The Informant

An FBI’s informant’s role in the murder of a civil rights activist by the KKK is explored in this “suspenseful and vigorously reported” history (Baltimore Sun). In 1965, Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo drove to Alabama to help organize Martin Luther King’s Voting Rights March from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. But after the march’s historic success, Liuzzo was shot to death by members of the Birmingham Ku Klux Klan. The case drew national attention and was solved almost instantly, because one of the Klansman present during the shooting was Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover FBI informant. At the time, Rowe’s information and testimony were heralded as a triumph of law enforcement. But as Gary May reveals in this provocative book, Rowe’s history of collaboration with both the Klan and the FBI was far more complex. Based on previously unexamined FBI and Justice Department Records, The Informant demonstrates that in their ongoing efforts to protect Rowe’s cover, the FBI knowingly became an accessory to some of the most grotesque crimes of the Civil Rights era—including a vicious attack on the Freedom Riders and perhaps even the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. A tale of a renegade informant and a tragically dysfunctional intelligence system, The Informant offers a dramatic cautionary tale about what can happen when secret police power goes unchecked.

DIV Facing a long jail sentence, a woman takes a dangerous job for the New York Police Department Lydia Constanza is not cut out for prison. Since she came to the United States from Cuba, she’s twice been convicted as an accomplice to a violent crime, and done two short stints in jail. The second time, her nerves went, and she vowed never to return. Back on the outside and living in New York with a five-year-old daughter, Lydia and her boyfriend hold up a check-cashing place, tripping the silent alarm and landing, once again, in handcuffs. To stay near her child, this three-time loser offers up the only thing she has left: information. Harlem has become a dangerous place to wear a badge. Two cops have just been killed at a traffic stop, and Walter F. X. Forster is not going to lose any more men. Informants like Lydia are the lieutenant’s last chance to stop the bleeding. It’s the bad guys’ turn to die—if his snitches stay alive long enough to tell the cops who to kill. /div

When police informant Lisette Dorrien is killed, her husband Hugh is the logical suspect. Detective Mike Ceretzke knows he needs more than logic to convict this respected public figure, whose ties to a notorious crime figure are well hidden. Police agencies across the country are watching, not with the aim of helping him, but to ensure his case against Hugh Dorrien doesnt upset their investigation of his boss and to position themselves to take advantage of Hughs downfall. Mike begins his investigation hoping to prove Hughs guilt with hard evidence and preferably an eyewitness. Unfortunately, that hope soon evaporates when Beth McKinney, the woman who discovered Lisette and heard her dying words cant, or wont, identify the person she saw leaving the crime scene. When a news report says otherwise and Beths life is threatened, Mike awakens to the knowledge that he personally wants to keep her safe. He failed to keep his promise to watch over Lisette and that guilt plagues him, but this obligation is different. Inevitably, those hunting the evidence that Lisette died obtaining, begin targeting Lisettes friends. Mike realizes that he must use Beth as bait in his final bid to capture Hugh.

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy—which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man . . . It was one of the FBI's biggest secrets: a senior executive with America's most politically powerful corporation, Archer Daniels Midland, had become a confidential government witness, secretly recording a vast criminal conspiracy spanning five continents. Mark Whitacre, the promising golden boy of ADM, had put his career and family at risk to wear a wire and deceive his friends and colleagues. Using Whitacre and a small team of agents to tap into the secrets at ADM, the FBI discovered the company's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI and federal prosecutors closed in on ADM, using stakeouts, wiretaps, and secret recordings of illegal meetings around the world, they suddenly found that everything was not all that it appeared. At the same time Whitacre was cooperating with the Feds while playing the role of loyal company man, he had his own agenda he kept hidden from everyone around him—his wife, his lawyer, even the FBI agents who had come to trust him with the case they had put their careers on the line for. Whitacre became sucked into his own world of James Bond antics, imperiling the criminal case and creating a web of deceit that left the FBI and prosecutors uncertain where the lies stopped and the truth began. In this gripping account unfolds one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America. Meticulously researched and richly told by New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant re-creates the drama of the story, beginning with the secret recordings, stakeouts, and interviews with suspects and witnesses to the power struggles within ADM and its board—including the high-profile chairman Dwayne Andreas, F. Ross Johnson, and Brian Mulroney—to the big-gun Washington lawyers hired by ADM and on up through the ranks of the Justice Department to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno. A page-turning real-life thriller that features deadpan FBI agents, crooked executives, idealistic lawyers, and shady witnesses with an addiction to intrigue, The Informant tells an important and compelling story of power and betrayal in America.

