The True Crime category has 1,229 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 13,216 ratings. The most-rated is If You Tell.
The Sixth Family
Summary
The definitive book about the explosive Rizzuto crime family On May 5, 1981, three rebellious members of New York's Bonanno crime family were gunned down in a Brooklyn social club. One of the gunmen was Vito Rizzuto, a man who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family, now revised and updated, reveals the hidden history of the rise of the Rizzuto clan, the alliances it forged around the world, and the bloody events that led to charges against Vito Rizzuto in the United States and Italy for racketeering and corruption. As police in the United States, Italy, and Canada meticulously pieced together the puzzle that is Vito Rizzuto, established notions about the nature of authority within the Mafia were called into question. Who was this so-called "John Gotti of Canada"? How did he become one of the biggest names in global crime? And how did he survive the deadly assault from gangland rivals that almost destroyed his family?
©2008, 2014 Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys (P)2019 Tantor
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Summary
Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy - Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than 300 letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others. Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times best seller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than 300 letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward - and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers. Exquisitely written, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” (The New York Times Book Review).
©2008 Lee Israel (P)2018 Simon & Schuster
Hunting LeRoux
Summary
With an introduction by four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Michael Mann. The story of Paul LeRoux, the twisted genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to international crime, and the exclusive inside story of how the DEA’s elite, secretive 960 Group brought him down. Paul LeRoux was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. After a first career as a pioneering cybersecurity entrepreneur, he plunged into the dark side, using his extraordinary talents to develop a disruptive new business model for transnational organized crime. Along the way, he created a mercenary force of ex-US and NATO sharpshooters to carry out contract murders for his own pleasure and profit. The criminal empire he built was Cartel 4.0, utilizing the gig economy and the tools of the digital age: encrypted mobile devices, cloud sharing, and novel money-laundering techniques. LeRoux’s businesses, cyber-linked by his own dark worldwide web, stretched from Southeast Asia across the Middle East and Africa to Brazil; they generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of arms, drugs, chemicals, bombs, missile technology, and murder. He dealt with rogue nations - Iran and North Korea - as well as the Chinese Triads, Somali pirates, Serb mafia, outlaw bikers, militants, corrupt African and Asian officials, and coup-plotters. Initially, LeRoux appeared as a ghost image on law enforcement and intelligence radar, an inexplicable presence in the middle of a variety of criminal endeavors. He was Netflix to Blockbuster, Spotify to Tower Records. A bold disruptor, his methods brought international crime into the age of innovation, making his operations barely detectable and LeRoux nearly invisible. But he gained the attention of a small band of bold, unorthodox DEA agents, whose brief was tracking down drug- and arms-trafficking kingpins who contributed to war and global instability. The 960 Group, an element of the DEA’s Special Operations Division, had launched some of the most complex, coordinated, and dangerous operations in the agency’s history. They used unorthodox methods and undercover informants to penetrate LeRoux’s inner circle and bring him down. For five years, Elaine Shannon immersed herself in LeRoux’s shadowy world. She gained exclusive access to the agents and players, including undercover operatives who looked LeRoux in the eye on a daily basis. Shannon takes us on a shocking tour of this dark frontier, going deep into the operations and the mind of a singularly visionary and frightening figure - Escobar and Victor Bout and Jeff Bezos rolled into one. Hunting LeRoux introduces a new breed of criminal spawned by the savage, greed-exalting underside of the age of innovation - and a new kind of true-crime story. It is a look into the future - a future that is dark.
©2019 Elaine Shannon (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Hell's Angels Biker Wars: The Rock Machine Massacres
Summary
For eight years, two outlaw biker clubs fought to control street-level drug sales in Quebec, Canada. The notorious Hell's Angels went up against local drug dealers, the mafia, and a rival biker club, the Rock Machine. Bombings and bullets were no stranger in the streets, and many unfortunate bystanders got caught in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and dozens of outlaws were arrested, over 150 people were dead. This true-crime book depicts the history of both clubs and the events known as the Quebec Bikers War.
