Levit Fernandini was born in poverty in the Bronx, NYC, and attempted to escape through a life of crime. His journey is a testament to the power of change and will leave you feeling hopeful. It is a story full of drugs, crime, and money, coming around the circle, being caught by the FBI, and prosecuted. But also, where is he now, the regrets and hope for the future...
A troubled young Puerto Rican boy becomes a major drug dealer leading the infamous Creston Avenue Crew in The Bronx, New York.Levit Fernandini started as a pre-teen goffer in front of 2600 Creston Avenue. He rose to a "pitcher" selling his dime bags on the street for years before he became a leader in the organization. Eventually Levit became one of the biggest weed dealers in New York City.Weed and cocaine were on the menu at Creston Avenue bringing Fernandini to the doorsteps of the butchers of the Gulf Cartel in Mexico and the treacherous, murderous drug dealers in Puerto Rico. Nothing brought the Bronx together like Salsa. What followed Salsa would dramatically change the vibe in the music world with a kind of a stylized rhythmic music subculture called Hip Hop. Then Reggaton hit the airwaves and spread like wildfire within the Latin world. With the likes of superstars Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon and Nicky Jam and the list goes on from the small Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico. Levit was in the mix with these superstars. In 2011 Levit was busted in front of his family by the FBI and found guilty of drug trafficking York. He was also found guilty of murder. He faced the federal death penalty for eighteen months while incarcerated. Fernandini was sentenced to life without parole. He endured his new world inside the horrendous snake pit of the federal prison system. After eleven years in federal prison Fernandini was released on legal technicalities although the streets believed he had cooperated with the government.Now, Levit Fernandini has become the family man he longed to be for so long. He is introspective with a philosophic view toward life. This is a no holds barred, real names mentioned, shots fired, bodies bagged book about what it took to be "Scooby-Doo" and how trust was turned into betrayal in the perilous world of the music industry and drug dealing.
Winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir “Kerbeck’s juicy memoir tells riveting tales [with] the thrill of a spy novel. . . Kerbeck bares all of his wild business secrets within the world of corporate espionage” — Foreword Reviews "Robert Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level." — Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can B-list actor, A-list corporate spy. . . In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.” After college, Kerbeck rushed to New York to try to make it as an actor. But to support himself, he’d need a survival job, and before he knew it, while his pals were waiting tables, he began his apprenticeship as a corporate spy. As his acting career started to take off, he found himself hobnobbing with Hollywood luminaries: drinking with Paul Newman, taking J.Lo to a Dodgers game, touring E.R. sets with George Clooney. He even worked with O.J. Simpson the week before he became America’s most notorious double murderer. Before long, however, his once promising acting career slowed while the corporate espionage business took off. The ruse job was supposed to have been temporary, but Kerbeck became one of the world’s best practitioners of this deceptive—and illegal—trade. His income jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. Until the inevitable crash… Kerbeck shares the lies he told, the celebrities he screwed (and those who screwed him), the cons he ran, and the money he made—and lost—along the way.
Koh Tao--a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, surrounded by pristine beaches, swathed in sunshine, and a mecca for tourists, divers and backpackers. But "Turtle Island" has its dark side. In 2014, Koh Tao was the site of the brutal double murders of two British backpackers, but theirs weren't the only suspicious backpacker deaths. My name is Suzanne Buchanan. I am the former owner and editor of the Samui Times, a news publication on Koh Samui, and covered the stories of the so-called "backpacker murders" and other suspicious deaths. Although I am a British citizen, because of my investigation and stories, as well as my support for the two Burmese migrant workers sentenced to death for the murders, I had to flee Thailand for my own safety. There is currently an active warrant for my arrest should I return to Thailand, which had been my home for more than twenty years, and I continue to receive death threats. In "THE CURSE OF THE TURTLE" readers can make up their own minds on who is responsible for the murders that so devastated the victims' families. Were the Burmese migrant workers responsible? Or were the powerful, tribal families who run Koh Tao involved? And if so, were they aided by corrupt law enforcement?
The inside story of a band of entrepreneurial upstarts who made millions selling painkillers—until their scheme unraveled, putting them at the center of a landmark criminal trial. • SOON TO BE THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE PAIN HUSTLERS STARRING EMILY BLUNT AND CHRIS EVANS "Unfolds with the velocity and verve of a Scorsese film…A tour de force."—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market. Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation. But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids. In The Hard Sell, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players. With colorful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.
A WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW BOOK CLAIMS DONALD TRUMP WILL RUN AND WIN IN 2024! A riveting account of the HOAX that sent a presidential campaign chairman to solitary confinement because he wouldn’t turn against the President of the United States. The chief weapon deployed by the government-corporate-media Establishment against the Trump presidency was propaganda. Time and again, allegations from anonymous sources were disseminated by a partisan media, promoted by a dishonest Democrat Party leadership, and ultimately debunked when the facts surfaced. But by the time the truth came out, it was too late. There had already been casualties. One of the highest profile casualties was Paul Manafort. Desperate to defeat Donald Trump—or hamper his presidency after he won—Democrats and their Establishment allies colluded with foreign operatives to concoct a completely false narrative about Paul’s supposed conspiracy with pro-Russian elements in Ukraine to further Vladimir Putin’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. But it wasn’t just defamation of Paul’s character. They took the unprecedented step of enlisting the US intelligence and law enforcement communities in using their power against President Trump and his campaign team. Political Prisoner finally exposes the lies left unchallenged by media who pronounced Paul guilty long before his case ever saw the inside of a courtroom. Not only is it untrue that Victor Yanukovych or any of Paul’s clients were “pro-Putin,” it is the opposite of the truth. Paul’s work in Ukraine and throughout his career was 100 percent aligned with US interests in the countries he worked in, sometimes even acting as a back channel for the White House itself. Neither was Paul guilty of laundering money, evading taxes, or deliberately deceiving the US government by failing to register as a foreign agent—which he wasn’t. These were all politically motivated charges manufactured by the Special Counsel’s team for one reason and one reason only: to get Paul to testify against Donald Trump about a conspiracy that never existed. When they hear the basis of these spurious charges, Americans will wonder what country they are living in and what has happened to our system of justice. Political Prisoner tells the real story of Paul’s life and career, exploding the lies about his work in Ukraine, his previous work with foreign governments and business interests in other countries, his involvement with the Trump campaign, and the “process crimes” for which he was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is no exaggeration to say that everything most Americans think they know about Paul Manafort is false.
Two NYC investigators don't stop until they expose the truth of the unsolved, 1957 murder of a little boy from Philadelphia. True accounts of collaboration with the current police department... until people's double lives are discovered and communication breaks down.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—and one of the most decorated journalists of our time—twelve enthralling true stories of skulduggery and intrigue "An excellent collection of Keefe's detective work, and a fine introduction to his illuminating writing." —NPR “Fast-paced...Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller." —The Washington Post Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface “They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism. The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.
An Albanian's word of honor, their BESA, is the pride that has made their clans fearless fighters for centuries. In the streets of the Bronx, New York their code has made the "sons of the eagle" a community that has become a powerhouse over the last forty years. When one of their own is killed, the Albanians will stop at nothing in their quest for vengeance. Enter Gino Ranno, uncle to the accused killer with connections to a New York mafia family. With no choice but to enter the fray, it is up to him to expose the truth and defend the honor of his own family before more blood is spilled.
