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Title details for The Birthday Party by Stanley N. Alpert - Available

The Birthday Party

A Memoir of Survival

by Stanley N. Alpert
Richard Powers
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available

On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car full of gun-toting thugs. Hoping to make a large withdrawal with his ATM card, they took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, and improvised. All night, his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and even offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present." As Alpert talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, and memorized every detail he could, his law-enforcement colleagues launched a major police and FBI investigation that would take many strange twists and turns. Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller—but every word is true.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 1, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781483052144
      • File size: 314938 KB
      • Duration: 10:56:07

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 27, 2006
      In this tartly written memoir recalling his 1998 kidnapping, Alpert, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, describes his abduction and release, and the subsequent trial of the kidnappers, with an impressive amount of detail and only the occasional note of self-congratulation for how he handled the ordeal. On the night before his 38th birthday, Alpert was forced at gunpoint into a car near his Greenwich Village apartment, blindfolded, made to relinquish his ATM and PIN, and driven to Brooklyn, where he was kept in an apartment full of oddly personable, gun-wielding youths and teenage prostitutes. In between violent threats, the criminals solicited legal advice concerning past crimes and offered him pot and sexual favors in honor of his birthday. After 25 hours, they handed their hostage $20 cab money and left him in Prospect Park. Though the second part of the account, detailing the mechanics of the arrests and sentencing of the perpetrators, along with Alpert's return to normalcy, is relatively dry and slow, Alpert delivers an honest, vivid chronicle of the suspenseful event itself in the memoir's first half.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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