©2016 RJ Parker Publishing (P)2016 RJ Parker Publishing
The Lost Girls
Summary
In The Lost Girls, John Glatt tells the truly amazing story of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight - who were kidnapped, imprisoned, and repeatedly raped and beaten in a Cleveland house for over a decade by Ariel Castro - and their amazing escape in May 2013, which made headlines all over the world. This audiobook has an exclusive interview with Castro's secret girlfriend, who spent many romantic nights in his house of horror without realizing that he had bound and chained captives just a few feet away. There are also revealing interviews with several Castro family members, musician friends, and neighbors who witnessed the dramatic rescue.
©2015 John Glatt (P)2015 Tantor
Love as Always, Mum xxx
Summary
The true story of an abused childhood, of shocking brutality and life as the daughter of notorious serial killer and master manipulator Rose West. You're 21 years old. Police arrive on the doorstep of your house, 25 Cromwell Street, with a warrant to search the garden for the remains of your older sister you didn't know was dead. Bones are found, and they are from more than one body. And so the nightmare begins. You are the daughter of Fred and Rose West. 'Mae, I mean this.... I'm not a good person, and I let all you children down....' (Rose West, HM Prison Durham) It has taken over 20 years for Mae West to find the perspective and strength to tell her remarkable story: one of an abusive, violent childhood, of her serial killer parents and how she has rebuilt her life in the shadow of their terrible crimes. Through her own memories, research and the letters her mother wrote to her from prison, Mae shares her emotionally powerful account of her life as a West. From a toddler locked in the deathly basement to a teen fighting off the sexual advances of her father, Mae's story is one of survival. It also answers the questions: how do you come to terms with knowing your childhood bedroom was a graveyard? How do you accept the fact your parents sexually tortured, murdered and dismembered young women? How do you become a mother yourself when you're haunted by the knowledge that your own mother was a monster? Why were you spared, and how do you escape the nightmare? Read by Julia Barrie.
©2018 Neil McKay (P)2018 Orion Publishing Group
Monster
Summary
On a snowy winter evening in 1982, 21-year-old Mary Brown accepted a ride from a handsome stranger in the resort town of Breckenridge, Colorado. The trip ended with her brutally beaten and raped. Mary survived, but her predator's violence had only just begun. After 10 years in prison, Tom Luther was released a far more vicious criminal. Soon, from the Rockies to West Virginia, like Ted Bundy, Luther enticed a chain of women into his murderous trap. In this gripping new edition of a true crime masterpiece, acclaimed author Steve Jackson recounts the intriguing pursuit and long awaited conviction of a charismatic, monstrous psychopath - one who remains a suspect in three other crimes, and has never given up hope of escape.
©2013 Steve Jackson (P)2020 WildBlue Press
The Serial Killer Whisperer
Summary
Fifteen-year-old Tony Ciaglia had everything a teenager could want: good grades, good athletic skills, and good friends - until he suffered a horrific head injury at summer camp. Pronounced clinically dead three times by helicopter paramedics before he reached a hospital, Ciaglia lapsed into a coma. When he emerged, his right side was paralyzed and he had to relearn how to walk, talk, and even how to eat. The areas of his brain that were damaged required him to take countless pills to control his emotions and rages. Abandoned and shunned by his friends, he began writing to serial killers on a whim and discovered that his traumatic brain injury - which made him an outcast to his peers - enabled him to emotionally connect with notorious murderers in a unique way. Soon many of America's most dangerous psychopaths were revealing heinous details to Tony about their crimes - even those they'd never been convicted of. The killers opened up to him, trusted him, and called him a "best friend". But there was a price. As Tony found himself being drawn deeper and deeper into their violent worlds of murder, rape, and torture, he was pushed to the brink of despair and, at times, forced to question his own sanity - until he found a way to put his unusual gift to use. Asked by investigators for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for help in solving a murder, Tony began launching his own personal searches for forgotten victims, incredibly with clues often provided to him voluntarily by the killers themselves. The Serial Killer Whisperer takes listeners into the minds of murderers in a way that has never been done before - straight from a killer's thoughts. It is also an inspiring (albeit sometimes terrifying) tale of an American family whose idyllic life is shattered by a terrible accident and how healing and closure came to a tormented man in the most unlikely way: by connecting with monsters.
