Kidnapped: A Story of Survival - Softcover

Alpert, Stanley N

3.33

702 ratings by Goodreads

9780099514305: Kidnapped: A Story of Survival

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099514303 ISBN 13: 9780099514305

Publisher: Arrow, 2008

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On the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car-full of gun-toting thugs. They were looking to use his ATM card, but when they learned his bank balance, the plan changed. They took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, with the idea of going to a bank the next day and withdrawing most of his money. His captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of gangsta philosophy and sought his legal advice before eventually releasing him in a manner which has to be one of the most bizarre occurrences in the history of crime.

Told from Alpert's memory and notes; interviews with NYPD detectives, FBI agents and witnesses; videotaped confessions; and court records, Kidnapped reads like a thriller - but every word is true.

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Review:

"Alpert's firstperson account is cool and laconic, with moments of sledgehammer certainty of death balanced by a lack of self-pity and histrionics." (Sunday Express)

"Harrowing, often hilarious ... One of the most exhilarating, improbable New York stories ever told." (New York Times)

"Stanley Alpert's memoir is so wild that it could never be fictionalized. The movie should be directed by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen working in tandem!" (Joseph Wambaugh)

"Forget about all the crime shows you've seen on television, this is what a real crime is like. Alpert nails the language, the motivations, the personalities of his kidnappers. And all through the story we see Alpert's own intelligence at work, picking up and remembering clues that'll bring the roof down on the bad guys. I read it in one big gulp." (John Sandford)

"Throughout, Alpert wins over the reader the same way he did the kidnappers, with the force of his canny, self-assured, bighearted personality" (New York Times Sunday Book Review)

Book Description:

The remarkable account of a federal prosecutor's kidnapping, the psychological duel and investigation that followed - a riveting story of human resilience: vivid, funny, terrifying, profane, true.

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