Jim Goad has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is The CBS Murders.
The CBS Murders
Summary
Winner of the Edgar Award: The gripping account of a gruesome mass murder in gritty 1980s New York and the relentless hunt for a coldblooded killer.
On a warm spring evening in 1982, 37-year-old accountant Margaret Barbera left work in New York City and walked to the West Side parking lot where she kept her BMW. Finding the lock on the driver’s side door jammed, she went to the passenger’s side and inserted her key. A man leaned through the open window of a van parked in the next spot, pressed a silenced pistol to the back of Margaret’s head, and fired. She was dead before she hit the pavement.
It was a professional hit, meticulously planned - but the killer didn’t expect three employees of the nearby CBS television studios to stumble onto the scene of the crime. “You didn’t see nothin’, did you?” he demanded, before shooting the first eyewitness in the head. After chasing down and executing the other two men, the murderer sped out of the parking lot with Margaret’s lifeless body in the back of his van.
Thirty minutes later, the first detectives arrived on the scene. Veterans of Midtown North, a sprawling precinct stretching from the exclusive shops of Fifth Avenue to the flophouses of Hell’s Kitchen, they thought they’d seen it all. But a bloodbath in the heart of Manhattan was a shocking new level of depravity, and the investigation would unfold under intense media coverage. Setting out on the trail of an assassin, the NYPD uncovered one of the most diabolical criminal conspiracies in the city’s history.
Richard Hammer’s blow-by-blow account of “the CBS Murders” is a thrilling tale of greed, violence, and betrayal, and a fascinating portrait of how a big-city police department solved the toughest of cases.
©1987 Richard Hammer and John Richard Wales (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
The Headache Factory: True Tales of Online Obsession and Madness
Summary
If Andy Warhol could have anticipated the Internet, he would have said it’s where everyone will be stalked for at least 15 minutes. Notorious underground author Jim Goad describes himself as “a lowly neutrino in the vast universe of celebrity,” yet he attracts a certain breed of demented fan that treats him as if he’s the second coming of Christ - that is, until they feel he’s somehow snubbed them, at which point he transforms into Satan. The Headache Factory documents Jim’s extensive experiences fending off fans who morphed into stalkers. By turns terrifying and amusing, the book demonstrates how social media enables the antisocial to reach out and touch anyone they want - even if their target doesn’t want to be touched.
©2014 Thought Catalog (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Potatoes on the Moon
Summary
What do most people think of Idaho? Well, see, that's the problem - they don't think of Idaho. Despite its breathtaking natural beauty and the fact that it's crammed to the gills with eccentrics and freethinkers, Idaho may as well be the moon as far as the rest of America is concerned. Jim Goad recently spent a week in Idaho mingling with state troopers, political extremists, collegiate progressives, and heartbreakingly friendly locals. Spending most of the week in the wilderness allowed him to examine one of the most pervasive yet ignored forms of cultural bigotry - the endless disdain that "urban supremacists" have for rural people. In this case, the countryside wins by a landslide.
©2015 The Thought & Expression Co. (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Animal
Summary
From the author of Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph Over Tragedy “Joseph Barboza is the most dangerous individual known.” -FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 1965 Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. If he killed enough men, if he did enough of the Mafia’s dirtiest biddings, then they would have no choice but to make him a Made Man. Barboza’s brutal rise during one of the deadliest mob wars in US history became the stuff of legend, both on the bloodied streets of Boston and in the offices of the FBI and the US Attorney General. He took sick joy in his crimes, and it became increasingly difficult for the mob to keep the Animal on his leash. But soon the hunter became the hunted. Betrayed by the mob and now on the run, Boston’s most notorious contract killer forged a Faustian bargain with two unscrupulous FBI agents - a pact that would transform the US criminal justice system. From false testimony and manipulated evidence that sent mob leaders to death row, to the creation of the Witness Protection Program so the feds could protect their prized, cold-blooded witness, this was the horrific, dramatic first act in a story of murder and FBI corruption still being played out today in the news and the courtroom with the capture and trial of Whitey Bulger. Barboza’s legacy, buried for years thanks to the murders or deaths of its participants, is finally coming to light and being told in its unvarnished brutality by one of America’s most respected true crime writers.
©2013 Northeastern University (P)2018 Audible, Inc.