Books & Books, Coral Gables. Sept 20, 2011. 8:00 p.m.
During World War II, German U-boats prowled the Atlantic, sinking hundreds of U.S. ships along the east coast, including the largest cruise ship in the world, Normandie, destroyed at a Manhattan pier after Pearl Harbor. Nazi agents even landed on Long Island with explosives and maps of railways, bridges, and defense plants.
Desperate to secure the coast, the Navy turned to Meyer Lansky, the Jewish Mob boss. A newly naturalized American whose fellow Eastern European Jews were being annihilated by Hitler, Lansky headed an unlikely fellowship of mobsters Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and naval intelligence officers.
In late 1982, Young Reagan White House aide Jonah Eastman, grandson of Atlantic City gangster Mickey Price, is approached by the president’s top advisor with an assignment: Discreetly interview his grandfather’s old friend Lansky about his wartime activities. There just might be something to learn from that secret operation.
The notoriously tight-lipped gangster, dying of cancer, is finally ready to talk. Jonah gets a riveting – and darkly comic – history lesson. The Mob caught Nazi agents, planted propaganda with the help of columnist Walter Winchell, and found Mafia spies to plot the invasion of Sicily, where General Patton was poised to strike at the soft underbelly of the Axis. Lansky’s men stopped at nothing to sabotage Hitler’s push toward American shores.
Based on real events, The Devil Himself is a high-energy novel of military espionage and Mafia justice.
Eric Dezenhall cofounded the communications firm Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and serves as its CEO. His most recent book of nonfiction, Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong, pioneered techniques for understanding and defusing crises. The author of five previous novels, he lives in the Washington, D.C. area.
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