What I have been reading lately #25

Today I finished Charles Brandt's book "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, & the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa. This book is based upon the author's extensive interviews with Frank Sheeran, a man who worked for years for the Teamsters and certain organized crime families in eastern Pennsylvania and New York. Sheeran was very close to Jimmy Hoffa for many years in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Sheeran is now dead, but in the book he claims to have killed Jimmy Hoffa. I won't spoil the story as to how it is supposed to have happened. You'll have to read the book. I will say this much, however-- Sheeran is the first union enforcer and Mafia hit man that I have ever heard of who moonlighted as a ballroom dance instructor.

Below: Jimmy Hoffa (left) and Frank Sheeran

There is also word that this book may be made into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro.

What I have been reading lately #24

I have recently finished reading Robert Sullivan's excellent book, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City.  From reading this book, I learned about the many interesting items that can be found or previously could be found in this wilderness/wasteland just a few miles west of New York City.  The list includes (in no particular order):

• many of the AM radio transmitters for New York City radio stations;
• abandoned copper mines:
• abandoned clay pits previously used for digging up clay to make bricks;
• salt hay farms;
• failed land development schemes;
• the cities of Newark and Secaucus (to name only two);
• garbage dumps (both in use and no longer in use) containing such items as rubble from the London Blitz, leachate (the liquid that trash makes after it has sat for a while), and fires (both above and underground);
• toxic waste, including, but not limited to, mercury, chromium, naphthalene, methylene chloride, toluene, and ethylbenzene;
• hunters, fishers, and swimmers;
• sports facilities for professional sports teams;
• highways and railways;
• lunatic asylums;
• organized crime murder victims (including, possibly, Jimmy Hoffa - pictured below);
• hotels;
• factories;
• pig farms;
• chemical and oil refineries;
• piles of coal;
• hills made from garbage;
• the Kearny, NJ Library, which boasts of having the world's largest collection of foriegn-language translations of Gone With The Wind;
• soccer stars, including John Harkes, Tab Ramos, and Tony Meola;
• cedar forests;
• mosquitoes;
• buried pirate treasure; and
• the ruins of the original Penn Station from New York City.

Above, the Meadowlands; below, Jimmy Hoffa.