The Happy Dust Gang: How Sex, Scandal and Deceit Founded a Drugs Empire

David Leslie

Mainstream Digital

Glasgow: Tales of the City

John Burrowes

Greyfrair's Cemetery in Edinburgh has a centuries old reputation for being haunted. Its gruesome history includes use as a mass prison, headstone removal, witchcraft, bodysnatching, desecration, corpse dumping and live burial. In 1998, something new and inexplicable began occurring in the graveyard. Visitors encountered 'cold spots', strange smells and banging noises. They found themselves overcome by nausea, or cut and bruised by something they could not see. Over the space of two years, twenty-four people were knocked unconscious. Homes next to the graveyard wall became plagued by crockery smashing, objects moving and unidentified laughter. Witnesses to these attacks ran into the hundreds. There were two exorcisms of the area. Both failed. The section of Greyfriars where the attacks occurred is now chained shut. The entity responsible has been named the 'Mackenzie Poltergeist'. It has become one of the best-documented and most conclusive paranormal cases in history. The Poltergeist is still growing stronger. This is its story.

The Ghost That Haunted Itself: The Story of the Mackenzie Poltergeist - The Infamous Ghoul of Greyfriars Graveyard

JAN-ANDREW HENDERSON

Say Nothing is the moving true story of four neglected siblings who were uprooted from their Glasgow home and sent to a small croft in the north-east of Scotland. They became trapped in what seemed like a bygone era with an old woman devoid of any emotion, compassion or understanding. For ten years, they endured daily beatings, an onslaught of physical and mental abuse, and dealt with every aspect of mistreatment at the hands of an inexperienced foster mother.  The lack of nourishment and affection disturbed every minute of their day; they ate cat food and hugged any animal that would let them. They came to depend on the friendship and loyalty of a collie dog, who cried and whined with them when they were locked in a shed and lay in the fields with them when they were hiding from "Auntie." The children's cries for help were ignored and misunderstood in the naive social-work climate of the late 1950s, and this heartbreaking personal account of cruelty and neglect reveals the effect this maltreatment had on their ability to adjust to a normal adult life. Say Nothing was written as a voice of support for all abused children who were afraid or never had the chance to tell their story.

Say Nothing: The Harrowing Truth About Auntie's Children

Duthie, Josephine

Biographies & Memoirs

The Girl with No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

In 1954, in a remote South American village, a four-year-old girl was abducted and then abandoned deep in the Colombian rainforest. So begins the incredible true story of Marina Chapman, who went on to spend several years alone in the jungle, her only family a troop of capuchin monkeys. Using instinct to guide her, she copied everything they did and soon learned to fend for herself. At around 10 years old, a completely feral Marina was returned to civilisation by hunters, who sold her as a slave to a brothel. Beaten daily and groomed to be a prostitute, she escaped - to live the perilous existence of a Colombian city street kid. Marina's life as a wild child wasn't over. In some ways, it had only just begun. This is her astonishing story.

Chapman, Marina

Community & Culture

In the bestselling tradition of Wiseguy comes a mobster’s behind-the-scenes look at how drugs and greed and the decline of traditional family values brought down an American institution—the New York Mafia.The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America—too dangerous and too deadly to fail. Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values. And by guys like Sal Polisi. He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power. Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat. In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists. *** I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special. A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory. John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out. From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go. Here’s how it all happened.

The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia

Polisi, Sal

Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century

Kapila, Dr. Mukesh

Manchester United in Europe: Tragedy, History, Destiny (Mainstream Sport)

Ken Ferris

Every Single Ball: The Brian Corcoran Story

Kieran Shannon

Brian Corcoran

Beginning with the death of legendary IRA figure Sean South of Garryowen on New Year's Day 1957, this title describes the background to what we have now come to call "the troubles" and paints portraits of the major players whose actions sparked the violence that erupted on the streets of Belfast and Derry in the summer of 1969. Throughout the decades of bloodshed, paramilitary leaders on both sides of the political divide continued to search for more so-called legitimate targets. This book charts how more and more innocent people were unwittingly drawn into the conflict against their will. It examines the killings which marked new lows in the republican/loyalist terror war, from the bombing of pubs and clubs to the advent of "human bomb" couriers, and revisits the horror story that was the infamous "Shankhill Butchers" case. It also covers the more recent murder of the author's colleague Martin O'Hagan, an act which sent shock waves through a battle-hardened media in Northern Ireland. O'Hagan was the first journalist in Ireland to lose his life at the hands of the paramilitaries and his death pushed the parameters of slaughter to new limits.

Milestones in Murder: Defining Moments in Ulster's Terror War

History

Jordan, Hugh

Europe

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