©2012 Pete Earley (P)2012 Tantor
Precious Victims
Summary
This is a New York Times best-selling true crime book considered by many to be a classic of the genre. The police in Jersey County, Illinois, accepted Paula Sims' story of a masked kidnapper who snatched her baby girl, Lorelei, from her bassinet. Three years later, her second newborn daughter suffered an identical fate - and this time the police were unable to stop searching until they had discovered the whole horrifying truth. This is the full terrifying story of twisted sexuality and hate seething below the surface of a seemingly normal family and of the massive investigation and nerve-shattering trial that made the unthinkable a reality. Written by the lawyer who won the case and the reporter who covered its entirety, the listener is given a unique close-up of the riveting drama that unfolds, painting a dark picture of the depraved family who lived with a murderous secret.
©2015 Charles Bosworth, Jr., Don Weber (P)2015 Charles Bosworth, Jr.
Lust Killer
Summary
When young women begin mysteriously disappearing in Oregon, Police Lieutenant James Stovall leads a relentless search for a killer. With little evidence available, and the public screaming for answers, he must find a remorseless, brutal killer whose identity will shock them all....
©2014 Ann Rule (P)2017 Tantor
Mafia Prince
Summary
Mafia Prince is the first-person account of one of the most violent eras in Mafia history - "Little" Nicky Scarfo’s reign as boss of the Philly family in the 1980s - written by Scarfo’s underboss and nephew, "Crazy" Phil Leonetti. The youngest-ever underboss at the age of 31, Leonetti was at the crux of the violent downfall of the traditional American Mafia in the 1980s when he infiltrated Atlantic City after gambling was legalized, and later turned state’s evidence against his own. His testimony directly led to the convictions of dozens of high-ranking made men including John Gotti, Vincent Gigante, and his own uncle, Nicky Scarfo - sparking the beginning of the end of La Cosa Nostra. Just as The Godfather and Boardwalk Empire defined the early 20th century Mafia, and Wiseguy and Casino depicted the next great era through the ’70s, Mafia Prince concludes this epic genre revealing the Mafia’s violent final heyday of the 1980s straight from the horse’s mouth.
©2012 Phillip Leonetti, Scott Burnstein and Christopher Graziano (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Empire of Blue Water
Summary
He challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades - and brought it to its knees. Empire of Blue Water is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean. Henry Morgan, a 20-year-old Welshman, crossed the Atlantic in 1655, hell-bent on making his fortune. Over the next three decades, his exploits in the Caribbean in the service of the English became legendary. His daring attacks on the mighty Spanish Empire on land and at sea determined the fates of kings and queens, and his victories helped shape the destiny of the New World. Morgan gathered disaffected European sailors and soldiers, hard-bitten adventurers, runaway slaves, and vicious cutthroats, and turned them into the most feared army in the Western Hemisphere. Sailing out from the English stronghold of Port Royal, Jamaica, “the wickedest city in the New World,” Morgan and his men terrorized Spanish merchant ships and devastated the cities where great riches in silver, gold, and gems lay waiting. His last raid, a daring assault on the fabled city of Panama, helped break Spain’s hold on the Americas forever. Awash with bloody battles, political intrigues, natural disaster, and a cast of characters more compelling, bizarre, and memorable than any found in a Hollywood including the notorious pirate L’Ollonais, the soul-tortured King Philip IV of Spain, and Thomas Modyford, the crafty English governor of Jamaica - Empire of Blue Water brilliantly re-creates the passions and the violence of the age of exploration and empire.
