December Bonus Book Review: Notorious New Jersey
Jon Blackwell's omnibus of Garden State crooks and crimes is a great bathroom book
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Mafiosi…Torricelli…Lindbergh…List…Notorious New Jersey: 100 True Tales of Murder and Mobsters, Scandals and Scoundrels has something for everyone.
The stories
Notorious New Jersey is a perfect toilet-tank book. If you’ve been around here a while, you know that that’s not damnation with faint praise: every visit to a man “about a horse” needs reading material like NNJ, a crime-pendium portioned out in five-to-ten-minute sections. Author Jon Blackwell and the team at Rivergate Books smartly divided all the criminals up, too, with sections on pre-1900 Jersey crime, “infamous murders,” the Mafia, pols, “terrorists” and “radicals,” and contested/unsolved mysteries. If you don’t care about La Cosa Nostra, you can flip forward to the chapter on Karen Ann Quinlan (her parents founded an org called the Citizens Committee on Biomedical Ethics; I worked for the CCBE one summer, back in the ’80s, basically as a teenage clipping service — but the real story here is that their office was in an underground warren of wood-panelled rooms known, far too romantically, as The Catacombs. AMA!).
The writing is…fine. Blackwell was, as of publication time, a copy editor at the New York Post, with time in the field at Asbury Park Press and the Trentonian, and he contributed to The Encyclopedia of New Jersey, an absolute unit of a book that I also own — and his prose is your basic “a reporter sent it to a novelist friend for a more conversational ‘polish,’ and it’s very obvious” deal, a couple garbage-time phrasings but nothing egregious. A handful of the crimes included stretch the borders of the Garden State a bit, and that’s also fine; Nicky Scarfo doesn’t really belong in here, but I get what a tempting subject he is, and that’s for Philadelphia to get salty about.
But it’s a perfectly solid sit, no matter which room said seat is in, and it’s got a good mix of familiar felons and new intel for natives. Just five of the things I learned while buzzing through NNJ this week: