True Crime

Kathryn Casey
§ Die, My Love
§ She Wanted it All 		Bernard F. Conners
§ Tailspin 		Kenneth R. Dickson
§ Nothing Personal Just Business 		Don Hale
§ Town Without Pity
Ann Rule
§ Every Breath You Take 		Daniel Stashower
§ The Beautiful Cigar Girl:
Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe
and The Invention of Murder 		Kate Summerscale
§ The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher:
A Shocking Murder and the Undoing
of a Great Victorian Detective

 


Nothing Personal Just Business, Kenneth R. Dickson, Trade paper, $20.00.

Ken Dickson has been a long time customer of Aunt Agatha's and a longer time resident of our neighbor city to the south, Toledo. His meticulously researched book, Nothing Personal Just Business is set in Toledo during the years of prohibition. The central characters are Yonnie Licavoli and Jack Kennedy, rival heads of liquor distribution rings in Toledo. The title comes from a comment made to Jack Kennedy's son many years later (Kennedy was killed when his son was only 4). The younger Kennedy was in Las Vegas and somehow met a former member of the Licavoli gang. The older man told the younger man that they'd liked his dad, killing him was nothing personal, "just business".

Dickson details the changeover from small independent distributors of booze to a more businesslike gang type arrangement, filled with the type of gang violence familiar to all of us from countless books and movies - but this is the real thing. Licavoli and Kennedy's growing rivalry and the eventual end to same - the murder of Kennedy - culminates in the trial of Yonnie Licavoli. Dickson makes no judgements about the value of prohibition but his extensive research makes clear the almost pointless waste of time and money spent in trying to keep liquor away from the general public (not to mention loss of life). Dickson's book gives a clear look into the realities of 1930's Toledo in a very even handed manner.

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