aloi (October 6, 1935 – April 7, 2011) was a New York City mobster who became consigliere of the Colombo crime family. Aloi was a main figure in the famous "Windows Case".Benedetto along with his brother Vincenzo joined their father Sebastian "Buster" Aloi in the Profaci crime family. On November 19, 1974, Benedetto Aloi was indicted in Brooklyn along with 156 other mobsters on perjury charges. He was accused of lying to a grand jury that what investigating police collusion with an illegal gambling ring. On June 28, 1984, Aloi was indicted on loansharking charges. Prosecutors alleged that he was involved with Resource Capital Group a company in Lake Success, New York, that lent over $1 million in a year and a half at interest rates of 2 percent or more per week. In May 1990, Aloi was indicted in the famous "Windows Case" along with other members of four of the New York crime families. In the Windows case, the crime families used their control over local construction unions and companies to fix the bid prices offered to the New York 
Housing Authority for thermal pane windows in its housing projects. 

 On May 18, 1991, Aloi was convicted of one count of extortion and a related conspiracy count in the Windows case. Under normal sentencing guidelines, Aloi might have received a three- to five-year sentence. However, due to his criminal record, his high rank in the Colombo family, and the high profile of the case, the judge gave Aloi 16 years and eight months in prison. On March 17, 2009, Aloi was released from a halfway house in the Greater New York area. He died on April 7, 2011. 










Sculpture this and Sculpture that

HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................

The Pupil
Donald Justice

Picture me,the shy pupil at the door,
One small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny.
Back then time was still harmony, not money,
And I could spend a whole week practicing for
That moment on the threshold.
                                               Then to take courage,
And enter, and pass among mysterious scents,
And sit quite straight, and with a frail confidence
Assault the keyboard with a childish flourish!

Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.


Donald Justice (August 12, 1925 – August 6, 2004) was a poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career David Orr wrote, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his poems weren't just good; they were great. They were great in the way that Elizabeth Bishop's poems were great, or Thom Gunn's or Philip Larkin's. They were great in the way that tells us what poetry used to be, and is, and will be."

I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM


Elliott Erwitt

Versailles, 1970,










WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................



THE ART OF WAR...............................



ALBUM ART


DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY....AND HERE'S SOME ANIMALS FOR YOU................... 













MUSIC FOR THE SOUL

Charlie Parker, Harry Babasin, Chet Baker and Helen Carr at The Tiffany Club, LA, May 1952 by William Claxton




DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?

“Bone Broth” by Eugenia Loli





HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!


Petticoat Lane Market - Peter Brown

Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905), La Reine Bianca - 1877



AND NOW, A BEATLES BREAK 





FROM LLR BOOKS. COM
Litchfield Literary Books. A really small company run by writers.

AMERICAN HISTORY


The Day Nixon Met Elvis
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/

Theodore Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/

THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND CIVILIZATIONS
The Works of Horace
Paperback 174 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/

The Quotable Greeks
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Epictetus
Paperback 142 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings

Quo Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero
Paperback 420 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero



















CHILDRENS BOOKS
The Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge, by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is a ongoing lesson isn't it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children



  
BOOKS ABOUT FILM

On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/

BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL

Scotish Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell

HUMOR BOOKS
The Book of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people

The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook

Perfect Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social

BOOKS ABOUT THE 1960s

You Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969

Baby Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/

Baby Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s


IRISH- AMERICANA
The Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

 The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes 
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
 
 The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
  http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/

 The Wee book of Irish Blessings... 
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/

The Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/

Everything you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick

A Reading Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History

The Book of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/

Poets and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/

The History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/


BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND

The New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/

Wicked Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/

The Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

The Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion

The Life of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut

Stories of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford

What they Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/


BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME

Chicago Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook

The Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook

An Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/

The Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/

Shooting the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/

Shooting the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre

The Life and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone

AL CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930 edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs

Whacked. One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/

Las Vegas Organized Crime
The Mob in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook

Bugsy & His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/

Testimony by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook

Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged

The Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor

The Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago

When Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos

Organized Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/

The Bioff Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios

Organized Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/

Mob Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/

The New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins

The New York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/

Organized Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook

Shooting the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York

THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/

The Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook

Organized Crime/General
Best of Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/