©2007 Stephan Talty (P)2007 Books on Tape
Killing Kennedy
Summary
A riveting historical narrative of the shocking events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the follow-up to mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln More than a million listeners have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln, the can't-stop-listening work of nonfiction about the shocking assassination that changed the course of American history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and how a sequence of gunshots on a Dallas afternoon not only killed a beloved president but also sent the nation into the cataclysmic division of the Vietnam War and its culture-changing aftermath. In January 1961, as the Cold War escalates, John F. Kennedy struggles to contain the growth of Communism while he learns the hardships, solitude, and temptations of what it means to be president of the United States. Along the way he acquires a number of formidable enemies, among them Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Alan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition, powerful elements of organized crime have begun to talk about targeting the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In the midst of a 1963 campaign trip to Texas, Kennedy is gunned down by an erratic young drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald. The former Marine Corps sharpshooter escapes the scene, only to be caught and shot dead while in police custody. The events leading up to the most notorious crime of the 20th century are almost as shocking as the assassination itself. Killing Kennedy chronicles both the heroism and deceit of Camelot, bringing history to life in ways that will profoundly move the listener. This may well be the most talked about book of the year.
©2012 Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (P)2012 Macmillan Audio
Dark Dreams
Summary
The Evil That Men Do introduced listeners to the lifework and the techniques of FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood. Now, in Dark Dreams, Hazelwood - writing with best-selling author Stephen G. Michaud - brings us deep into the minds of his prey, the world's most dangerous sexual criminals, and reveals the extent to which these individuals permeate our society. Profiler Roy Hazelwood is one of the world's leading experts on the strangest and most dangerous of all aberrant offenders - the sexual criminal. In Dark Dreams he reveals the twisted motives and thinking that go into the most reprehensible crimes. He also catalogs the innovative and remarkably effective techniques - investigative approaches that he helped pioneer at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit - that allow law enforcement agents to construct psychological profiles of the offenders who commit these crimes. Hazelwood has helped track down some of the most violent and well-known criminals in modern history; in Dark Dreams he takes listeners into his world - a sinister world inhabited by scores of dangerous offenders for every Roy Hazelwood who would put them behind bars.
©2001 Roy Hazelwood and Stephen G. Michaud (P)2016 Tantor
The Country Boy Killer: True Story of Cody Legebokoff, Canada's Teenage Serial Killer
Summary
He was the friendly, baby-faced, Canadian boy next door. He came from a loving, caring, and well-respected family. Blessed with good looks and back-woods country charm, he was popular with his peers, and although an accident at birth left permanent nerve damage in one of his arms, he excelled in sports. A self-proclaimed "die hard" Calgary Flames fan, he played competitive junior hockey and competed on his school's snowboarding team. And he enjoyed the typical simple pleasures of a boy growing up in the country: camping, hunting, and fishing with family and friends. But he also enjoyed brutally murdering women, and he would become one of the youngest serial killers in Canadian history. From the best-selling author of The Vampire Next Door: The True Story of The Vampire Rapist, John Crutchley. This is the sixth book in the Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation collection. www.CrimesCanada.com
©2015 VP Publications, an imprint of RJ Parker Publishing (P)2015 VP Publications, an imprint of RJ Parker Publishing
The Spider and the Fly
Summary
In this superb work of literary true crime - a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense - a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us. "Well, well, Claudia. Can I call you Claudia? I'll have to give it to you: When confronted, at least you're honest, as honest as any reporter.... You want to go into the depths of my mind and into my past. I want a peek into yours. It is only fair, isn't it?" (Kendall Francois) In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for The New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite 27-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed by the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women - and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims' rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil. Rowe reached out after Francois was arrested, and she and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control, an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss, forcing her to clearly see herself and her own past - and why she was drawn to danger.
©2017 Claudia Rowe (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
The Good Mothers
Summary
We live in their buildings, work in their companies, shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants and elect politicians they fund. Founded more than 150 years ago by shepherding families in the toe of Italy, the 'Ndrangheta is today the world's most powerful mafia, with a crushing presence in Southern Italy, a market-moving size in global finance and a reach that extends to 50 countries around the world. And yet, remarkably, few of us have ever heard of it. The 'Ndrangheta's power rests on a code of silence, omertà, enforced by a claustrophobic family hierarchy and murderous misogyny. Men and boys rule. Girls are married off as teenagers in arranged clan alliances. Beatings are routine. A woman who is 'unfaithful' - even to a dead husband - can expect her sons, brothers or father to kill her to erase the 'family shame'. In 2009, when abused wife Lea Garofalo 'disappears' after giving evidence against her mafiosi husband, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti realises the 'Ndrangheta's bigotry may be its great flaw. The key to bringing down this criminal empire is to free its women and allow them to speak out and testify. When Alessandra finds two collaborators inside Italy's biggest crime families, she must persuade them to cooperate and save themselves and their children. The stakes could not be higher. Alessandra is fighting to save a nation. The mafiosi are fighting for their existence. The women are fighting for their lives. Not all will survive.
