Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Last of the gladiators, a memoir of love, redemption, and the Mob, James M. LaRossa, Jr

eng

individual biography

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non fiction

Last of the gladiators

James M. LaRossa, Jr

a memoir of love, redemption, and the Mob

"From the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century, New York City was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared Mafia chiefs, assassins, defrocked stockbrokers, Orthodox Jewish money-launderers, and Arab bankers sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa, a Kennedy-era prosecutor who became the defense lawyer of first resort in the big, important, highly publicized cases for four full action-packed decades. On January 30, 2009, I snuck my famous and mortally ill father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, where we flew in secret to a place few people would look for two die-hard New Yorkers: a town in Southern California aptly named Manhattan Beach. During our five years in exile, we, "the La Rossa boys" as we came to be known, made our mark as a most irreverent and unrivaled father-son duo. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most up-to-date equipment and drugs, he recounted his legendary courtroom exploits. Not only is Last of the Gladiators a memoir about some of the seminal legal events of a generation, but it's also a love story between a father and son - a theme not often seen in American arts and letters. Not until I wrote that story, though, did I realize that I had not saved my father. He, in fact, saved me. I became a better man and father thanks to him - a more joyous, grateful, and grounded soul."--Amazon.com