Best of Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/

Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook

Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

More Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

The New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook

Shooting the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/

The Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/

The Mob across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/

The US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/

The Mob and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters


BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST

The Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself

BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago: A photographic essay.
 Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas

STAGE PLAYS
Boomers on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook

Four Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy

Four More Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/

High and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve

Cyberdate. An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/

The Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/

Fishbowling on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/

American Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook

She Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/

The Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/

BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/

McLean Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/


THE QUOTABLE SERIES

The Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300 quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes

The Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/

The Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/

The Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/

The Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/

The Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook

The words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti

The Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet, and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In 1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in 1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/

The Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages

The Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer

The Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/

The Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby

The Art of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander


BLOGLAPEDIA’S BLOGS



ARCHITECTURE
Architecture for the blog of it
http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

THE ARTS
Art for the Blog of It
http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Art for the Pop of it
http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/

Photography for the blog of it
http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Music for the Blog of it
http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Sculpture this and Sculpture that
http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/

The art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)
http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/

Album Art (Photographic arts)
http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/

Pulp Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/

Admit it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/

FILM
The Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot
http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/

On the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film
http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/

FOOD
Absolutely blogalicious
http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

Good chowda (New England foods)
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes (Book support site)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams (New England foods)
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Wicked Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Old New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

FOSTER CARE
Foster Care new and Updates

Aging out of the system

Murder, Death and Abuse in the Foster Care system

Angel and Saints in the Foster Care System

The Foster Children’s Blogs

Foster Care Legislation

The Foster Children’s Bill of Right

Foster Kids own Story

The Adventures of Foster Kid.

HEALTH
Me vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)
http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/

HISTORY
The Quotable Helen Keller
http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/

Teddy Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)
http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)
http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/

HUMOR
Whatever you do, don't laugh
http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Grouch Marx
http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/





IRISH-AMERICANA
A Big Blog of Irish Literature
http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)
http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Recipes
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

The Irish in their Own Words
http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/
















LITERATURE
Following Fitzgerald
http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/

Shakespeare
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/

The Blogable Robert Frost
http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/

Charles Dickens
http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/

The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation
http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/

Holden Caulfield Blog Spot
http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/

NEW ENGLAND BLOGS
The Quotable Thoreau
http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Wicked Cool New England Recipes
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Emerson
http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/

The New England Mafia
http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Watch Hill
http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/

York Beach
http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut History Blog
http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut Irish
http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/

Good chowda
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/











NOSTALGIA
God, How I hated the 70s
http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/

Child of the Sixties Forever
http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/

The Kennedy’s in the 60’s
http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/

Music of the Sixties Forever
http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/

Elvis and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)
http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/

Beatles Fan Forever
http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/

Year One, 1955
http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/

Robert Kennedy in His Own Words

The 1980s were fun
http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/

The 1990s. The last decade.
http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/

ORGANIZED CRIME
The Russian Mafia
http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/

The American Jewish Gangster
http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Hollywood
http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/

We Only Kill Each Other
http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/

Early Gangsters of New York City
http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/

Al Capone: Biography of a self-made Man
http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/

The Life and World of Al Capone
http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/

The Salerno Report
http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/

Guns and Glamour
http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/

Mob Testimony
http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/

Recipes we would Die For
http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/

The Prohibition in Pictures
http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Pictures
http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Vegas
http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

Roger Touhy Gangster
http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/

Chicago’s Mob Bosses
http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/

Chicago Gang Land: It Happened Here
http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

The Mob Across America
http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Mob Cops, Lawyers and Front Men
http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dutch Schultz
http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/

Bugsy& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/

After Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime
http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book support site)
http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/

The US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)
http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/

The Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)
http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/

Joe Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)
http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in the News
http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)
http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/

The Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)
http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in Black and White
http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/

Mafia Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas
http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)
http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/

The Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)
http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/



PHILOSOPHY
It’s All Greek Mythology to me
http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/

PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologically Relevant
http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/

SNOBBERY
The Rarifieid Tribe
http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/

Perfect Behavior
http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/

TRAVEL
The Upscale Traveler
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

TRIVIA
The Mish Mosh Blog
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

WASHINGTON DC
DC Behind the Monuments
http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/

Washington Oddities
http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish

http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/