There will never be another Billy Hill - Reggie Kray. Bill had a great brain. There's no two ways about it - Frankie Fraser. I made Billy Hill. Then he got over the top of me. I should have shot Billy Hill. I really should. I'd have got ten years for it but it would have made me happy and I'd be out now - laughing - Jack Spot. I have no doubt that during his career Hill had some very senior officers in his pocket - Leonard 'Nipper' Read, legendary Scotland Yard detective. Billy Hill was Britain's first celebrity gangster. Born in London's impoverished Seven Dials, by the early 1950's he had control of the city's gambling rackets and masterminded a heist that set the template for the Great Train Robbery. He ruled the roost in the bloody era when the underworld's choice of weapon was the open razor. His violent clashes with onetime ally turned enemy Jack Spot became the stuff of legend, as Hill and his henchmen left the streets of Soho running red. But Hill was astute enough to choose his moment to get out, abdicating in favour of his gun-toting young protégés, the Kray twins . . . In this fast-moving biography, Wensley Clarkson charts the life of the only post-war British villain to truly make crime pay.

Billy Hill writes about an extraordinary life of crime and punishment and his rise to the top of Britain's gangland. This book details Billy's sensational heists in the 1950s, for which no one was ever convicted. It's an entertaining read, giving the reader insight into what made Billy tick.

This is the memoir of Billy and Gyp Hill - Britain's most successful criminal couple - and Justin, their only child. Billy was the Boss of Britain's underworld. He introduced 'project' crime to Britain and got clean away with the 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery even though the authorities knew that he did it. In 1956, he was at the centre of a phone tapping scandal that led to a Privy Council enquiry. When Billy published his memoir, the papers said there had been nothing like it since the days of Al Capone.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

In August 1955 two men fought on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, Soho. From the dreadful injuries they inflicted on each other it easily could have been a hanging matter, but ironically it became known as 'The Fight that Never Was'. It was, however, to have enormous repercussions in the battle for control of Soho and its clubs and for the bookmakers' pitches on the racecourses. It also led to the inexorable rise of the Kray twins. One of the men fighting was Jack Spot, the self-proclaimed defender of the Jewish community against Fascism. The other was the half Italian Albert Dimes, the right hand man of Spot's one-time friend and later nemesis Billy Hill, rightly described as the nearest Britain has ever had to a mastermind. Meticulously researched, including interviews with the survivors of the era, this is the story of the rise and fall of Spot from an East End background and Hill from a criminal family in Holborn, as well as that of their spiritual mentor Darby Sabini, the King of the Racecourses in the 1920s and 1930s and his successors Alf and Harry White.

A talented, devoted anesthesiologist, with a coveted academic position. A lovely, accomplished financial analyst with a glamorous social life, a high-rise apartment, and a dirty little secret. A chance encounter, a night of passion, a confessed preference for opioids...In this sordid tale of infatuation, temptation, and intoxication, Dr. Kurt McCain rises to a pinnacle of popularity and self-regard that he could not previously have imagined, only to realize that his pursuit of drug-induced euphoria has cost him nearly everything that he holds dear. His position, his profession, and his relationships with those he loves are destroyed, and the young physician finds himself at the lowest point of his life, disconsolate and alone. He must somehow summon all of his energies to overcome a dependence on opioids while making a desperate attempt at the restoration of his practice, and for redemption in the eyes of those who care for him. The nation is riven by a devastating epidemic that continues even as the COVID epidemic fades- opioids are killing Americans in unprecedented numbers. While physicians are often implicated among the many causes of this scourge, little attention is paid to the potential for doctors and nurses to become addicts themselves. Anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, who administer opioids with great regularity, are among the most susceptible providers. The Stairs On Billy Buck Hill, a 100,000-word literary novel, relates one physician's travails as he progresses from the carefully controlled, recreational use of opioid pills, to the brazen theft of fentanyl from his patients in the operating room, a treacherous descent that leads to the destruction of his career, his social standing, and very nearly himself.