Playboy: Narco Americano

An extensive new investigative article by T.J. ENGLISH entitled "Narco Americano" appears in the newly published February 2011 issue of Playboy magazine. The article offers a disturbing assessment of the narco war in Mexico, focusing on the border region of Ciudad Juarez, near El Paso, Texas. Using the shocking double-homicide of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband last March as the central narrative of the article, English ranges far and wide, shedding light on issues of corruption, economic exploitation and gangsterism that have contributed to the unprecedented crisis in Mexico. The article shows how the U.S. and Mexico are inextricably linked in the so-called drug war, in which nearly 90% of the product coming from Mexico is destined for the U.S. marketplace of drug users and abusers. Thorough and thought-provoking, the article is not to be missed.

REVIEW: The Savage City

KIRKUS REVIEWS

THE SAVAGE CITY
Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge
Author: English, T.J.

Review Date: January 15, 2011
Publisher:
Morrow/HarperCollins
Publication Date: March 15, 2011

Superior chronicle of the most violent decade in New York City history.

Through a crisp journalistic lens, English (Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, 2008, etc.) retraces the tormented life of three men who proved pivotal in Manhattan’s “now-legendary descent into mayhem” from the early ’60s to the mid ’70s, as the struggling civil-rights movement battled a corrupt, brutal law-enforcement agency. Following the March on Washington in the late summer of 1963, two white Upper East Side women were found bound together, raped and brutally slashed to death. Police scrambled to bring the increasingly sensational double-homicide case to swift closure. George Whitmore, a naïve, 19-year-old, partially blind black laborer, was falsely identified as the perpetrator and coerced into signing a multiple-felony confession by the NYPD, then a primarily white-male “autonomous institution.” Whitmore spent a decade defending himself in the face of a merciless, unyielding justice system. English also provides a deep profile of Bill Phillips, a thieving, prejudiced, corrupt second-generation police officer, as well as of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a fearless ex-convict and Black Panther Party. Culled from a host of wide-ranging interviews, memoirs, court-case transcripts, books, and documentary programming, the author effectively addresses key events like the 1963 Harlem Riots, the shockwaves of Malcolm X’s assassination and the Knapp Commission’s dogged scrutiny of NYPD corruption. Noting that the three centerpiece profiles he features (and the era in which they lived) are “largely forgotten today,” their separate legacies should serve as a cautionary reminder.

A comprehensive, still-shocking exhumation of racial discord in America.

16-page black-and-white photo insert. Agents: Nat Sobel and Judith Weber/Sobel Weber Associates