©2018 Alex Perry (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Man Who Played with Fire
Summary
The author of the Millennium novels laid out the clues. Now a journalist is following them. When Stieg Larsson died, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had been working on a true mystery that out-twisted his Millennium novels: the assassination on February 28, 1986, of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister. It was the first time in history that a head of state had been murdered without a clue who’d done it - and on a Stockholm street at point-blank range. Internationally known for his fictional far-right villains, Larsson was well acquainted with their real-life counterparts and documented extremist activities throughout the world. For years he’d been amassing evidence that linked their terrorist acts to what he called “one of the most astounding murder cases” he’d ever covered. Larsson’s archive was forgotten until journalist Jan Stocklassa was given exclusive access to the author’s secret project. In The Man Who Played with Fire, Stocklassa collects the pieces of Larsson’s true-crime puzzle to follow the trail of intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy begun by one of the world’s most famous thriller writers. Together they set out to solve a mystery that no one else could.
©2019 by Jan Stocklassa (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Last Victim
Summary
Dear Mr. Manson.... It started with a college course assignment, then escalated into a dangerous obsession. Eighteen-year-old honor student Jason Moss wrote to men whose body counts had made criminal history: men named Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez, and Gacy. Dear Mr. Dahmer.... Posing as their ideal victim, Jason seduced them with his words. One by one they wrote him back, showering him with their madness and violent fantasies. Then the game spun out of control. John Wayne Gacy revealed all to Jason - and invited his pen pal to visit him in prison.... Dear Mr. Gacy.... It was an offer Jason couldn't turn down. Even if it made him.... The book that has riveted the attention of the national media, this may be the most revealing look at serial killers ever recorded and the most illuminating study of the dark places of the human mind ever attempted.
©1999 Jason Moss and Jeffrey Kottler (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Ted Bundy
Summary
Presented for the first time in audio format, the chilling transcript of Stephen G Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth's interviews with notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, as seen on the hit Netflix documentary series Conversation with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes - based on their New York Times best-selling book. Handsome and educated, Ted Bundy killed scores of women during the 1970s, eventually confessing to 30 murders committed over seven states between 1974 and 1978. In 1979, much to the surprise of the nation, Bundy made the bold decision to represent himself in the Chi Omega murder case, thinking that his intelligence and enigmatic charm could best the prosecution. He was convicted, however, and was incarcerated on death row in Florida State Prison. After he exhausted all appeals, Bundy spoke to detectives, confessing to other homicides he committed across several states. He had already spoken frankly about himself, his victims, and his crimes to famed journalists Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. Thirty years later, thanks to the combination of an unlikely killer, a sensational murder trial (featuring Bundy acting as his own attorney), and a series of Death Row interviews that represented the dynamics of any extraordinary psychological profile, this prolific serial killer continues to intrigue and haunt the American popular imagination. Yet as Netflix’s sensational show reveals, an old case is never as preserved as it may seem. Presented in audio format for the first time, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer provides shocking insights into the killer's 11th-hour confessions before his death in a Florida electric chair in January 1989. Drawn from more than 150 hours of exclusive tape-recorded interviews with Bundy in 1980 by Michaud and Aynesworth - in which the veteran journalist used a psychological tactic to get Bundy talking in the third person - this audiobook, voiced by a cast of narrators, is a harrowing portrait of a serial killer’s final reckoning and the two journalists trying to understand the psychology behind the darkness.
©2000 Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (P)2019 HarperAudio