Autumn 1941: most of the world is at war. America is hovering on the brink. Special Agent James Nessheim is stuck in Hollywood, working as an adviser to a studio making pro-FBI movies. And then one his key informants, Japanese-American Billy Osaka, asks to see him urgently. But before they can meet, Osaka vanishes. Nessheim’s search for Osaka takes him to a Mob-run gambling club, through the dense streets of LA’s Little Tokyo, from the seamy San Pedro docks to the hill-top ranch of a Communist sympathiser. As Nessheim begins to unravel Osaka’s deadly secrets, he uncovers a chilling conspiracy to push America into the war. But other people are looking for Osaka too, and are prepared to kill anyone who gets in their way. A lethal race is on.

“A master class in thriller writing” from the New York Times bestselling author of The Butcher’s Boy and Sleeping Dogs (Los Angeles Times). In Thomas Perry’s Edgar Award–winning debut The Butcher’s Boy, a professional killer betrayed by the Mafia leaves countless mobsters dead and then disappears. Justice Department official Elizabeth Waring is the only one who believes he ever existed. Many years later, the Butcher’s Boy finds his peaceful life threatened when a Mafia hit team finally catches up with him. He knows they won’t stop coming and decides to take the fight to their door. Soon Waring, now high up in the Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department, receives a surprise late-night visit from the Butcher’s Boy. Knowing she keeps track of the Mafia, he asks her whom his attackers worked for, offering information that will help her crack an unsolved murder in return. So begins a new assault on organized crime and an uneasy alliance between opposite sides of the law. As the Butcher’s Boy works his way ever closer to his quarry in an effort to protect his new way of life, Waring is in a race against time, either to convince him to become a protected informant—or to take him out of commission for good. “Accentuates the best of Mr. Perry’s gift for using pure logic and gamesmanship to generate breathless nonstop suspense.”—The New York Times “No one makes killing bad guys more fun, no one is smarter at blending research and invention, and no one offers a higher body count of ingenious hits.”—Library Journal (starred review)

Paulie The Printer LaMonica once cut off a finger to get out of a bind. Now he has Treasury agents Carr and Kelly on his tail. Carr and Kelly lost Paulie once--and it cost the life of one of their best informants. This time, they are going in for the kill.

Set in London and Essex, The Informant is a story of ruthless criminals, corrupt cops, obsessive love and the villainy that operates on both sides of the law. As a drug-fuelled teenage tearaway, Kaz Phelps took the rap for her little brother Joey over a bungled armed robbery and went to jail. Six years later she's released on licence. Clean and sober, and driven by a secret passion for her lawyer, Helen, Kaz wants to escape the violence and abuse of her Essex gangster family. Joey is a charming, calculating and cold psychopath. He worships the ground Kaz walks on and he's desperate to get her back in the family firm. All Kaz wants is a fresh start and to put the past behind her. When Joey murders an undercover cop, DS Nicci Armstrong is determined to put him behind bars. What she doesn't realize is that her efforts are being sabotaged by one of their own and the Met is being challenged at the highest level. The final test for Kaz comes when her cousin, Sean, gets out of jail. He is a vicious, old-school thug and wants to show Kaz who is boss. Kaz may be tough enough to face down any man, but is she strong enough to turn her back on her family and go straight?