Pete Earley

In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas -- from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus Circus -- to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.From the Paperback edition.

Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son-in the throes of a manic episode-broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law.This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless thousands who suffer confinement instead of care, brutal conditions instead of treatment, in the "revolving doors" between hospital and jail. With mass deinstitutionalization, large numbers of state mental patients are homeless or in jail-an experience little better than the horrors of a century ago. Earley takes us directly into that experience-and into that of a father and award-winning journalist trying to fight for a better way.

Author of the acclaimed Family of Spies, Pete Earley is the first writer ever permitted unlimited access to America's oldest federal prison. Out of the iron belly of this maximum-security penitentiary comes his stunning account of life behind bars--the nation's hardest criminals doing hard time... It's a self-contained metropolis behind vast walls built in 1895; a lethal place governed by ruthless clans competing for dominance. Murder is frequent, rape is less for sex than for power, and respect is the coin of the realm. Once disrespected, a Leavenworth inmate has two choices: he can submit to virtual slavery--or he can fight his antagonist until one of them dies. Nicknamed "the Hot House" because of the sweltering conditions of its cellblocks, the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, seethes with the pervasive threat of riot. It is the most dreaded facility in the system--not because of its maximum-security rating, but because of its fierce population: sociopathic gangsters, Aryan Nation neo-Nazi killers, muscle toughs, ruthless narcotics profiteers, and heavyset bikers pockmarked with bullet wounds like acne scars. Even the shaven-legged "punks," the drunks, and the junkies may be carrying homemade "shank" knives under their shirts. Pete Earley, celebrated investigative reporter, conducted literally hundreds of hours of interviews, all but living inside the primordial world of Leavenworth. Out of this extraordinary firsthand access, as well as essential documents, telephone transcripts, and prison files, comes the riveting story of what life is actually like inside this most famous of prisons. The Hot House depicts the gulf between the thinking of us "Square Johns" and the inmates--people a Hot House prison psychologist termed as having "only two emotions, fear and anger. Everything these inmates do revolves around those two emotions and nothing else.". The Hot House focuses on a few of the "star" players in Leavenworth: among them Carl Cletus Bowles, the sexual predator with a talent for murder; Dallas Scott, a gang member who, at age forty-two, has spent almost thirty of those years behind bars; Warden Robert Matthews, who put his shoulder against his prison's immovable grim reality; Thomas Silverstein, a sociopath confined in "no human contact status" since 1983; and William Post, a bank robber with a criminal record going back to when he was eight years old, and the nickname "Catman" because he takes devoted care of the cats that live inside Leavenworth. The inmates are kept under control by an enormous staff of guards, whose main job is to keep the turf wars at bay and quell riots before they erupt. Not only a gripping account of real men behind bars and those who control them, Pete Earley's book is also a startling meditation on national prison policy. The United States has the dubious distinction of locking up the highest percentage of its population of any country in the world. The subject matter of The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison colors our daily lives and fills every night's newscasts. This disquieting book compels wide attention.

An account of the Soviet spy ring, and master American spy John Walker, who routinely sold American nuclear secrets and codes to the Russians.

For decades no law enforcement program has been as cloaked in controversy and mystery as the Federal Witness Protection Program. Now, for the first time, Gerald Shur, the man credited with the creation of WITSEC, teams with acclaimed investigative journalist Pete Earley to tell the inside story of turncoats, crime-fighters, killers, and ordinary human beings caught up in a life-and-death game of deception in the name of justice.WITSECInside the Federal Witness Protection ProgramWhen the government was losing the war on organized crime in the early 1960s, Gerald Shur, a young attorney in the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, urged the department to entice mobsters into breaking their code of silence with promises of protection and relocation. But as high-ranking mob figures came into the program, Shur discovered that keeping his witnesses alive in the face of death threats involved more than eradicating old identities and creating new ones. It also meant cutting off families from their pasts and giving new identities to wives and children, as well as to mob girlfriends and mistresses. It meant getting late-night phone calls from protected witnesses unable to cope with their new lives. It meant arranging funerals, providing financial support, and in one instance even helping a mobster's wife get breast implants. And all too often it meant odds that a protected witness would return to what he knew best--crime.In this book Shur gives a you-are-there account of infamous witnesses, from Joseph Valachi to "Sammy the Bull" Gravano to "Fat Vinnie" Teresa, of the lengths the program goes to to keep its charges safe, and of cases that went very wrong and occasionally even protected those who went on to kill again. He describes the agony endured by innocent people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in a program tailored to criminals. And along with Shur's war stories, WITSEC draws on the haunting words of one mob wife, who vividly describes her life of lies, secrecy, and loss inside the program. A powerful true story of the inner workings of one of the most effective and controversial weapons in the war against organized crime and the inner workings of organized crime itself--and more recently against Colombian drug dealers, outlaw motorcycle gang members, white-collar con men, and international terrorists--this book takes us into a tense, dangerous twilight world carefully hidden in plain sight: where the family living next door might not be who they say they are. . .From the Paperback edition.

"From New York Times bestselling author Pete Earley comes the true story of a young man who suffers a traumatic brain injury that renders him incapable of judging or feeling repulsion, and subsequently becomes the most trusted confidant of numerous imprisoned serial killers"--

When Aldrich Ames was arrested in February 1994, he had been feeding the KGB information for nine years; he had been paid more than two and a half million dollars, with the promise of two million more; and he had been personally responsible for the betrayal that led to the execution of most of the United States' top assets in the Soviet Union. Never before had one man done so much damage to American security. Pete Earley is the only writer to conduct fifty hours of one-on-one interviews with Ames, without a government censor present. He is the only writer to have traveled to Moscow to speak to Ames's KGB handlers and with the families of the spies he betrayed. He is the only writer to have had access to the remarkable CIA mole-hunting team that tracked down Ames through its own detective work. The result is a portrait of a much more complex and diabolical man than has previously been depicted; an account of damage far worse than has ever been chronicled, including startling revelations of unreported double agents and scandal in high Washington circles; and a story of three women - a gray-haired lady in tennis shoes, a knockout blonde, and a shy, gum-chewing secretary - who bucked every obstacle the CIA male establishment could throw at them, to expose perhaps the most devastating spy in modern U.S. history.